Collective Bargining Continues

Posted: 4 Dec 2022
Updated: 5 Dec 2022

This week the Canterbury region of the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) Union had a stopwork meeting to discuss and vote on the collective agreement offer that we had received from the Minstry of Education (MOE). Reccently I had volunteered as the branch representative for my school and after many conversations with teachers, I found myself lying in bed at 12am the night before reading the PPTA Financial Statements for the year ended 31 March 2022. That reading lead to a statement that I contributed to discussion at the stopwork meeting. Here it is.

Kia Ora koutou,

Ko Finn Le Sueur toku inoga and I am a kaiako at Te Iringa O Kahukura, Cashmere High School.

Many of us here today will feel that this job is hard and asks a lot of you but that you love it. But we are feeling the pressure and it’s not letting off. If anything, it seems to be increasing with every passing term and Ministry of Education proposal.

• The pastoral needs of our students are increasing, but the resourcing does not match that need, leaving us teachers to pick up the slack.
• NZQA changes - it seems top-down but in the end we are the ones doing an extraordinary amount of work to make it possible. At Cashmere we have it easy, in our Science department alone we have over 20 brains to apply to our curriculum. But what about those kaiako at smaller schools where it is just them? Madness.
• What about de-streaming? It will work ONLY if the student:teacher ratio is improved so that we have sufficient bandwidth to individualise our lesson plans, but I do not have faith the Ministry will resource it well enough. Do more with less, I guess.

These are only some of the pressures we all face, and to even consider that we come out of this bargining with a pay cut is completely unacceptable. We are not asking for more money to do the same work we have always done. We are asking, at a bare minimum, to not take a pay cut so that we can can do more than ever.

Since our last agreement in 2019 we have taken a 5% pay cut due to inflation. In 2019 we won 9%, but inflation has been 14%. No more. It’s time to start acting like a 20,000 person union that took in $12.9mil in membership dues for year ended March 2022.

An important fact that can be hard to hold in our minds is that it will sound like teachers are being greedy by asking for so much of a “pay rise”. The repsonse to that knee-jerk reaction is that income must be considered in relation to its buying power – buying power that is decreased by inflation. So, a constant income in the face of quarterly inflation is actually you taking a pay-cut each quarter. When we ask for a “pay rise”, what we actually want is for the buying power of our incomes to not decrease. I hope that the public can keep that in mind if we end up in industrial action in 2023.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koe (a huge gratitude to you), nā,
Finn