If the government and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation are putting the welfare of students first, we don’t see the evidence. Despite all the rhetoric about finding a new approach, bargaining has degenerated into the familiar tooth-and-nail nastiness that has characterized contract talks for most of the past 30 years.
It’s tiresome. It’s not good for education. It needs to change.
“Schools are not factories,” former deputy education minister Don Wright wrote in 2003 after being called back into service to examine teacher bargaining. “There are all kinds of intangible factors that make for a successful school. This is all put at risk when labour conflict is brought into the school.”
Wright, a Harvard PhD and an expert highly regarded by educators for his common sense, said what everybody knew: The teacher bargaining model simply did not work, never had and was serving nobody well.
One solution, he suggested, might be for both sides to step away and try final-offer binding arbitration, in which the arbitrator chooses one of the parties’ proposals on each or perhaps all disputed issues.
A trade union might demand a wage increase of 15 per cent and the employer might offer three per cent. The arbitrator has to choose one, which encourages the parties to arrive at a settlement by introducing uncertainty into the arbitration procedure.
Parties who fail to compromise during negotiations risk a total loss on some or all arbitrated issues. It leads parties to adopt reasonable positions during the arbitration, because an unreasonable position will almost certainly be rejected in favour of a more reasonable proposal.
The report was shelved.
Wright’s report also clarified that the dynamics of collective bargaining and dispute resolution are different in the public and private sectors. Bargaining in the private sector occurs within the context of the marketplace, where labour relations are circumscribed by considerations of profit and loss. Bargaining in the public sector occurs where no such structural limits appear to exist.
Which brings us to the shameful situation where the victims of all the game-playing and charades are children and their parents, not a company’s bottom line.
Shameful, because the number of families headed by single parents or where both parents work has increased significantly. If teachers strike, parents will have to stay home and lose income, or live with the anxiety that their children might not be adequately looked after.
Shameful, because the government, in threatening to arbitrarily dock teacher salaries with no legislative or judicial backing to do so, has successfully done what B.C. Supreme Court Justice Susan Griffin said it had been trying to do all along — provoke a teachers’ strike.
Shameful, because the BCTF demands are so far out of line with other public-sector awards that they would not survive final-offer arbitration beyond a single meeting.
Shameful because Teresa Rezansoff, president of the B.C. School Trustees’ Association, which represents 60 boards of education, elected by their communities to defend not government policy but the interests of public education, calls the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association threat to lock out teachers “a necessary step.”
That is the same toothless BCPSEA shuffled aside by government, which fired its board of directors, replacing them with Michael Marchbank and their negotiating team with Peter Cameron.
With responsibility for the welfare of public education gone sideways, with the possibility of Grade 12 kids facing life-changing final exams without access to their teachers, let’s take this shameful insanity a step further.
Let the students apply for certification, unionize and then walk out and stay out until the adults come to their senses.
That might sound foolish, but it’s no more foolish than what’s already happening.
