Unresolved issues may lead to Alberta teacher job action

CALGARY Some Alberta teachers could soon be in a position to pare back services or walk off the job for the first time in a decade.

More than two years after their last contracts expired, teachers working at 16 Alberta school districts have yet to reach agreements on local issues with their school boards.

Although mediators are now working to settle many of these differences, Alberta Teachers’ Association teacher welfare co-ordinator Sandra Johnston said discussions are headed for an impasse in some school districts.

Teachers working at 45 Alberta school boards have reached agreements with their school boards on local issues such as professional development, leave provisions, and substitute teachers’ rights, she said.

While teachers at the province’s four largest boards in Edmonton and Calgary have struck local agreements, others are far from a deal, she said. Among them are Calgary-area Rocky View Public Schools — Alberta’s fifth most populous district — and Red Deer Catholic Schools.

“A lot of them are angry,” Johnston said. “When they see that 45 (districts) settled and that improvements were made … something in their world is a little bit better.”

Complicating matters is a twotable bargaining model for teachers that took effect in 2016. The teachers’ association bargains issues like salary and benefits at a provincial table, and smaller cost items with their local school boards.

The two-year provincial agreement struck in April 2017 expired on Aug. 31, 2018, and the next round of provincial bargaining is underway.

Alberta teachers haven’t walked off the job, or been locked out, since an acrimonious strike in 2002.

For about a decade, teachers and boards were bound by legal agreements not to strike or lock out employees, Johnston said. That’s no longer the case.

Before teachers take any job action, mediation would have to fail, and teachers would have to wait for a two-week cooling off period before taking a strike vote.

FRENCH OR ENGLISH?

In one case, teachers and a school board can’t agree on what language to bargain in.

Eric Cloutier, president of Unité Local Francophone, which represents teachers at Alberta’s four French school boards, said southern Alberta’s Conseil Scolaire Franco-Sud wants to bargain in English, and teachers want to bargain in French.

When the teachers refused to bargain in English, the board filed a complaint to the labour relations board, Cloutier said.

Bargaining in French is important to teachers because the collective agreement is written in French, and the language is an important part of their identity, he said.

The school district did not reply to requests for comment last week.

SCHEDULING CONFLICTS

In Red Deer, the Catholic board and teachers are also before the labour relations board seeking resolution to a disagreement about a provincial cap on the number of hours teachers should spend instructing students, Johnston said. It’s affecting the tone of local bargaining, she said.

Scheduling conflicts have slowed down bargaining, said Red Deer Catholic Schools’ secretary-treasurer Rod Steeves in an email last week.

The assignable and instructional time issue doesn’t affect local bargaining, he said.

“The two-tiered bargaining process is challenging because we are not provided with additional funding from the province for any ATA proposals,” he said.

In the St. Paul regional school division, talks stalled when the school board took an “unduly aggressive stance” to negotiations, Johnston said.

The board wanted to remove school principals from the bargaining unit, which she said can’t be done in a local agreement.

The provincial government maintains an arm’s-length relationship from bargaining between school boards and teachers, said a statement last week from the finance minister’s press secretary.