B.C. teachers are dismissing Premier Christy Clark’s renewed push for a 10-year contract as a confusing and “facile” political tactic.
“It’s pretty superficial and shallow to put on the table a 10-year deal without addressing the conditions this premier has created in classrooms, schools and the teaching profession in the last 10 years,” said Susan Lambert, the outgoing president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.
Clark told her newly re-elected Liberal caucus Thursday they had a mandate from voters to, among other things, “find labour peace in our classrooms.”
Her government followed up with a letter Friday that said it would no longer negotiate a two-year contract with teachers, based on a co-operative gains mandate, and was instead redirecting efforts to achieve the Liberal re-election promise of a 10-year collective agreement.
“This commitment has the potential to significantly affect the present round of collective bargaining,” deputy education minister James Gorman wrote in a letter to the BCTF.
That’s “enormously disappointing,” Lambert said, adding she learned of the letter from the media Friday. She called it “dictatorial politics” that impose a political will on the bargaining table.
Clark’s long-term deal with teachers was first floated in January but dismissed at the time by the BCTF as an election ploy that could strip them of hard-fought legal rights to negotiate class size and composition.
“If teachers had agreed to that [deal] 10 years ago, they’d all be making more money today because they’ve lagged behind the average settlement for the public sector,” Clark told reporters on Thursday.
“We’re a long way away from getting a 10-year agreement, but if that’s where we get to, it would mean more money for teachers.”
The proposal includes indexing teacher salaries against wage increases received by other public-sector employees, such as nurses and college instructors. It would also create a $100-million fund to deal with class size, which could be spent by a council that includes teacher representatives.
But those terms weren’t repeated by Education Minister Don McRae in a meeting with the BCTF in February, Lambert said. McRae told her no government can commit to indexing wages or to incremental funding increases over 10 years, Lambert said. “I’m very perplexed as to what actually is behind this very facile proposal,” she said.
The teachers’ current two-year contract expires in June.
The BCTF and the government’s bargaining agent, the B.C. Public School Employers Association, agreed on a structure for contract talks in January that Lambert said has led to respectful negotiations.
Both sides had been scheduled to return to the bargaining table on Tuesday, but that was before the government changed the bargaining focus on Friday.
Lambert called on Clark to meet with teachers to explain the proposal.
— with a file from Canadian Press
