Education labour pains in Ontario
They’re counting on history of government weakness
When it comes to education labour negotiations, it’s time admit that what we do in Ontario just doesn’t work, and hasn’t for years.
Previous negotiations have produced top salaries of more than $90,000 for teachers, reduced in-class time and preserved a job description that doesn’t include meeting parents, filling out proper report cards or helping with extracurricular activities. The unions have even succeeded in interfering with hiring, establishing the concept of seniority before a person even starts work. An effort to control teacher salaries with a legislated wage freeze in 2012 infuriated the unions. The government ultimately withdrew the legislation and gave angry teachers $468 million in voluntary concessions.
And now, here we go again. In other parts of Ontario, 67,000 secondary school students are without classes due to a full strike by their teachers. A further 817,000 public elementary students will be affected if their teachers’ work to rule begins Monday, as threatened. The elementary action will be the first to affect Ottawa, but the secondary school union has said Ottawa is on the hit list as it rolls out its strike at a pace of one board a week.
Ontario’s public school boards have asked the province to negotiate three changes in the current contracts, all of them eminently reasonable and in the public interest. All three also are attempts to fix previous government giveaways.
The boards want a little flexibility in administering the cap on class sizes in secondary schools. If a class is one or two students over the limit, they want to live with that, rather than create two smaller classes. Boards can afford a limited number of teachers. If they have to split one slightly larger class in two, it means they have to cancel some other class, reducing student choice.
The boards also want an end to the foolish hiring rule that the province agreed to, which makes it hard to give jobs to the best new teachers. Instead, jobs must go to those who have waited around longest. That’s just silly, and doesn’t benefit union members at all.
Finally, the boards want teachers to contribute a little more supervision time in the halls and the schoolyard. In any normal contract, that would just be part of the job.
When it comes to negotiations over money, the province has talked a good game, but it’s in a weak position.
The government says it is not willing to spend any new money on education raises. In fact, the government’s plan to balance its books over three years relies on freezing education spending for the next two years. With declining enrolment, that’s actually not a great trick, but rising labour costs would make it impossible to freeze spending and preserve programs.
The government has given itself some wiggle room by talking about “net zero” contracts, in which teachers could get higher pay in exchange for some other concessions. Unfortunately, the word concession is not in the union dictionary. Or, if it is, it’s defined as “what the government gives us at contract time.”
The government could legislate an end to the strikes, but after the blowback the last time it tried to get tough with teachers, it will be reluctant to do it again.
No doubt, the unions are counting on that weakness. They are also counting on the fact that no one knows better than this provincial government how effective teaching unions can be when it comes to election time.
Notwithstanding that, the government’s job now is to remind teachers’ unions that they represent employees, and that’s it. The unions shouldn’t run the schools, and they certainly shouldn’t run the government.
That’s what should happen, but it’s not clear what the government’s end game is, if it has one.