This note was sent out to parents of a northside college at the end of last week (all formatting as in original):
The Australian Education Union (AEU) has notified the department that union members will take industrial action on the morning of Tuesday 14 March 2006. the AEU have advised that the action will consist of “a half day stoppage of all AEU members on Tuesday 14 March 2006…members will return to their workplace to commence duties on that day by 1:00pm”.
The department has been discussing a new enterprise agreement with the AEU and the stopwork action forms part of the AEU’s strategy to gain pay increases for their members.
In order to bring media attention to the industrial dispute between the AEU and the department, the AEU has decided to hold stopwork action between 8:30am and 1:00pm on Tuesday 14 March 2006.
[The college] will close at 8.30am and resume, with normal classes, at 1pm.
Students are advised to use this time to work on unit assignments or revise work for upcoming tests.
I shall keep you informed of any future developments.
[signed The Principal]
Hang on two seconds and run that by me again? The purpose of the stopwork is “to bring media attention to the industrial dispute”? How about this, this and this? Or all the stories on the ABC (here are two)? I’m sure WIN has also covered it but their site search is awful. And that’s just the mainstream media. There’s also been extensive debate here on RA about the issue.
It may well be stopwork action is a good way to bring attention to the issue and put pressure on the government, but given the coverage this story has already had, I don’t think media attention should be the sole stated reason for the action.
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