Uni High's Teachers' Union
Written By Annelie Edge
Many different industries have unions in order to protect workers’ rights, even Uni High. Did you know that around 94% of Uni High teachers are a part of the Australian Education Union? The interview below, conducted with Uni High humanities teacher and union representative Coach Varns, explores some of the aspects and responsibilities of a union.
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When and why did you decide to join the union?
I joined the Australia Education Union (AEU for short) during my teacher training. It was a real no-brainer for me. Among many other things, the AEU are champions of free, well-funded, well-resourced public schools - and so am I! It also definitely helped that membership was free when I was doing my teacher training and for my first six months on the job. Free membership for the first few months is usually the case for most unions.
What do you feel is the main purpose of being a part of a union? What role do you play in this?
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." I love this quote from the late, great David Graeber and it sums up what our union movement is all about: remaking the world as a better, fairer, safer, happier place!
Of course, trying to change the world by yourself is really hard. You need help! Unions are that help.
How? Well, a union is pretty much just a bunch of people coming together to work on making the world, or their little corner of it, better. Different industries have their own union because this is a really straightforward way of organizing people. What you do for work also has a huge impact on your quality of life. Not earning a living wage, dangerous working conditions, precarious hours, insecure employment, dehumanizing work, your job taking over your life - these things are really bad for people. Better pay and conditions for workers is a sure-fire way of making the world a better, fairer, safer, happier place. In a sense then, different industries having their own union is a way of dividing up this goal. At the end of the day though, the AEU and all other unions are all part of one big union movement. If it's about making the world a better, fairer, safer and happier place then unions are for it.
To put how we work another way, I like to think of unions as kind of like when that guy in Perth got their foot jammed between the train and the platform. One person, try as they might, was not strong enough to budge that train and pull them free. But fifty people, all pushing against the train at the same time? Well, they moved it easily.
My role in the union is the same as that of every other union member: to stand with them as we remake the world as a better, fairer, safer, happier place.
What issues are you most passionate about within the union? Do you incorporate any activist/social issues, or just teacher’s rights?
I'm passionate about a lot of things! What I'm most passionate about at the moment is more time for teachers, better pay for our ES staff, a safe and inclusive school (and society!), climate action, reconciliation, and better funding for public schools. (Not to mention spending the money schools do have where it matters most). Did you know our school underspent millions of dollars on staffing over the last few years? And that we've been sitting on millions of dollars for capital works for the last couple of years yet still haven't fixed the student bathrooms?.
Climate action is perhaps the most obvious activist issue and is probably, and quite rightly, of biggest concern for Ubique readers and our union. Our union has been campaigning for climate action for a long while now. Locally we've been distracted by stuff related to teachers' rights these last few years but we're starting to get our act together more now. For example, we were planning on staging a die-in in solidarity with our student climate strikers but lockdown cancelled it. I'm also part of a network of teachers in schools across Victoria demanding more climate action from our schools. This passion has really cut through into my role as a union endorsed staff representative on our School Council. I've been trying to get our school to publicly support the student climate strikes and to divest our school's money from banks that invest in fossil fuels (not to mention other nasty things like tobacco and gambling). It's been almost two years now and I haven't had much luck yet but that won't stop me or our union from continuing to stand up and speak out for what's right. I'd be more than happy to keep Ubique posted on our pitch for a Climate Action and Sustainability working group that would radically and rapidly transform Uni High's policies and practices over the next two years.
I could go on and on about all the other things I rattled off at the start - they're all really important (especially a safe and inclusive school and society) but that would make for a very long read.
Have you created any change/done anything significant? If so, what and how?
Yeah, I probably think it's fair to say we have. I'm going to emphasise "we" because we're a union; we do things together, collectively. There's a fair few things that spring to mind. From seeing our ideas and suggestions make it into national and state AEU policies, to getting a Health and Safety Representative at our school for the first time ever (which has been essential during the pandemic and after discovering all the asbestos in the South Wing!). But I think going to Fair Work and what flowed from that was the most significant, so I'll tell that story.
Here's the short version that isn't really all that short:
So last year I represented our Uni High union members at the Fair Work Commission. Fair Work is where employees and employers go if they have an issue with one another that they're struggling to resolve. Fair Work is a little like Mordor: one does not simply go to Fair Work. The union at Uni High had been in a fight with our principal and our employer, the Department of Education (or DET for short), about our working conditions for a couple of years. We did not think proper consultation was happening and that teachers were being needlessly overworked. These conditions were having not only a negative impact on us as staff but on you, the students, as well. Through the course of this dispute we also discovered that the school had underspent millions of dollars of our funding for staffing. Basically, the conditions that had pushed so many of us to breaking point were entirely avoidable if we just employed more teachers which it turned out we could easily afford to do.
