“They’ve seen what we’re capable of, I think. It’s not a threat, it’s just a reality – if we’re not happy, if our members are not happy, we will walk out. We’ve done it once, we’ll do it again!”

Until a few months ago few people would have expected to hear a statement like this from a National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) delegate at Melbourne’s Centre for Adult Education (CAE). Never before in the centre’s 66-year history had workers gone on strike.

In November and December last year they took action that was unprecedented in the sector - a strike and picket that lasted for 3 weeks. CAE ground to a halt. Classes and events were cancelled. The CEO resigned.

Lay-ping Powell and Carlos Marquez-Perez, administrative staff and union delegates at CAE, spoke to Red Flag about how events unfolded.

At first, Lay-ping explains, workers were scared by the prospect of a strike, as were the four delegates. It was the severity of management’s attacks on the union and the contempt shown at the bargaining table (management twice reneged on an in-principle agreement) that whipped the normally placid workers into a storm, says Lay-ping. Countless one-on-one conversations between delegates and members meant that everyone knew of each dishonest management manoeuvre at the bargaining table.

Lay-ping also attributes some of the discontent to the behavior of arrogant “toxic bosses” since CAE’s merger with Box Hill TAFE four years ago. Workers were sick and tired of management’s "wanton wastage of money for infrastructure… which means that the number of staff is reduced drastically", she said.

In bargaining, management wanted to restrict union access to dispute resolution at Fair Work, and remove union delegates from a key workplace committee. Such an agreement would have been “unworkable” says Carlos. “I wouldn’t work in a place like that.” In response, union meetings voted unanimously for an indefinite strike.

Encouraged by 1,000 students’ signatures on a petition in support of the strike – and despite a brief management attempt to tear down material advertising the strike – workers walked off the job. “It was unifying”, says Carlos. “It connected us.”

Immediately, Carlos noticed a boost in everyone’s confidence. He describes one worker who he had “never seen being vocally that active – at first [Ann] wouldn’t jump up and take the megaphone because she was just so scared about it. But after speaking to one person she was just so strong she just kept on jumping on there.” After seeing the change, “her husband said to the delegates ‘who are you and what have you done to Ann!?’”

The strike went on for longer than anyone had expected but Carlos says they quickly realised that it didn’t matter how long it took – “we need to be here.”

In the end, their resolve paid off. On 19 December they signed off on an enterprise agreement that, according to Carlos, is “not only what we wanted but that we dreamed of”. Workers beat back management’s anti-union attacks and won a 25 percent pay increase for sessional teachers.

Though Lay-ping says it "is really not quite the 9 percent that we should be getting", the rest of the workers won a 5 percent pay rise with 2.5 percent backdated to 2012.

Carlos hopes for a more offensive strategy in the next round of enterprise bargaining, starting in a few months. He says they need a strategy that says “let’s add things as opposed to always subtracting things”.

The workers at CAE have come away from the dispute with more than improved pay and conditions. Not least is a union membership that has grown by about 30 percent. Carlos added: “The way it stands, if we told our members we’re going on industrial action again, they’d just say ‘let’s go’. They’re ready.”