If anyone still subscribes to the quaint notion “conservative” governments are somehow better at managing the complex financial machinery of government than more progressive ones, they might want to reconsider in light of yesterday’s vote by more than 43,000 public, Catholic and francophone schoolteachers to reject the province’s latest contract offer.
The overwhelming result: 89.5 per cent of the teachers voting rejecting the proposal. Only 10.5 per cent voted to accept it.
As a result, a province-wide teachers’ strike potentially impacting more than 700,000 students at 2,500 schools seems all but inevitable by next Monday.
Moreover, it’s extremely hard to imagine the government, which has dug itself into a bargaining position clearly rejected by rank-and-file teachers, finding a way to cough up the pay increases members of the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) obviously require.
As ATA President Jason Schilling said in a press release, “The proposed agreement failed to meet the needs of teachers, failed to improve student classroom conditions in a concrete and meaningful way, and failed to show teachers the respect they deserve.”
“By rejecting this agreement, teachers have signalled that classroom complexities have not been adequately addressed and an increase of 12 per cent is insufficient,” the ATA news release went on to say. “Over the last decade, teachers have received a total salary increase of less than six per cent, while being promised that they would be fairly compensated in their next collective agreement.”
Try as they surely will to put the blame this entirely on the union, Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) obviously hasn’t got a handle on how to successfully negotiate with restive public sector unions, and the impact of the vote is almost certain to have serious consequences for thousands of families and students.
While the government employs competent negotiators, constant political meddling in the process by the UCP through its legislated secret negotiating mandates, general under-funding of public education, trying to get teachers to pay in their contract for basic classroom needs, and constant disrespect for teachers and other education workers have all contributed to the situation in which the province now finds itself.
It is a historical fact that that the NDP government of former premier Rachel Notley successfully negotiated a much less generous agreement with ATA members and other public-sector unions. Teachers and other unionized public employees are well aware of that and determined it will never happen again, including with any future NDP government, but it does make it difficult for the UCP to blame Notley’s government for its troubles, as it is inclined to do.
What are they supposed to say? That the NDP had no business being better at bargaining tough contracts than they are? Well, Alberta Conservatives have said stuff this dumb before, so you can’t rule that out entirely.
“This is the second time teachers have rejected a potential settlement that provided what their union said teachers wanted in response to growing classroom complexities,” Finance Minister Nate Horner said in a statement this evening.
“With two failed ratification votes, I am left questioning whether the union fully understands what their members are seeking,” Horner’s statement continued. “If teachers did not want this deal, then why was it proposed by the ATA in the first place?”
Well, he may have a point there. Last May, the ATA’s Provincial Executive Council voted to recommend the union’s members accept a mediator’s report that also recommended a 12-per-cent pay increase over four years and “a government commitment of more than $400 million in classroom improvements which would have started this fall.”
That was rejected by more than 62 per cent of the teachers who voted, suggesting a mood of impatience and militance similar to that seen in other Canadian unions in recent months. Today’s rejection of a revised agreement surely confirms that teachers want their union to focus on their pay, and not, as Schilling put it, “to bargain for basic classroom needs, which is both inappropriate and embarrassing.”
Horner went on to say, a little too cutely: “I encourage the ATA’s leadership to take time to meet with their members and gain clarity on what teachers are seeking out of a deal.”
His problem now, of course, is that there’s no way either the government or the ATA’s leadership can say in light of what’s just happened that they don’t understand exactly what teachers want.
They want to be paid significantly more money than the government is willing to part with, dammit, and what happens next is what’s known as being caught between a rock and a hard place. Only in this case, it’s parents and students who are going to get squeezed.
The influential extremist fringe of the UCP – of which Horner is pretty clearly not a part, although his boss the premier certainly leans that way – will naturally demand harsh and arbitrary measures to end the possibility of a strike.
The problem with that, as the grownups in the room will understand, is that instead of fighting one union with a track record of trying to reach a deal its members could live with, it would in effect have to deal with a multitude of uncooperative mostly conservative lawyers hired by a significant number of the province’s 51,000 teachers. No way that’s going to cost less!
Plus, of course, there are multitude of ways unhappy teachers forced back to work without a satisfactory settlement can and will passively resist an authoritarian government’s commands.
