Membership renewals due 31 March
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 124 No 2, 15 March 2019, page no. 4
QTU membership renewals are due by 31 March. It is important to remind your colleagues that their eligibility for access to the QTU’s legal assistance scheme is based upon their financial status at the time of any incident occurring.
But QTU membership is a whole lot more than just legal protection. I recently met some workplace Reps at a training session and we talked about the difference between “joining something” and “buying something”. Their responses reinforced the view that when you buy something, it is an individual decision or transaction. But when you join something, you are actively choosing to belong to it. When you join the QTU, you are actively joining the collective power of 46,000 members across the state and contributing to making your work life better.
You are also joining together with teacher unionists as part of a much larger network, nationally through the Australian Education Union (AEU) and internationally through Education International (EI). Being connected allows us to campaign for better working conditions and salaries on a local, national and international level.
Union membership is not something you purchase. It is something you contribute to. And the bigger we are, the stronger we are. In a year in which we are campaigning for a new enterprise agreement (EB9 in schools and EB10 in TAFE) and fighting for fair school funding as a federal election looms, this is particularly important.
Please take the time in the month of March to remind your colleagues about the need to renew their membership, and why not have a conversation with a potential member about the power of the collective, both locally more broadly. Your story could be all a potential member needs to make the decision to join with you as a member of the QTU.