The decision by the B.C. Labour Relations Board to uphold the government decision to lock out teachers and dock their pay clarifies several issues.
It is now clear the governance over teacher contracts rests not with trustees but with the minister and his B.C. Public School Employers’ Association appointees. Chief administrator Michael Marchbank replaced the school trustee board of directors, and Peter Cameron, a hard-nosed ex-union negotiator, implements the government’s tactics.
That is a significant change. School trustees, elected by their communities to oversee the interests of public education, have lost yet another capacity, and now find themselves basically representing government interests, not interests of their communities in matters relating to teacher contracts.
The notion of local governance of public education seems to have been incrementally replaced by provincial government policies and unelected officials.
For some time, trustees, without the power to levy local taxation, have been left to act as apologists for government funding decisions. They now find themselves acting on behalf of the minister and his appointees docking teacher pay.
I use the term “pay,” as opposed to “salary,” because a second issue clarified by both the government directive and the subsequent LRB decision is that teachers are not the salaried employees they thought they were.
Based on BCPSEA’s decision and the LRB’s ratification of that decision, docking pay for work not done is kosher. It seems that the specific duties of teachers — instruction, marking, attendance at staff meetings and so on — is what teachers are paid to do, piece by piece. Failure to fulfil those prescribed duties, locked out or not, has resulted in loss of pay.
Again, this is a significant shift in teacher understanding about their employment situation. Some teachers might begin to wonder if the voluntary responsibilities such as coaching, travelling with sports teams, running school concerts and directing plays should either be compensated additionally or should take place on some kind of hourly pro-rated basis in place of other duties, if pay-by-duty-performed is the name of the new game.
The third shift in the public education landscape sees the once-powerful British Columbia Teachers’ Federation backed into a corner where calling a full-blown strike at this point in the school year puts them on the wrong side of “what’s good for kids.”
Government, which seems to have engineered this situation, can survive a full strike, but the BCTF might not. The question will be whether classroom teachers are enraged enough by the arbitrary actions of the minister, Marchbank and Cameron to throw caution and their own ethical preferences to the wind and walk out.
It is, as government knows, not a winning position for teachers caught between the rock of their union and the hard place of abandoning the kids at exactly the wrong time of year.
The BCTF has never met such a concerted challenge to its authority. To teach in this province, teachers must belong to the BCTF.
This is a condition, again imposed by government at the time of unionization, that does not sit well with some teachers who long for a return to the days of true professionalism. It has been a fine line for the union executives to walk when they called for job action.
Now, faced with an unprecedented challenge, including lockout and a cut in pay, the union and its members have some careful thinking to do.
Chances are that a large enough majority of members will be so offended by the government’s tactics that they will hold their noses and submit to the union’s call to down tools.
Finally, there are the kids and their parents, who are not the passive victims of yesteryear and, having found themselves the pawns in an endless political game, might react beyond minor expressions of annoyance.
Government took unto itself the responsibility for negotiating a settlement with the province’s teachers. The old joke about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” has been realized in the worst possible way.
What in the past had been a series of minor skirmishes has, with government control firmly established, escalated rapidly into a nasty and, in the view of some, mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners war, with public education a bloody battlefield.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
