Retirees complicate college strike situation

RE: Treat part-time faculty fairly (Oct. 23)

Added to the part-time list of teaching faculty should be those instructors who are retirees from the teaching profession and who along with collecting a pension have been allowed to moonlight in the system they chose to retire from.

And these returnees do no favour to those new graduates who are trying to enter the teaching profession on a full-time basis. If the education system seeks to lower the expenditure of teacher costs by employing part-timers to which they owe no additional benefits, then those who possess a professional certificate together with many years of teaching experience should rightly and fairly be paid journeyman wages. If this is actually the case it is a false economic advantage, because newly hired full-time personnel would not make close to the same income as a senior educator, even with supplementary benefits included.

Then again, the same should apply to those teachers who are solely part-time employees and not former ones who have retired from teaching. The framework of equal pay for equal work along with parity of performance ought to be of contractual agreement and further upheld within the provisions of Bill 148. Most particularly if they happen to be temporary personnel serving a term of preentry to a full-time employment in the offing. Frank L. Gallo, Ancaster