Well, guess what? This year we did! Our new principal agreed that we should spend our staffing money on what it was supposed to be spent on and they employed more teachers. This means we now have one session less in the classroom which means we have gained 50 minutes more for planning, marking, and, I'll be honest, eating lunch (there was a year there where I stopped eating lunch because I was always in such a rush!). If it were not for our sustained pressure as a union I can confidently say this would not have happened. There were so many times when we could have just given up. But we stuck with it and we stuck together. By doing this, we got what was right eventually.
Of course, a lot more still needs to change! I believe teachers are still way overworked. Your teachers work on average more than 50 hours a week but only 38 of these hours are actually paid. That means one-fifth of your teachers' work is not only unpaid but happening in their personal time and at the cost of spending time with their friends and family (but maybe not cats!). This is one of the main reasons why the AEU has just started to take industrial action in Victoria. More than 50,000 AEU members across the state will be implementing workplace bans and maybe even going on strike over the coming months. Being a part of this is huge. If by coming together as a union we can get state-wide working conditions that let us be the best teachers we can be for you without giving up our personal lives, well, then that would trump Fair Work and getting a better deal for UHS teachers as the most significant thing I've been a part of.
Would you say a majority or minority of teachers at the school are a part of the union?
The majority! Last time I checked, about 94% of teachers at Uni High were union members. This percentage is known as density. Our Education Support staff density is, however, much lower. This is something we're really keen to change. Education Support staff (or ES for short) do lots of different jobs in our school. From working in the office, to IT, to maintenance, to our wellbeing counsellors. ES work is really, really important but it often isn't very well paid. This is something else we're fighting to see change by taking industrial action.
Do students or parents have any involvement?
It depends. We can actually get in trouble for communicating with students and parents about union stuff if we don't go about it the right way. Basically, we've got to get permission and permission hasn't been given. It's also important that we keep our lives as unionists separate from what we say and do in the classroom. You know, I'm not going to get up in front of a classroom and prothletise why I think union's are great - that would be wildly inappropriate and unprofessional. This interview is obviously different though - you're asking me these questions as a Ubique journalist with my union hat firmly on and my teacher hat cast aside.
I'd love to have students and parents and carers involved in our union's activism. I'd love it if we could get permission to put something in the newsletter or post something on Compass or to run a Zoom or big townhall-style info session so we could share some of our stories with students and parents and carers. If they joined us in our campaigns (the same way we do when we support nurses and ambos when they take industrial action) it would only add to our strength and make the government take our demands even more seriously.
Can you describe what a typical meeting would look like? Is there a hierarchy?, is it UHS only?Is there a specific structure or can people bring up any concerns?
Meetings, like most things, have been a little weird these last two years. Online meetings don’t lend themselves to the way we usually like to run union meetings: everyone coming together, sharing their concerns, generating solutions, and thrashing things out. Much like remote learning, debate and discussion still happens over Zoom, but it’s just not the same. Any member can bring something up in a meeting. Although, I must admit, for the last year or so I’ve done more talking in meetings than I’d like to. Partly because of Zoom, and partly because there’s been a lot of stuff to share and report back to members.
The structure of our union at Uni High is an anarchist one so we’re not supposed to have a hierarchy. People often think anarchy is a bad thing - it's not! Well, that's my opinion, at least. In an anarchist organisation, everyone's equal and no one is the boss of anyone else. We still have leaders who we elect but usually it's just anyone who has the time and energy to be more active and involved in the union (or as was the case a few years ago, who wasn’t afraid to stick their neck out). Union leaders don’t tell members what to do. Rather, they are representatives who union members delegate responsibility to and ask to act on their behalf. I’m one of these representatives - don’t let my title of “President '' fool you. I’m currently endorsed by union members to be on our school’s Consultative Committee, Health and Safety Committee, and School Council. I’m also a member of the executive team of our inner city region, and part of a reference group to the AEU’s Education Committee who draft big picture policy on things like assessment and technology. This is a lot of responsibility to have and I’ve always tried to do right by members and live-up to our goal of making the world a better, fairer, safer, happier place
The AEU is much bigger than just Uni High though. It operates on a national, state, and regional level as well. It’s a huge organisation. At the national and state levels it’s certainly more anarchic than most organisations, although a hierarchy certainly does exist. Fundamentally though, the AEU remains bottom-up and democratic. What we as members decide at a local level (in what are known as sub-branches. eg. the UHS sub-branch), informs what members decide at a regional level, which then informs what the elected officials in the AEU sector councils decide, which then informs what the elected AEU leaders (like Meredith Peace) say and do. It’s pretty cool seeing this play out. For example, there are a bunch of things in our sub-branch’s log of claims submission,which is a wishlist of what we want to improve in all schools across Victoria, that made it into the AEU’s final log of claims and which they’re discussing with our employer, the Department of Education, right now.
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