15 minute read
Gender workplace equity afforded by law
in the courts and in tribunals for the SSTUWA. This can be on issues for individual members, or cases which represent the interest of the membership. If necessary, the union’s Legal Services Team will refer you to you lawyers, Slater and Gordon, Tehan Legal or Eureka Lawyers, for legal advice.
Growth Team
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New to the teaching profession? The SSTUWA Growth Team has all the information and support you need to make it through those difficult early years of your career. This team also attends graduate modules and visits schools and universities, so keep an eye out for them. They can be contacted at neweducator@sstuwa.org.au or you can connect with them on Facebook.
The New Educator Network Facebook group (New Educator Network – WA) offers an environment where you can talk to people who have been through, or are having, the same experiences as you. Read more on page 12.
Education and Training Centre
The SSTUWA Education and Training Centre (ETC) is committed to providing high quality learning opportunities for educators at all stages of their career. All courses on offer through the ETC are developed and delivered by highly skilled, passionate and experienced educators.
Whether you are a new graduate, an early career teacher, experienced teacher, aspiring leader, school leader or TAFE lecturer, you will find relevant, collaborative and empowering learning opportunities. Head over to sstuwa.org.au/training to find out more.
Members in schools and TAFE colleges are eligible for five days of paid leave per year to attend Trade Union Training (TUT). Make use of your TUT leave to build your knowledge, skills and understanding of your union.
As a member of the SSTUWA, you belong to the only organisation recognised to represent the industrial and professional interests of educators in WA public schools and TAFE. We really do have you covered with information, advice and support when you need it. The Schools General Agreement has just been registered, and as we go to print, we remain in negotiation over the TAFE General Agreement.
The SSTUWA has won women many conditions over the years in both agreements, from paid parental leave to increased job security for part-time workers, who are mostly women.
Gender workplace equity afforded by law
By Janette Bedwell Women’s contact officer
One area that I wanted to highlight are the benefits afforded under the Equal Opportunity (EO) Act 1984.
This act contains important conditions that hold for employees of both the Education Department and the various TAFE colleges in the state.
Did you know that it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of pregnancy, breast feeding, family responsibility or family status?
Many of us have a general understanding of what the EO Act does, however we seem to forget that, as Public Servants, the Act applies to us as it does to all employers/employees.
Part II of the EO Act, section 10A. 2 states:
“For the purposes of this Act, a person (in this subsection referred to as the discriminator) discriminates against another person (in this subsection referred to as the aggrieved person) on the ground of breast feeding or bottle feeding if the discriminator requires the aggrieved person to comply with a requirement or condition —
(a) with which a substantially higher proportion of persons who are not breast feeding or bottle feeding comply or are able to comply; and
(b) which is not reasonable having regard to the circumstances of the case; and
(c) with which the aggrieved person does not or is not able to comply.“
What this means is that you cannot treat people differently because they are breastfeeding. For example, you must be allowed to have time to feed or express breast milk whilst at work.
This is a provision that is protected in law and is encapsulated within both agreements under the section that says, “legislation that affects...”
Legislation also applies to discrimination on the grounds of family responsibility or family status – you can read the applicable EO Act legislation on this by going to: bit.ly/3B5YZ2r
The SSTUWA continues to improve the working conditions for women in our education workforce. Until true gender equity is obtained, our fight continues.
Growing knowledge of climate change starts early
By Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Professor of Early Childhood Education, Western University (Ontario)
To the untrained eye, the small community garden on Coast and Straits Salish territory (in Canada) – on what passers-by commonly know as the University of Victoria campus – might look unruly. Bursting with dandelions, lamb’s ear and grasses, it’s difficult to tell where the garden starts and where it ends.
Wondering where those boundaries begin and end has been a fruitful challenge for children, educators and researchers at the University of Victoria childcare centre, who now work in the garden.
The group buried itself in the garden overgrowth with gusto, rather than manage it. They didn’t know what was growing there or how. Those unknowns allowed them to move beyond the idea of a “controlled garden plot.” Instead, they think about what belongs and why, to consider what else they do not know.
Such approaches are critical for children of this generation, and of generations to come, who are inheriting an ecologically precarious world.
Climate Action Childhood Network
The educators with the University of Victoria centre, along with educators from more than 10 collaborating early childhood centres in five countries (Australia, Ecuador, Canada, United States and United Kingdom), are part of the Climate Action Childhood Network.
As the director of this network, which is composed of international interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners, I see the importance of generating responses to climate change through creating and experimenting alongside young children. Educators develop climate-specific experiences with children in different early childhood centres to address topics such as relationships with food, animals, energy, weather, waste and water.
