What approach to bargaining for EB11 will get the best outcome?

One part of this debate is centred on “Interest Based Bargaining”. This is described by the Fair Work Commission as a “consensus-seeking and cooperative” approach to bargaining, in contrast with a “traditional” approach which is more adversarial, and where parties “approach the process with pre-determined positions or a log of claims.”

Fightback encouraged branches to approve specific claims to be brought to the August State Council meeting for approval. For example, 30 branches passed motions for a wage claim of ten per cent per year. This would address the relative decline in teacher salaries since the 1980s, and the sub-inflation pay outcome in EB10. (EB10 is likely to leave an EST 2 around $4,500 per year – more than $80 per week – worse off in real terms by the time the current agreement expires).

However rather than a clear claim for 10% each year, or for any other amount – the QTU leadership succeeded in getting endorsement for a vague statement of “interest areas”, one of which states that the union will seek “[r]emuneration that recognises the professional qualifications of members.”

Similarly on workload, over 33 branches endorsed a claim including a series of specific measures: a doubling of NCT time by 2030; one planning day each term for all staff; an increase in the weekly NCT for primary and special school teachers to parity with secondary teachers (45 branches!); removal of the requirement for Easter SFD make-up hours; and five hours of planning time for teachers in the SFDs at the beginning of the year.

Unfortunately, however, the “interest areas” approved by the August State Council don’t even mention the word “workload” – let alone specific measures to address workload concerns. The QTU leadership justified this approach as in keeping with “interest-based bargaining”.

The formation of an LNP government might mean that “interest-based bargaining” won’t be adopted as the approach to negotiations for EB11. However, the issues raised are still worth debating out, as they are likely to re-emerge in various ways over the next year. And there’s every possibility that our leadership will insist on interest-based bargaining because they refuse to recognise Fightback’s influence.

Here’s Fightback’s four-point guide to why we should oppose “interest-based bargaining”:

1. Why are specific claims important?

The first workers to win the eight hour day didn’t enter into a “consensus-seeking and cooperative” process with totally amorphous claims. They made a clear, inspirational, transformative demand – the eight hour day -- and then built and exercised the industrial power needed to win. The same story can be told for annual leave, leave loading, superannuation, and pretty much anything else that unions have won over the years.

This should tell us something.

Breakthroughs in working conditions – and often, maintaining wages and conditions when they are under attack – depends on workers taking strike action. It’s much easier to inspire union members to do this, and to explain what’s at stake, if we’re putting forward specific, measurable claims which members can understand rather than an amorphous statement of “interests” which can mean everything and nothing.

2. Accountability

Specific claims – discussed, debated, endorsed and understood by the widest possible layers of a union’s membership – are also crucial for ensuring that those negotiating on our behalf are fully accountable, at all points of the bargaining process which will determine our working conditions.

You don’t have to take Fightback’s word for this. Important wins by unions in the United States in recent years have taken this approach seriously.

For example, the Chicago Teachers Union literally wrote the book on how to turn around a union to organise successful, mass-participation strikes. One important part of the preparations for CTU’s historic strike in 2012 was developing specific, winnable claims for every section of the workforce.

Similarly the late Jane McAlevey – perhaps the most famous union organiser in the English-speaking world, due to her series of useful books on building union power and negotiations – advocated for clear, specific claims. This goes to the extent of having “article committees”: a group of rank and file union members who take a specific interest on important clauses (“articles”) during a collective contract negotiation.

The detail of claims matters. A watertight, enforceable clause is worth something. A woolly, amorphous, “best endeavours” clause means a lot less. Equipping members to tell the difference between these things, and to be able to debate out what’s on offer at any stage of the negotiations, is a lot easier if we have specific claims to start with.

And members need to be involved in the process! To see the 1,600 motions on claims submitted to QTU State Council in August reduced to five vague “interest areas” breeds disengagement, not the sort of interest and direct involvement we’ll need for a proper fight.

3. The proof of the pudding?

The evidence from “interest-based bargaining” is in: it was used in the last bargaining period, which has seen no improvement on workloads and our wages fall behind inflation.

We supposedly “won” our demand to be the “highest paid teachers in the country” while still receiving a pay cut, a “victory” that has seen our wages go backwards by 3.5% thanks to inflation. We also only held that title of “best paid in the country” for a few months before losing it anyway as NSW signed onto a more favourable agreement off the back of industrial action.

We were told by our union leaders that EB10 satisfied the demands around attraction and retention – yet how has it prevented the teacher shortage? There were some measures as part of EB10, enough to be told the demand was satisfied. But we can’t just fiddle around the edges any more. We need actual retention measures like increased NCT, planning days at teachers’ discretion, remote incentives to be doubled across the board, significant pay increases and so much more.

4. “Interest-based bargaining” is claimed to be “win-win” – is this too good to be true?

Short answer – yes.

“Interest-based bargaining” is geared towards finding a “common interest” between two parties. But what if the interests of the two parties at the negotiating table are actually counterposed?

No matter what the economic situation, we keep being told that our working conditions -- which shape the learning conditions of 572,000 government school students in Queensland -- are less of a priority than the government bottom line, which in turn is shaped by the taxes (not) paid by mining and gas companies. School staff, and the vast majority of the families who entrust their kids to us each day, don't have the same interests as these companies, or with governments that want to look after them ahead of the rest of us.

Again, it's not just Fightback saying this. “Interest-based bargaining” was first popularised through the book Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury in 1981. Since that time, there’s been a large and growing academic literature pointing out the various problems with the whole approach.

Bobette Wolski, writing in the James Cook University Law Review in 2012, argued to “call a halt to the unqualified acceptance of interest-based negotiation”. One of the main reasons for this is that, as Wolski states: “Fisher and Ury’s model of interest-based negotiation relies upon the assumption that behind opposed positions lie many more interests that are shared than divergent…” This is obviously not the case.

If we don't have the same interests, seeking “consensus” through "interest-based bargaining" isn't going to be a winner for us.

Similarly, James White of the Michigan Law School reviewed Getting to Yes in 1984. White pointed out that ultimately, in a negotiation between a union and management, parties will “come to a raw economic exchange in which additional wage dollars for the employees will be dollars subtracted from the corporate profits”. There’s simply no getting around this contradiction in interests. Fisher and Ury’s suggestion that (in White’s words) “one can avoid ‘contests of will’ and thereby eliminate the exercise of raw power” is, in White’s assessment, “at best naive and at worst misleading.”

This is the real heart of the problem. If we want to win the dramatic changes that teachers and school staff – and our students, families and communities – need, we have to be preparing to take serious industrial action. “Interest-based bargaining” points in exactly the opposite direction.

By emphasising consensus, “interest-based bargaining” tends to disarm us. By emphasising vague “interest areas” rather than specific claims, it makes the job of winning members to the idea of fighting to win concrete gains much harder.

“Interest-based bargaining” fits into a common pattern since the early 1980s. Instead of striking to win and keep gains, we’ve been told our unions must be “consensus-seeking and cooperative”. With our unions disarmed, workers and our communities have seen living standards and services stagnate or go backwards.

If we want a different outcome, we need a different approach -- and to go back to what the union movement was founded on. We should be raising bold claims that will actually fix the entrenched problems we face, and build the industrial strength needed to fight and win.