This has been both a very difficult week and a most extraordinary week. I love the beginning of school. I always have. My mom and dad had a wonderful tradition of putting a new outfit at the bottom of my bed on the day before the first day of school. Every year I would show up to my first class wearing something new. The clothes were never fancy or expensive. My mom would scour the sales racks and find me something funky that fit my personality. My favourite outfit was an orange and brown dress.
Now, as a university professor, I still get excited for the first week of school. Meeting the first year students and greeting former students is the highlight of the year - except for the day when I get to say their name as they cross the UNBC convocation stage. It is not just that the outfits are new and that the backpacks are clean, it is the air of promise and challenge and excitement. It is the hope that you might light a fire in a student's life and that you might shape their citizenship.
At the same time as I was singing at this year's university orientation pep rally I was lamenting that my daughter's new outfit would not be worn this week - maybe not next week or the week after either.
There have been a lot of articles about the dispute that befalls B.C. right now. I'm not calling this impasse a "the teachers' strike" because this expression puts too much emphasis, and I think blame, on the teachers. The teachers may be on the picket lines but this is not a teachers strike. The current dispute is a public sector labour dispute. The central question in the dispute is really about the right to bargain.
A core issue in this dispute is that the government is asking the BCTF to wait for an appeal to be heard on two court rulings by the B.C. Supreme Court. As the CBC reported: "the B.C. Supreme Court concluded in two separate rulings, that the right to... [address class size and composition] in collective bargaining has been illegally stripped from earlier contracts." It is simply not clear why the union should be expected to wait for any further ruling on this matter. The right to bargain over these issues is central to the right to bargain at all.
Without doubt there has been a shift in politics over the last twenty to thirty years that has pitted the public service against the taxpayer. The language of austerity has shaped most of the discussions about social investment. CTV reported on Thursday that Christy Clark said: "...her government will "stand firm" until negotiators settle an agreement that's fair both to the teachers and the taxpayers." This language suggests that these two groups are the groups at odds but teachers are taxpayers and taxpayers gain from the social investment that is education. It seems to me this point is getting lost in the dispute. This came home to me in an editorial in Maclean's Magazine in August that suggested that the B.C. government's $40 a day strategy might be a "shrewd negotiating tactic" because it will compensate the taxpayer for the loss of an essential service. The editor then goes on to say this: "Further, if directing savings from public sector strikes to taxpayers' pockets proves successful in prompting a reasonable settlement in B.C., perhaps it could become a useful template for labour negotiations in other circumstances, as well. Consider, for example, a municipal garbage strike where taxpayers are compensated for hauling their own waste to the dump. Not only does this redress the hardships caused by public sector strikes, but it provides a handy reminder that it's taxpayers who foot the bill for these contracts in the first place."
And there it is... in this view the assumption is that all public sector workers do is replace your labour. But, teachers do far more than replace labour. They provide a public service that is core to the development of civil society. In my opinion, anyone who thinks that $40 a day will pay for the priceless benefit we get from well-educated citizens has completely missed the point of this dispute.
