Working industrially or professionally? What strategies should teacher unions use to improve teacher salaries in neoliberal times?

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, governments across Western democracies have endeavoured to inject neoliberal, market-inspired ideology into public education policy; reorganise teachers’ work and conditions and undermine the collective strength of the organisations representing teachers’ interests. Within this context, teachers’ salaries have been subject to particular scrutiny by governments. In the Australian state of New South Wales, successive governments have utilised adversarial tactics during salary negotiations, placed legislative restrictions on wages growth and imposed limitations on union activities which have been aimed at improving teachers’ salaries. This paper examines the response of the NSW Teachers’ Federation to neoliberal imperatives on teacher salaries since the 1980s. To investigate this issue, this study incorporates extensive documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with NSWTF officials and members as well as senior government leaders and departmental officials. Through analysing key salaries disputes from the 1980s to the present, this paper problematises the effectiveness of industrial approaches to unionism, explores renewed strategies to achieve salary increases for teachers and contributes broadly to union renewal debates on how teacher unions can act strategically to protect and advance conditions using professional agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher unions
• teacher salaries
• neoliberalism
• education reform
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an annual assessment for students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across areas of reading, writing, language and numeracy.

2. Table 2 summarises the leadership of successive NSW governments in the education portfolio from the early 1980s to 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mihajla Gavin

Mihajla Gavin (B.Comm (Liberal Studies) (Hons.)) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. She is currently researching how teacher trade unions use strategic choice and decision-making to advance the interests of public school teachers in times of neoliberal educational reform.