Some of the environmental conditions that young children face today are toxicity, extraction, destruction, drought, pollution, wildfires and extreme weather. Yet, children are rarely consulted or included in environmental decisions.
We believe a paradigm shift in early childhood education can provide a path to deeper societal changes that are required. The shift means moving from learning that is information-driven to learning that is situated, speculative and experimental.
Collaborate with garden inhabitants
It can begin with something like the community garden on Vancouver Island, led by researchers B. Denise Hodgins and Narda Nelson, that challenges ideas around managing and stewardship. There, the children are learning to collaborate with the community garden’s inhabitants: by planting, digging, fertilizing, watering and responding to the garden’s own actions.
Prior to working with children to cultivate an awareness of Lekwungen food systems – a system of relations that predates settler colonial garden practices on these lands – educators attended a Colonial Reality Tour led by Cheryl Bryce. Bryce is from the Songhees Nation, traditionally known as Lekwungen. The educators also
engaged in dialogue with Earl Claxton Jr., a SȾÁ,UTW (Tsawout) WSÁNEĆ (Saanich) Elder, ethnobotanist and Knowledge Keeper.
Challenging assumptions
When educators invite children’s speculations, we can tap into other worlds that allow us to imagine alternatives.
“These beans are going to grow so high they will reach the clouds!” one child said on a recent visit to the garden. This is a beautiful declaration that forces us to challenge our assumptions.
The Climate Action Childhood Network, alongside the Common Worlds Research Collective, positions early childhood education as a collective practice of learning with others. The goal is to move beyond learning about the climate crisis to seeing ourselves as part of it.
One example is Conversations with Rain, a project in Western Australia between the Art Gallery of Western Australia and researchers Mindy Blaise and Jo Pollitt.
They worked alongside young children to respond to a painting, Raining on Kurtal, by Wangkatjunga/Walmajarri artist Ngarralja Tommy May. Children were invited to think with their own breathing. In a sketchbook, children began by marking a line for every inhale and exhale until a page was full. Then, considering the question “What if raining is writing?” children wrote as fast as rain, without stopping or planning.
Water stories
Another project involved children, educators and researchers exploring creeks in each other’s environments across the planet. A group participated from Criuckshank Park, in Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Australia — once a grassland, then a bluestone quarry that polluted a creek and now a greenbelt that winds through a gentrifying suburb. Another group was located in Haro Woods, an urban second-growth forest on Canada’s West Coast on the unceded, traditional and ancestral lands of the Coast and Straits Salish peoples, and what is known now as Victoria.
Researchers Nicole Land and Catherine Hamm, working alongside children in their respective creekside settings in Australia and Canada, used FaceTime to explore new ways to connect. Sitting creekside, children and educators used FaceTime to share creek and water stories with one another. They listened to the sounds, asking: Where does the water go when it runs dry during certain seasons? What stories did this place tell before settler colonialism?
“Our water stories are not worried about saving or rescuing the water,” the project collaborators wrote. “Rather, they are about what might be required to carefully stay with the troubles made visible with polluted creeks in urban nature spaces.”
The point of the FaceTime project was not to reinforce the idea of children as global citizens, who should learn about people and practices in other cultures and places.
In fact, it resisted that urge to exchange facts about the parklands. Instead, it was concerned with what feminist scholar Donna Haraway described as “passing patterns back and forth”. Haraway discusses the children’s string game of cat’s cradle that can be passed (and elaborated) from person to person as a metaphor: when we hold each other’s stories and creations, this collective attention opens up new possibilities.
Pandemic experiments
Our work responded to the pandemic, too. A project based out of Cuenca, Ecuador, turned the difficulty of lockdown into an opportunity to experiment with an itinerant school. Educators at Santana’s Children’s School with researchers Cristina D. Vintimilla and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw created home gardens across the city. Children met with teachers three times weekly to create a curriculum that responded to the specific surroundings.
In an itinerant school on Cabogana Mountain, one child noticed how a particular stick looked like the leg of a hen wandering the garden. This triggered an exploration of the bird’s movement through imitation and drawings.
The Climate Action Childhood Network has created new modes of engagement in environmental early childhood education. These modes will create the conditions for society’s youngest members, who will be the most impacted by ecological challenges in the long term, to actively participate in transforming the world they are inheriting.
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University in Ontario, Canada. The opinions expressed in this article is that of the author and does not necessarily reflect any official policies or positions of the SSTUWA or AEU. This article was first published at The Conversation website and is reproduced with permission.
