With 41,000 teachers from 60 school districts all working without a contract, and no end to stalled negotiations in sight, it's no wonder Prince George District Teachers Association president Matt Pearce is thinking back to the old days when each district settled its own contract with the province.
That ended in 1992 when contract negotiations for B.C. teachers became a province-wide collective effort that produced one contract. Two years later, the Public Sector Labour Relations Act established the B.C. Teachers Federation as the bargaining agent for teachers and the B.C. Public School Employers' Association as the bargaining representative of school trustees.
Pearce has no problem with the provincial-level approach to settle big-budget items like salaries, benefits, class size or class composition.
But he's convinced localized solutions would be better to the solve some of the 700 smaller contract issues now on the provincial bargaining table.
One example of that is the winter weather proposal the PGDTA has put together. If passed, the contract would not dock teachers' pay if they fail to reach their school due to a snowstorm that forces RCMP to close a highway that is on that teacher's route to work.
"We could sit down with our local board and say, 'how often is the highway completely closed and do you want to force your teachers on to dangerous highways when the schools are empty because students don't go,' but we can't," said Pearce.
"Our local employer wouldn't even discuss that with us because they're barred from doing so by the provincial association. They can't even talk with us, and that's the state of the situation."
