Educators expect tough pay battle

Flexing muscle may see ‘seismic shift’ for primary teachers

Teachers are gearing up for hard — but colourful — industrial action over pay equity, higher pay and lower workloads. About 380 primary and early childhood teachers at the NZ Educational Institute's annual conference in Rotorua yesterday made multicoloured placards, sang about “the sisterhood” and exercised to music in line with two women filmed postur- ing outside Parliament to make the case for pay equity.

The teachers, who are overwhelmingly female, have lodged pay equity claims for 425 education support workers in early childhood and about 12,000 teacher aides in schools, and will lodge an equity claim for private early childhood teachers to match a deal won for public kindergarten teachers in 2002.

They are also gearing up for what executive member Liam Rutherford described as a claim for a “seismic shift” in pay and conditions for the country's 29,000 primary teachers and principals, whose collective agreements expire in May and June next year.

Former institute president Louise Green warned that they would have to flex their “industrial muscle” if they were to succeed in their claims.

Hutt Valley education support worker Jacoline Brink told the conference that her work was undervalued compared to her husband's work as a corrections officer — an occupation the institute tried to use as a male-dominated comparator in negotiations the Ministry of Education had agreed to treat as a pay equity case.

The ministry has rejected corrections officers as a comparator on the basis that their work is too different from education support workers, and negotiators are now talking about using more closely related male-dominated jobs in the social services.

Brink said she and her husband migrated with their children from South Africa 10 years ago. She had wanted to train as an early childhood teacher but the family could not afford to live on one income, so she started work five years ago as an education support worker, paid by the ministry to work with individual children with special needs in early childhood centres.

The starting rate was now just under $17 an hour and Brink was on the top rate, $19.87.

Hours fluctuated with the needs of children in her area, and next term she would work only seven and a half hours a week, with one child, because another child had left.

Her husband earned about $55,000 a year, about $26 an hour.

“Last year we tried to buy a house,” she said. “Every time we sat down with the mortgage broker . . . it comes down to my pay. Then the comments come back, ‘ Oh, you have to go and find a real job’.”

Negotiations for the next group, teacher aides in schools, are still in the early stages of agreeing on a job description of what aides actually do.

The institute signalled it would start campaigning immediately for the broader primary teachers' agreement with the aim of a big leap in both pay rates and paid preparation and marking time equivalent to winning equality with secondary teacher pay rates in 1998.

“Our current salary movement has us falling further behind doctors, lawyers and other professionals that we have historically been compared with,” Rutherford said. “This campaign is going to require us to mobilise our members in ways that we have never done before.”