By Jena Carr
Geelong TAFE teachers continue to fight for better pay and conditions with a rally held outside Member for Geelong Christine Couzens’ office this week.
Teachers from the Gordon TAFE stopped work and rallied outside Ms Couzens’ Pakington Street office at 10am on October 22 as part of a series of stopwork rallies targeting state Labor MPs.
Australian Education Union (AEU) Victorian Branch president Meredith Peace said TAFE teachers were “working unsustainable workloads”.
“TAFE members deserve better respect, salaries and conditions for the important work that they do for their students and the community,” she said.
“The state government’s forecasts show more than 2,700 vocational education teachers need to be trained by 2026, with 71 per cent of existing TAFE teachers considering leaving the profession.
“We can’t solve the skill shortage if we have a shortage of TAFE teachers, and we can’t solve the skills shortages and deliver high-quality education and training without investing in the workforce.”
It had been close to two and a half years since negotiations between the state government, AEU, and TAFE teachers started, and it had been two years since a pay raise was received.
AEU The Gordon Geelong branch president and TAFE teacher Matt Henry said teachers were “leaving TAFE in droves” due to the workload and pay gaps.
“The Gordon is an institution in Geelong, and it’s been going for over 100 years, so we need to get our MPs to respect that,” he said.
“We’ve got a TAFE teacher shortage and a skills shortage, and the only way we fix that is to make teaching TAFE more attractive and try to recruit new teachers into the sector.
“It’s been two years since we’ve had a pay rise. This long and protracted battle with the state government to earn the respect that TAFE teachers deserve has gone on long enough.”
Ms Couzens said that TAFE teachers had the right to request better pay and conditions, and she supported the industrial actions as the negotiations continued.
“TAFEs are vital for Victoria’s and Geelong’s training needs, now and into the future. We highly value our TAFE teachers’ role in training the workers our community needs,” she said.
“Bargaining for a new agreement has been ongoing since June 2022 between the AEU and Victorian TAFE Association, with TAFE teachers receiving a two per cent wage increase in October 2022.
“The AEU is also seeking orders from the Fair Work Commission in October 2023 to bargain with all TAFEs for a single interest agreement. I am hopeful that an agreement can be reached very shortly.”
TAFE teachers voted to escalate the industrial action during the historic statewide 24-hour stopwork meeting in August in response to the ongoing negotiations with the state government.
