COOLING OFF BEST WAY TO SOLVE DISPUTE
The provincial government has crafted useful legislation that should salvage the school year for students while allowing teachers to continue to try to achieve a negotiated contract with the help of a mediator.
The legislation imposes a coolingoff period until the end of August, at which point, in theory, the B. C. Teachers’ Federation will again be in a position to resume job action. But Education Minister George Abbott made it clear Tuesday that the government will not tolerate another school year being disrupted as this one has been. A posture, we believe, most parents will agree with.
That means the window for achieving a negotiated settlement will close when the cooling- off period ends, with the expectation that the legislature will be called back in August to impose a new labour contract.
That would be a shame, even though the history of negotiations between the BCTF and both NDP and Liberal governments suggests that this latest round, like all but one of the previous negotiations since the move to provincewide bargaining on monetary issues, will end in failure.
It’s a shame because even though the government has rightly made it clear that it cannot be moved off its net- zero mandate on wages, there are still goals that the teachers can achieve, including some improvement on wages, if the BCTF is willing to bargain creatively, as other unions have done.
After a year of negotiations and six months of job actions, both the union and the government recognized that no progress was being achieved. The strike vote now underway by the BCTF, along with the decision rendered Tuesday by the Labour Relations Board that the teachers can strike for three consecutive days ( with two days’ notice), illustrates how an escalation has the potential to drag students and their families further into this dispute.
So the cooling- off period mandated by the government bill is fully in order. It is possible, however, that because of the time it takes to enact legislation, teachers will be in a position to strike for a few days next week.
Such an action will accomplish nothing, other than to make it more difficult for students and impose hardship on parents. The way forward is now known and we hope the teachers can instead focus on making the most out of what we recognize many will see as a bad situation.
This round of bargaining has been overshadowed by the government’s net- zero wage mandate, which Abbott has described as carved in stone. It must be non- negotiable, not just because of the state of the province’s finances, but because other public sector unions have achieved agreements with the assurance that no other group would get better treatment.
Net zero is an obstacle to reaching an agreement, but it also has beneficial aspects that should be revived in future years when the government is flush enough to be able to offer a general raise.
The bad side is that the zero part of the mandate reflects a boom- andbust bargaining strategy, under which the government is able to buy labour peace with generous contracts in good years and slams down the lid when times are a little tougher.
The public sector unions rightly point out that while wage gains in the private sector have been suppressed by the sluggish economy, they have seldom been zero. What we need in the longer term is a workable private sector comparator that over time chips away at the perception that public sector workers are overpaid compared to people in the private sector, while still allowing for some negotiation on wages.
At the same time, the advantage of the net concept needs to be retained: It provides a mechanism to fully engage unions in the process of finding smarter ways to work by offering a financial incentive to workers for costsaving measures they can identify.
Teachers now have the opportunity to take another crack at achieving benefits for themselves through this process. If they choose instead to insist they have to be treated differently than all of the other public servants in British Columbia, that opportunity will be squandered and the long sorry history of failure will add another chapter — with no different conclusion.