Australian Education Union Responses to the GERM

Abstract

The second strategy that unions can deploy to resist the rise of social neoliberal policies in education is to enliven the traditions of social democracy. This requires interpreting professional unionism as an updated form of industrial democracy that is more pertinent to the problems of auditing in an age of networked information and social media. The chapter looks at how Australian ideas of ‘strategic unionism’, drawn in the 1980s from an interpretation of the Swedish social-democratic labour movement, has led to unions conducting political campaigns independent from the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The dispute between the Australian Education Union and the ALP government over My School in 2010 should be considered within the wider ambitions of Australian unions to maintain connections between pay and working conditions and various campaigns for wider concerns of social justice.