Thursday's government announcement of pending legislation to force a collective bargaining agreement has angered local teachers.
And Matt Pearce, president of the Prince George Teachers Association, would not rule out the possibility of teachers walking off the job in retaliation.
"I'm not going to guess what the membership will do, but one of the options is not to work under an imposed agreement," Pearce said. "I've never seen the teachers as angry as they are right now. We really feel it has been a deceitful and rigged process from the very
beginning."
The province's 41,000 teachers have been working without a contract since the end of June and their job action is now heading into its seventh month. Pearce said similar actions by the government in October 2005, when the Liberals tried to force a settlement with the Teachers' Collective Agreement Act, resulted in a full-blown strike. Given the current state of negotiations, he said teachers might choose that course of action again.
"We've seen this as part of the entire strategy from the government from the get-go," said Pearce. "They have clearly never intended to bargain with us in good faith and they believe they have the circumstances that allow them to interfere with our Charter right to freedom of association. We will certainly be testing that in court and I'm sure the government will be spending millions of dollars to defend what they are about to do.
"Legislation is going to cause years of dysfunction with teachers deciding to withdraw some of the things they do for the school community."
Richard Giroday, a math/physics teacher at the Centre for Learning Alternatives, said teachers won't make a decisions on whether to take up picket signs until terms of the legislated contract become clear.
"When governments enact illegal legislation, what other recourse do you have left?" asked Giroday.
"There are lots of people pounding the table saying we should walk off and shut everything down, but there are other options. We've asked for a mediator to bring the two sides together on common ground or take it a step up to
binding arbitration.
"There is case law that's been established that you can't just take away people's bargaining rights or strip contracts. I think we'll have to look at the legislation they're going to put on the table and ask if it's another violation of our rights."
Teachers are planning a province-wide escalation of their current stance against the government on a provincial day of action on Monday. The PGDTA is urging all its members to show up for work that day just before the morning bell and leave their classes in the afternoon when students are dismissed for the day. Teachers are also planning lunch hour meetings and will gather in front of their schools for after-school demonstrations.
"It's not a withdrawal of services; what we're going to do is more like what a work-to-rule situation would look like," said Pearce. "The teachers are going to be working a bell-to-bell day, they'll meet at lunch, and it will be a day of unity for the teachers.
"Teachers have been there early and leaving late, just as they have always done to make sure their services are always in place for the kids and that's not been respected by our employer, the government. They don't care one bit that our job action was protecting kids and parents and we haven't seen any positive outcomes from the job action taking that form."
