It’s curious how little the details matter, after months of agonizing about every comma that’s on the table in the teachers’ negotiations.
Everything pales in comparison to the fact that there’s a tentative deal that will likely end the strike.
It happens in nearly all high-profile disputes. They run for weeks or months and seize more and more of the public’s attention. The media dive deep into every facet of the talks and details start piling up about what each side wants and how far apart they are.
Then the crisis abates. It always does, eventually. A deal is reached and the wave of relief that accompanies it washes away much of the curiosity about who won what.
B.C. Ferries got to the brink of a shutdown 11 years ago and negotiations were in full crisis mode, with a round-the-clock media watch just like the one this week. Mediator Vince Ready worked his magic and the crisis dissipated, along with most of the public interest in the details.
Teachers were again at an impasse in 2012 with little hope of a deal when mediator Charles Jago helped pull off a miracle to get a deal. The crisis went away and so did the public attention to the deal (until the government’s tactics were condemned in court 18 months later).
Schools are going to reopen next week. That’s all that counts.
There will be some scorekeeping in the next few days as more details come out about the tentative deal reached Tuesday. But apart from the parties themselves, it will mostly interest just the hard-core followers of the battle. The War of 2013-14 had so many different fronts, it’s hard to keep track of them all. That’s obviously why it lasted so long.
And when it comes to settling up at the end of the day, it’s also why it will be hard to score the wins and losses.
Once the pressure built toward a settlement, sizable amounts of money could be shuffled back and forth between the class-size issue, the class-composition argument, the wages and benefits package and the grudge match over the Supreme Court rulings.
Early outlines suggest that moving that money around under Ready’s expert guidance got it done.
The teachers’ straight salary package looks as if it was reduced from the original demand to something pretty close to the going rate for the public sector. The government will claim that as a win.
And it appears the funding to address class size and composition has been bulked up enough for the B.C. Teachers’ Federation to claim a victory.
So the government can claim it avoided the prospect of inflating upcoming public-sector deals and breaking the budget by holding the teachers to the going rate. All the extra costs can be labelled as policy spending on education improvements, separate from wage negotiations.
The union can cite some increased spending on learning conditions as the benefit they were looking for all along. And the grudges over the Supreme Court findings that the government cheated are settled with a huge one-time payout that eliminates tens of thousands of potential grievances going back 12 years. That’s a substantial hit, in the $100-million range, but it heads off even higher potential costs.
The swapping was obviously the route to a solution all along, but it looked a lot easier in theory than it was to execute.
The one lingering concern is whether this overall deal will make any difference on one of the core problems in the schools. That’s the increasing number of damaged, challenged or underperforming children who not only aren’t getting the help they need, but are bleeding away the attention that other students need.
“Composition” is the euphemistic shorthand phrase used to outline that dilemma.
It’s a shame that the most sensitive issue of all in education has become so wrapped up in labour negotiations that everyone else is either shut out from discussing it, or has to pick sides if they want to contribute anything. The next five years are a chance to talk about it.
