MORE than 200 teachers and support staff from 27 St George and Sutherland Shire Catholic schools took part in a strike on Tuesday morning.
The Independent Education Union held a three-hour stop work meeting at Gymea Tradies as part of a series of ongoing protests in NSW.
The industrial action was part of the union's Recognise Respect and Reward campaign.
Employees signed a petition against what they described as a "disrespectful and insulting" proposed enterprise agreement.
The previous agreement expired at the end of last year.
Local union organiser Marilyn Jervis said Catholic teachers had not taken industrial action on their own behalf since 1995.
She said under the new agreement, teaching support staff, for instance, would face pay cuts of between $6156 and $17,417 a year.
"The draft agreement proposed by Catholic employers threatened to increase hours of face-to-face teaching, scrap restrictions on class sizes, abolish all promotions positions and take away the right to a half-hour meal break and reduce sick leave," she said.
"It is hoped that this intervention will force the employer to negotiate around current salaries and conditions rather than those contained in their draconian proposal."
Teachers from four schools — St Francis Xavier's Arncliffe, St Joseph's Oatley, St Declan's Penshurst and Holy Family Menai chose not to go on strike.
Supervision was organised for students at schools where teachers went on strike. No school was left without supervision.
Sydney Catholic Schools' executive director Dan White said it was "business as usual" and "lessons as normal" at some schools.
Dr White said he was "overall" disappointed that teachers chose to strike.
He said two thirds of schools in the Sydney archdiocese were staging some sort of industrial action.
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