It’s not all quiet on the labour front for province’s 46,000 teachers

Getting educators to agree to another salary freeze won’t be an easy task

One week ago, Joe Ceci issued a news release that had the finance minister sounding pretty pleased with himself.

The government had reached a tentative agreement with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees representing 23,000 government workers.

As Ceci pointed out, the government was on track to work out deals with all governmentpaid workers.

“Of the six major provincial public sector contracts, in addition to the tentative agreement with the AUPE, three others — with the Alberta Teachers’ Association, Health Sciences Association of Alberta, and the United Nurses of Alberta — have been ratified,” said Ceci. “Negotiations continue in the two remaining contracts, which both cover AUPE members who work in Alberta Health Services.”

While reading that you get the impression three of the big six contracts are safely tucked away, one is in the hopper and two more are on the way.

It’s labour peace in our time. But what Ceci doesn’t mention is that the contract covering 46,000 teachers is about to expire. Next week, to be precise.

While the other unions negotiated three-year contracts that expire in 2020, the teachers signed a two-year deal that runs from Sept. 1, 2016 to Aug. 31, 2018.

They’re about to start negotiations for a new contract.

This is important because the deals worked out so far include some form of wage freeze or a zero per cent increase in salaries.

(Details of the new tentative AUPE deal won’t be released until workers see the agreement for themselves and can vote on it sometime in the next few weeks. The government won’t say anything either, other than it has “already signed common sense agreements with no pay increases and job security.” No pay increase is the new normal in exchange, it seems, for job security.)

The government, to demonstrate fiscal prudence to the public when dealing with government-friendly unions, is desperate to get the Big Six to all agree to a wage freeze of some sort in time for the next election.

That’s still possible. The newest tentative deal could be ratified within a few weeks and the two AUPE locals still negotiating with Alberta Health Services could finally work out a deal after months of gruelling talks. Then there’s the ATA.

The teachers’ union is heading into a brand new round of negotiations in September.

If the talks take as long as the last round, the two sides won’t have a tentative deal until April, right in time for the 2019 provincial election campaign.

Getting teachers to agree to another salary freeze won’t be easy.

“Teachers for the last six years have had five years of zero increase,” said ATA spokesperson Sandra Johnston in an interview Wednesday. “Teachers have taken their zeros, they have taken five of them, and the sense we are getting from our members is they are done with that.”

Does it make any difference to teachers that Alberta is headed toward an election and the NDP, arguably friendlier to teachers than, say, the United Conservative Party, is in trouble politically?

“Bargaining has to occur,” said Johnston. “We have an obligation to members; politics does not change that obligation.”

Johnston understandably said she has no idea how long negotiations could take or whether they’d bump up against the provincial election.

But these things are not known for breaking any speed limits.

Under a new system introduced by the NDP in 2015, teachers, school boards and the government negotiate in a “twotable” bargaining model.

“Big ” issues that affect all teachers and boards — salaries, for example — are negotiated at a central provincial table to get one contract covering everyone.

“Smaller” issues — mileage for substitute teachers in rural areas, for example — are negotiated at a local table between individual boards and their union counterparts.

It looks logical. But Johnston points out a troublesome reality. While the one “big” issues table worked out the provincewide contract that was signed on Sept. 1, 2016 (and expires next week), 15 out of the 61 locals dealing with “small” issues have still not settled. Many are in rural areas. They are, in effect, two years behind.

“There will be agreements in the fall but others may in fact take a while,” said Johnston. “We’ve been told by one of them that the employer can’t meet until December.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that teachers are about to walk off the job.

But it does seem the public sector labour front isn’t as peaceful as Joe Ceci might make it look.