Teachers diss decade deal discussion

Ten years of labour peace?

For B.C. teachers who have struggled through a prolonged history of difficult contract negotiations with the provincial government , that would seem a dream come true.

But according to Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers Federation, the structural plan of a 10-year contract, as discussed Thursday by Premier Christy Clark, is another attempt by the government to limit the constitutional rights of teachers to bargain and is doomed to fail.

"The premier's plan is flawed in a number of significant ways," said Lambert.

"The key problem is that it ignores the ruling of the B.C. Supreme Court that teachers have the right to bargain working conditions, such as class size and class composition. The Liberals' own Bill 22 also allows for these issues to be negotiated in this round but her new plan requires teachers to give up this hard-won right."

Lambert claims the student-to-teacher ratio in B.C. is the worst in Canada and that the province would need to hire 6,800 new teachers just to bring that ratio up the national average. She says Clark's proposal does nothing to address that inequity.

"Over the past decade, when Liberal policy regulated learning conditions, class sizes grew and support for students with special needs suffered," Lambert said.

She said Clark's proposal to tie teacher salary increases to average increases given to other public sector unions over the life of a 10-year deal would take that bargaining right away from teachers and would give the government all the power it needs to limit salary gains.

"When you do that, the government is in absolute control of the compensation package, there is no bargaining," said Lambert.

"Government, for the last several years, has had a net-zero mandate and the average of zero is zero, and now they have a co-operative gains mandate, which is another name for net-zero, and the average of that is zero."

The BCTF will discuss the 10-year proposal when it hosts a representative assembly of 300 teachers this weekend in Vancouver. Lambert questioned the timing of Clark's announcement on Thursday, the day before teachers gather to discuss whether to endorse a framework agreement with the B.C. Public School Employers' Association, and said that could scuttle the agreement.

Designed to improve bargaining structures, the agreement would pave the way for a mutually agreed-upon facilitator to get involved in teacher negotiations to help settle any disputes. It also would mean non-cost items like job postings, seniority issues, and layoff/recall policies would be bargained locally by school boards, rather than in provincial bargaining. The agreement would also get bargaining started on Feb. 4, a month before the March 1 mandated date, and would give the BCTF a role in estimating contract costs.

"We're recommending ratification to our members this weekend," said Lambert. "I'm saddened that the government, with its announcement [Thursday] has interfered with that process but we are going to continue to engage in the bargaining process with BCPSEA and we hope they will ratify the deal as well."

In September, the BCTF will fight in B.C. Supreme Court to reinstate provisions on classroom composition, which under the previous contract provided additional instructional help for teachers with more than three students whose learning disabilities require individual education plans. The union will also push for reductions on upper limits of class sizes. Those provisions were stripped from the teachers' contract in 2002. The government's action was ruled unconstitutional in April 2011, but those same provisions were written out of the current two-year contract, which expires on June 30.

Prince George District Teachers Association president Matt Peace said B.C. teachers have long memories and remember Clark was the education minister in 2002 when their contract was stripped. Considering the long history of difficult labour negotiations with teachers over the past two decades, Pearce says there's no way teachers will want to negotiate a 10-year deal.

"Relationships are built on trust and you would be hard-pressed to find someone who teachers have less trust with than Premier Christy Clark," said Pearce. "This whole thing started with legislation she brought and passed and stripped our contract, which later was proved illegal that still hasn't been addressed. For her to come to us and talk about building a 10-year trusting relationship based on mutual respect is very difficult to take seriously."

Pearce says B.C. teachers salaries have consistently ranked as the lowest in Western Canada for the past decade and predicts there would be very little support from teachers to lock that offer in for the next decade.