So We’re Doing Individual Teaching Contracts Now Erica? Excellent.

by Rebecca Thomas

Oh Minister, Minister — where art thou dignity, Minister?

The whole sector — minus the government’s own echo chamber — already knows what Erica really thinks of teachers. We’ve seen it in the tone, the speeches, the little barbs tossed into interviews. We’ve heard it between the lines every time teachers dare to say that supporting children properly might require… well… support.

And heaven forbid we mention Te Tiriti while we’re at it.

Because apparently standing firm on those things now counts as being difficult.

So today’s grand gesture arrives like a shiny bauble from the Beehive: a “fairness” offer for non-union teachers.

Schools, we are told, may now offer Individual Employment Agreements.

Cue the slogan: Teachers have a right to a contract.

How generous.

How progressive.

How positively revolutionary.

One almost imagines the Minister standing on the steps of Parliament like a Victorian reformer announcing the end of child labour.

“Teachers have a right… to a contract!”

Thank goodness. Many of us had been worried we were simply volunteering all this time.

It is, we are assured, a sweetheart deal. Teachers outside the union can finally receive the pay rise the government has so thoughtfully prepared. The implication being that pesky unions — those unruly defenders of collective bargaining — have somehow been standing in the way of teachers receiving their weekly bounty of somewhere between $50 and $76 Roughly eight milk-and-bread grocery pairs at Woolworths — and once you add an $8 jar of the sweet stuff, the land of milk and honey is already over budget.

Be still our beating hearts.

Of course, there is a small technical curiosity in all this. For decades now the system has operated on a rather quaint principle: collective agreements first, individual agreements later. It’s a dull little tradition designed to keep things like national pay scales, fairness, and professional unity intact.

But traditions are terribly inconvenient things when you are trying to manufacture a narrative berfore November 7th. So now we are invited to imagine the thrilling new frontier of education employment. The age of the Individual Teacher Deal.

Which raises some exciting possibilities.

If teachers now have a right to negotiate their own contracts, perhaps we should embrace the spirit of the moment. After all, if an individual agreement is the new gold standard, why stop at $50 a week? Perhaps teachers could begin submitting their own proposals. Nothing unreasonable of course. Just a modest request for something in the vicinity of the $147,000 pay rise that recently floated across the parliamentary benches. We wouldn’t want to appear greedy. Merely… aligned.

And while we’re drafting our Individual Employment Agreements, perhaps we could add a few clauses of our own.

Clause one: the school board commits to upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi in practice, not just in decorative policy documents.

Clause two: adequate learning support for every child who needs it.

Clause three: a curriculum rollout paced at the speed of reality rather than the speed of press conferences.

Clause four: the Minister agrees to visit an actual classroom and remain seated for the duration of a wet Wednesday afternoon.

If we are entering the age of individual contracts, let us truly negotiate.

Because once you open the door to that logic, Minister, it swings both ways.

But perhaps that was never really the point.

Because everyone in the sector understands what this little manoeuvre is actually about. It is not fairness. It is not generosity. It is not even particularly original.

It is simply the oldest play in the political handbook:

divide the room and hope nobody notices.

The difficulty, Minister, is that teachers are quite good at noticing patterns.

It comes with the job.