National education and union news
Schools review must consider funding
The Australian Education Union (AEU) is urging the federal government to ensure school funding is a key consideration of the review of the National Schools Reform Agreement (NSRA). The NSRA is the foundation for bi-lateral agreements between the Commonwealth and the states and territories, setting out goals for student performance and outcomes for students with additional needs, and minimum funding contributions. The Productivity Commission is currently conducting a review of the NSRA; however, the terms of reference exclude any consideration of funding. “The current review is hamstrung by the very agreement it is considering. There is a clear link between student outcomes and funding,” AEU Federal President Correna Haythorpe said. “Any consideration of student performance and outcomes for students with disability, First Nations students and other students experiencing disadvantage requires a comprehensive consideration of the underfunding of public schools, which is entrenched in the agreements associated with the NSRA for every state and territory. “The current agreements are so deeply flawed because they leave public schools below the minimum funding standards set out in the 2012 Gonski review, and they were developed without any reference to the teaching profession – the very people who have to implement the priorities they set.
“The recurrent funding shortfall has a direct impact on the ability of schools to deliver the reforms set out in the NSRA, as well as their ability to ensure ongoing staffing and resources for the delivery of learning and support programs for students.”
The present NSRA expires at the end of 2023, and negotiations for agreements covering 2024-2029 are expected to commence later this year. “There is still an opportunity for the federal government to recraft the Productivity Commission review to include funding,” Ms Haythorpe said. “We also urge the federal government to consult directly with the teaching profession through the union and to update the terms of reference to ensure a thorough examination of the direct relationship between funding, equity and student outcomes.”
Record profits driving cost of living crisis
Australian companies are banking record profits rather than using them to shield consumers from cost increases is the leading driver of inflation, according to new research released by The Australia Institute. The new research shows that big businesses are actively making choices which harm the economy and are putting millions of households under financial stress in order to increase their margins and secure record CEO bonuses.
It also reiterates that wage growth, which is lagging well behind CPI, is not driving inflation. Businesses have ample room to absorb cost increases but are instead choosing to hike up prices to support record profits and CEO bonuses, while working people are seeing their pay swallowed up by the rapidly rising cost of living. The lack of real wage growth over the last ten years is a considerable barrier to economic growth in Australia as it throttles domestic consumption. ACTU President Michele O’Neil said the new research showed how hypocritical the big business campaign against wage growth has been. “Corporate Australia is causing the cost-of-living crisis by passing on price increases and refusing to give working people decent pay rises. This is all about protecting their record high profit share at all costs,” she said.
“While they are warning that the sky will fall in if wages keep pace with inflation, they are creating an inflationary cycle by pocketing record profits and paying out record bonuses to CEOs who refuse to increase pay for their workers.
“Businesses could absorb cost increases into their record-setting profit margins, but instead have chosen to pass them straight on to consumers, fuelling inflation and creating a costof-living crisis in this country. “Our system is broken when big business is setting records for profits and bonuses but workers’ pay hasn’t increased in real terms for nearly a decade. “Wage growth could be an engine of economic growth in a country that relies so heavily on domestic consumption. We should be sharing the recovery from the pandemic across the whole economy, not letting big business fuel inflation by funnelling it into offshore bank accounts and CEO bonuses.”
Low unemployment not delivering wage growth
Years of inaction widens gender pay gap
Unemployment has fallen steeply from 3.9 to 3.5 per cent, but with a broken bargaining system, workers are unlikely to see any translation to wage growth, with real term pay cuts likely to continue through this year and into next.
Working people have been promised that a tighter labour market, higher productivity and businesses recovering would mean higher wages, but with remarkably low unemployment, productivity growing and record profits and CEO bonuses, wage growth remains well below inflation. ACTU Assistant Secretary Liam O’Brien said all the variables that workers had been told would drive wage growth were now in alignment, but real wage cuts stretching into the distance were still being seen. “With a functioning bargaining system, low unemployment, productivity growing and profits and bonuses at all-time records would translate into wage growth for working people,” he said.
“The recovery from the pandemic is not being shared across the economy. We need to fix the bargaining system to kick-start wage growth for workers who have been missing out for a decade under the previous Government.”
Almost a decade of inaction on the gender pay gap under the previous government has resulted in women continuing to earn less than men in every age bracket, according to latest data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).
On average, women earn $483.30 less per week than men, largely due to women shouldering the majority of care responsibilities and making up 61 per cent of workers reliant on Award and minimum wages.
The WGEA attribute 20 per cent of the pay gap problem to women-dominated industries in care and education being undervalued and underpaid.
Women have lost nearly a decade under the previous government, and action is urgently needed to restart the work of closing the gender pay gap. The union movement welcomes the action already taken by the Albanese Government in committing to providing 10 days of Paid Family and Domestic Violence leave through the NES, but more work is required, including the government’s commitments to include Gender Equity in the Fair Work Act, full implementation of the Respect@Work report recommendations, prohibiting pay secrecy and enforcing public reporting of pay gaps by employers.
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