Thread: Payday...$300 for 7hrs work

Originally Posted by Chucaro

Not at all, IMO $40.00 per hour is good money if you do not have nothing and some people are not prepapred to work for that money

People are on the dole because they choose not to work, I work for more than that, yet I've never been on the dole, I've gone and found more work, you comment still makes no sense, there is those that do and those that don't in life, not going to change that

Chucaro your generalizing when we are talking a specific case.
If you work in retail $40/hr is great. That is not relevant here it's about teaching
You go to uni for 4-5 years and are in reality paid less as a casual than the permenant doing the same bloody job next to you, it's stupidity.
Lets take it a step further if you where running a business would you hire identically skilled labour from a labour hire company that was 15-20% more expensive? Thats is the current situation the teachers are in. why put on a permenant when you can get the casual for the same $$$ per day and not have to pay them sick leave, no super,no long service leave, no training relief. Do you understand now?

A GOOD refrig/air con mech will easily get $1400 plus for a 40hr week,plus super,phone,company vehicle with unlimited after hours use,uniform,O/T, etc.And they don't have to work hard,this is for local work,not building or mine sites.

Not bad money,but still difficult to find a good one

Myself and Mrs Whippy run a small 2 person 24/7 business and we would earn a bit under $400 a day. That is $200 each. I would love to earn more but we are comfortable. We don't live an extravagant lifestyle and in the last ten years we have purchased two investment properties and raised two teenage boys. One is now at uni and living on campus which isn't cheap, and the other is learning to fly as he wants to be an airline pilot. I'm sure you all have an idea on the cost of flying lessons!

As far as teachers go, I come from a family of them. My Dad and two sisters were teachers. I believe they deserve every cent they earn, as I got to see what they do behind the scenes.

When I started going out with Mrs Whippy back in 1983 she was a student teacher. She chucked it in with six months to go because at the time there were no jobs for teachers.

Dave.

I like the way this is going now, thanks for the comments.

To clarify something about the relief teaching game, is that yes some schools have the one person they pay basically full time to be their full time relief teacher, and that's a great concept. However this is very rare these days for many reasons that I can explain if people want. However the main reason is that the need for reliefs is very random and there are many many days we don't need any reliefs while other days like yesterday where we need 4 relief teachers. No amount of shuffling staff/days/resources can plan for that. So it would be a waste of money to employ a full time relief teacher, certainly for our school, at this time, according to our needs, but thanks for the suggestions and ideas.

The other things I'd like to clarify is the money issue. We aren't having issues attracting relief staff because of what we pay or what others pay. Basically whether $300 or $400 a day was on the table, a relief teacher would 99% of the time go with an offer of $300 rather than risk it all waiting for an extra $100 that might possibly never come that day. Every relief teacher I have ever spoken to has said they take the first phonecall of the day no matter if its the lowest or highest paying school.

The only really obviously effective strategy I have put in place for securing relief staff (apart from making sure we do pay the highest) is to change how my existing staff call in sick. Previously (due to control issues) the principal insisted that staff call him at 6:45am each morning. They were clearly NOT allowed to call the night before and if they called after 6:50am the boss "had words". When I took the job over I relaxed the rules for the purely pragmatic reason that if they call me at 6pm the night before I have HEAPS more chance securing a relief teacher before they're snaffled elsewhere. Before we changed this policy, we were really struggling to fill absences and hence it was done in-house by existing teachers taking on more lessons, but without O/T etc as in many industries. Unfortunately, if I cant find a relief teacher for the day, its usually the executive staff who don't actually "teach" as much, who cop a whole lot of lessons, who then have to stay back later and later to catch up on all their work...vicious cycle!

So now I have people relaxed about taking a day off when they're sick, and I am, usually, comfortable finding a relief teacher, or 6 when necessary. This is the reason I started the thread, because what happened on Sunday was quite abnormal.

Finally, there is no school that I know of that chooses to employ people as releif/temp teachers over employing them as permanent or at least 6-12month contract as a financial benefit to the school. I know many other industries do this and people "contract" rather than be employed which does hadve advantages both ways. One of my mates was "employed" by the RTA for years and was getting $45 /hr. He was told by one of his colleagues that if he resigned and offered to "contract" for them, he'd be on $65/hr plus then he'd be eligible to claim car, rent, travel etc etc and now hes on some sweet-as money.

IMHO If a school has a permanent hole to fill, and they can fill it, they will fill i t "permanently". In this process, the more permanent the position, the higher quality applicants usually apply. There isn't any stuffing around with "its cheaper to hire them on a casual basis" crap. The only strategy some schools use in this respect is whether they employ as "a permanent" vs "long term contract". This is not for financial reasons but only so they don't have to re-employ next year if the funds aren't there for the position as a whole or they are scared the teacher won't perform and they want to keep options up their sleeve.

Hope that helps.

When you can't get a temp and you get existing staff to work harder to fill the gaps, why don't they get paid some extra, as the money must be available if you can pay a temp $300?

Dave.

I take it the executive staff who fill the gap are on contract, and it is in their contract agreement to do just that without o/t payment.[ I assume this is taken into account when their salary is negotiated] However a teacher on permanent staff should expect o/t payments when it's legitimately worked. What do you do if someone refuses? Wasn't it Adelaide that I saw Teachers taking industrial action lately? It's no wonder Teaching is having trouble attracting top quality recruits, Bob

Yeah good point.

I would like to do this for sure, but I dont control the $$$$$ really. However there are complications with this. In the EBA there is provision that teachers will do an extra lesson per week of relief teaching, unrewarded as such, but I dont like the assumption that teachers should do this and it doesnt help generating support of management when this happens. Mostly my staff work long and hard for their coin and I dont like putting extra on them unless its unavoidable. To over come this extra pressure of the occasional relief lesson and parent meetings etc etc I ensure I care for my staff in other areas, like being as flexible as we can when things come up and they need to run off (aside from our supposed 40weeks holidays a year, the teaching profession is terribly inflexible), and also doing plenty of staff morning teas and nibblys, dropping into a lesson with a coffee for the teacher from the cafe over the road unexpectedly etc etc.

As we all know, money isn't everything and this has been proved time and time again by job satisfaction surveys so I ensure my staff are valued and appreciated constantly in other ways and I think this act goes further than an extra $40 for teaching 45minutes extra that week. If I cut costs and give extra work to my staff rather than hiring a relief teacher, and dont look after my staff, the long term cost of advertising, hiring and inducting someone new is far more expensive than doing the job properly in the first place....as you'd know well I expect.

Just my thoughts.