Support staff at Pearson schools to walk off job
There is a lot of talk in the media about teachers and specialists, but the fact is, you can’t run a school without support staff. ANITA NENADOVICH
Support staff for the Lester B. Pearson School Board will walk off the job on a one-day strike Nov. 4. The action will shut all Pearson schools.
“Our reason for striking is twofold,” support-staff union president Anita Nenadovich said. “We want to show our solidarity with our teaching colleagues and the common front (of public-sector employees), and we want to send a message that negotiations have to accelerate.”
Nenadovich is head of the Independent Association of Support Staff of the Lester B. Pearson School Board. The 1,600-member union works in partnership with support staff from the Western Quebec School Board and negotiates its contract separately from the teachers’ unions. The IASS has been without a contract since April and negotiations began in January.
The so-called common front of around 400,000 public-sector employees began a series of rotating strikes throughout the province Oct. 26. The Pearson Teachers’ Union took to the picket lines Oct. 29 and have five more mandated strike days, each to be announced one week before the action.
If teachers and academic specialists are the machine that powers a school, then support staff are the oil that greases that machine. The list of classifications under the umbrella title “support staff” is long, reaching beyond the front-line office staff to include daycare educators, IT technicians, integration aides, student lunch supervisors and social-work, laboratory, foodmanagement, documentation and school-organization technicians.
“There are so many components involved in keeping the education of students moving forward,” Nenadovich said. “There is a lot of talk in the media about teachers and specialists, but the fact is, you can’t run a school without support staff.”
On Oct. 13, the IASS was in a legal position to strike. Seventy-four per cent of its members voted in favour of two non-consecutive strike days.
Nenadovich said the second strike day will be used if negotiations continue to skirt important issues, which include pay, pension, working conditions and social-security issues like health insurance payments.
Support staff have been offered the same wage increase as teachers — three-per-cent over five years — an offer Nenadovich described as “insulting.” Support staff, like the teachers, are asking for a 13.5-percent salary increase over three years.
The wage offer is not the only sticking point. The Liberal government would also like to increase the age at which a public-sector worker can begin collecting full pension benefits by two years, to 62.
Nenadovich said IASS negotiations with the government have not broken down, but that decisions need to be made at the Treasury Board level to really move contract talks forward.