The Tralfamadorians have a saying.
Those are the science-fiction characters from Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five and they say "so it goes" constantly, in resignation for all of life's trials and tribulations, both major and minor, that affect them all in a dramatic way but is beyond their control to change.
And so it goes with the teachers strike.
Even at the beginning of this current dispute back in the spring, there were only a handful of people in government and in the union with the power to influence the outcome. With all due respect to the letter writers asking Mike Morris and Shirley Bond to do something, those two MLAs have as much sway in this dispute as Tina Cousins does in her role with the Prince George District Teachers Association. Even though Bond is a cabinet minister and former education minister, the government side of the dispute is being decided in the premier's office with education minister Peter Fassbender and finance minister Mike de Jong at the table, no doubt. Meanwhile, Cousins has little influence over what BCTF boss Jim Iker and the members of the bargaining committee decide.
So it goes.
Yet even the power players are losing control of this fight. If Iker and his team thought the Liberal government would listen to a combination of reason, public anger, court rulings and a good old-fashioned work stoppage, they were sadly mistaken. Meanwhile, if Christy Clark and her team thought $40 a day to parents, reason, public anger, agreements with other public sector unions and vague threats about taxes and deficits would bring the teachers to heel, they also were mistaken. As a result, both sides have become so entrenched in their positions that even veteran mediator Vince Ready can't see a way forward. Neither the teachers nor the Liberals want to be the side that blinks first.
So it goes.
Meanwhile, school-aged children in B.C. have just finished their third month of no school, otherwise known as The Glorious Summer That Has No End. The high school kids are taking extra shifts at work and laughing all the way to the bank. Even the ones without formal jobs have found work tending to younger kids in the neighbourhood for parents who couldn't make other arrangements. The younger children are putting extra miles on their bikes and skateboards. The ones that miss their teachers are riding down to the picket line at their neighbourhood school to say hi. The foreign exchange students are trying to work on their English outside of the classroom. They're all missing school, but as the great line goes from Office Space, some of them would say they're not really missing it at all.
So it goes.
For teachers, this has gone beyond fighting the good fight out of principle for what's fair, what's best for the kids and what they're entitled to. With no strike pay, this has become a major financial hardship. Not many people could afford four weeks of unpaid leave with no end in sight. No agreement will ever give them back the income they've lost on the picket line so far and the patience of banks, mortgage companies and credit card providers only goes so far. Whenever the settlement comes, it will likely be a lean Christmas for families with public-sector teachers and that will have an impact on retailers, large and small. And at what point do school districts decide that a two-week Christmas break is too long and decide they can only break between Christmas and New Year's if they want to still finish the school year at the end of next June?
So it goes.
The teachers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday that they would settle for binding arbitration, knowing full well the government never will. As the Vancouver Sun's Vaughn Palmer wrote this week, the Liberal government got taken to the cleaners to the tune of $400 million when it went to binding arbitration with the doctors. The teachers are willing to take their chances but the Liberals are not. Meanwhile, the legal bills continue to pile up on both sides as more court challenges and appeals are in the works. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson put it succinctly when he wrote that Western society no longer operates by the rule of law but by the rule of lawyers. That means that even when the teachers go back to work and students go back to school, it won't be over. The fight will rage on.
So it goes.
