Like marriage and the tango, it takes two parties to agree to a union contract: the employer and the employee, or at least the employee’s representative. Like marriage and the tango, it is likely that at least one of the partners to the agreement really did not understand what they were getting into when the music started.
It is a bit late now for trustees on the board of education in Victoria to say that the contract to which they agreed turns out not to be to the advantage of the children and parents they represent.
School district officials say substitute teachers have been using a “loophole” that allows them to win temporary postings and then work only a few weeks before going on leave. In some cases, they have gone on leave before the job even starts.
Teachers get benefits, accumulate seniority and receive a “top-up” on their employment insurance to full pay while on leave, but students can sometimes suffer when multiple teachers rotate through a classroom, the district says.
Yet the district admits that the issue first surfaced in 2007, and now it finds as many as a dozen examples each year. Which raises the question about how the problem became common enough to cause situations in which several teachers can revolve through a classroom in a single year.
Even if these folks are the best teachers available, they will inevitably bring with them different styles of instruction and different expectations regarding student performance, which must be mind-numbingly confusing for the kids.
But of course the kids were not at the bargaining table and neither were their parents. The people parents elected to represent themselves and the kids were there, however, and those representatives, the trustees, agreed to this contract.
Bear in mind that teacher unionization was not the teachers’ idea in the first place: It was the Bill Vander Zalm government’s Bills 19 and 20 in 1987 that finally accomplished that.
And those different values and interests really come to light when we consider the snowballing impact of the myriad of leave provisions, terms of temporary employment, and posting and filling arrangements that successions of boards of education all over the province have agreed to since the first contracts were established after 1987.
The Bill Bennett government in 1983 had pushed the teachers right over the edge with a particularly offensive piece of legislation, Bill 3, which allowed for the dismissal of public employees, including teachers, without cause.
Even though that legislation no longer exists, it was the beginning of the end for the relationship among successive governments, ministers of education too numerous to mention and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, which has always known who it was and what its job was: To protect and enhance conditions for its members.
The BCTF has done a remarkable job of ensuring that something like Bill 3 never happened again. Since that time, it has been a game where a motivated, disciplined, single-minded provincial team, the BCTF, has time and time again cleaned up local pickup teams — the community school boards — all in the interests of union membership.
None of this is to diminish the job being done by B.C.’s teachers every day in their classrooms. The majority of public-school teachers focus on what they can do for the kids in their classrooms, and most have never paid close attention to the benefits established in their contracts. Many teachers would be stuck for a quick answer about the specifics of class size and composition provisions, leave allowances or exactly what they earn.
It is the job of union reps to know all that, and in my experience they do a good job.
Which leads me to ask how many trustees, not just in Victoria but in any district, know what is in the collective agreement they or their predecessors signed.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
