Like many parents in BC today, my daughter was in tow when I left for work this morning. With school closed indefinitely well be trying the patience of my workmates and the stamina I have for multi-tasking.
Being a school trustee in addition to my day job, my workday now also includes stopping by picket lines to offer support on the way to work, finding time throughout the day to take calls from understandably distraught parents, cramming in frantic emails to and from district staff on issues that inevitably emerge with our many community partners and, finally, working with other trustees to try and get some response from the government. (To date, we havent got so much as a smoke signal).
In the middle of all this, my curious daughter wants to know what exactly is going on. She watches the news with me, listens to the talk shows on CKNW at work, asks my co-workers for clarification and discusses her insights with the other kids whove taken to camping in our office. Shes eight so it can be a little funny to listen to. But when I asked her this afternoon if she wanted to come with me to the teachers rally in Vancouver she immediately answered Of course, Mom. If someone is getting bullied, its important to stand up for them. From the mouths of babes.
Ive been trying to keep my own opinion fairly quiet around the house. But if I were to tell her how I feel I would have told roughly the same thing shes now telling me, although likely based on a slightly different set of facts. And I would tell her how incredibly frustrating it is watching three long years of re-building trust and good relationships with teachers in our district since the last time the provincial government imposed a contract, dashed away.
How did things get so bad?
Problem One: In 2002, the government made BC teachers the only teachers in the country that have been declared an essential service. However, every other union that is declared essential also has the right to binding arbitration. BC teachers werent given that right. So they lost both the right to strike, and the right to an agreement.
Problem Two: That same year, the government overturned decades of bargaining by throwing away agreed upon class sizes and special needs and ESL supports previously in the collective agreement. But heres the kicker they also took away the ability of teachers to negotiate classroom conditions such as class size and composition. Then this past year the government announced that there would be no money on the table either. By using their considerably greater power to ensure there was no money or working conditions on the table, the government unilaterally made it impossible to negotiate.
Problem Three: Although the government took everything off the table, the teachers tried to put forward an offer. This was deemed unreasonable by the government. Not unreasonable in the scheme of what is asked for or even agreed to in other provinces but unreasonable in so much as the BC government was insisting that there be nothing on the table to negotiate.
Problem Four: Once the government had decided the teachers were being unreasonable, they then felt justified in legislating a collective agreement (their words not mine you cant actually call something an agreement and/or a contract when only one party has agreed to it and abused their power to enact it).
Which brings us to problem five : There are only two groups of people who can get us out of this. The first group is the government, who would need to repeal the legislation, put items on the table and sit down and negotiate. The problem is that the government has pretty much boxed itself into an intractable corner. Students, teachers, parents and local school boards are trapped in their very fast moving car and it looks like they are driving all of us, and the public education system, towards a pretty steep cliff.
The second group is the teachers, who would have to call off a very high-stakes strike without having won anything for their suffering and would be guaranteed a whole lot more suffering as a result. As stated in problem one above their strike is illegal, as in against the law. But understanding that this was a law specifically designed to target one group of individuals and circumvent their legal right to free collective bargaining, its hard to see the justice (although a lawyer friend of mine does remind me that one shouldnt go to the law seeking justice).
As for tonights news that only about half the teachers voted in the ballot that gave them a 90.5% mandate to go on strike, consider that the mandate the provincial government has right now is only 48% of about half the provinces voters. Seems like dangerously thin ice for the provinces labour minister to be hammering on but unfortunately not unpredictable for a government that seems hell bent on drowning in this dispute.
However, there is a third group that could get us out of this impasse: school trustees. Technically the province bargains on our behalf, although that would imply that they would actually consult us (and actually bargain). Until we lost the ability to bargain directly with teachers locals about 14 years ago, we did a generally good job at it. Weve even got successes to point to in the more recent past: trustees still do bargain with all the other education unions and Vancouver at least has come up with agreements, even with the governments imposed zero-cost mandate.
At this point I cant see what the government has to lose from repealing Bill 12 and letting us give bargaining a try, except perhaps a little face. For the sake of students in the province it seems like that wouldnt be such a hard thing to give on right now.
Thank you for the in-a-nutshell interpretation.
In response to the labour minister's rhetorical question to teachers (What are you teaching students about respect for the law?) I am inclined to ask, "What are YOU teaching them about fascism?"
Posted by: Sal Robinson | Wednesday, October 12, 2005 at 07:12 AM