The BC Liberals need to end the teachers dispute – the sooner the better.

I’ll say it again. In the dispute with the BCTF, the BC Liberal government is in trouble. During negotiations, the Liberals’ unceasing public pronouncements front-end loaded the ideas of an “affordability zone” and a settlement “consistent with other public sector unions”. And they repeatedly bargained in the press. This strategy has painted negotiations into a corner. It is now hard for either party to bend without losing face.

And the narrative is bogus anyhow. Negotiations with the teachers can not really be compared to other public sector union negotiations. First of all, the teachers have not had a pay increase for 3 years. And second, the teachers’ situation is complicated by the government’s own twice-repeated charter violation coming back to bite it, as well as the ongoing underfunding of school districts, putting public education into full-on crisis mode. The situation has gotten so bad that the Vancouver School District, in order to be able to continue offering its world class band programs, has had to resort to the temporary measure of spending its contingency fund.

The Liberals want the teachers to give up millions of dollars in court-ordered restitution for charter violations, while getting nothing in return. They feel that they can flex their muscle and grind down the union on this issue. It won’t happen. Having won a stunning court victory, the teachers can claim moral high-ground. They will never give up their quest for compensation. And it’s not greed that motivates them, but a sense of outrage that is revisited every time they look at their class composition. The cuts have gone too deep.

No question, the Liberals can eventually wear the union down financially, and the teachers will have to go to work (though it’s likely that before this were to happen, other unions would weigh in on the Charter violation issue). How many lost school days it will take for this to happen is anyone’s guess. The government has an endless supply taxpayer funds that it can wield on legal appeals and on populist stunts (e.g. a $40 a-day daycare benefit for parents with children under 13). Meanwhile, the union has finite reserves of cash, and can’t last forever.

But to what end would the government do this? Eventually it will have to open schools. Eventually the teachers will have to give up their full walkout and go back to work. But the climate, which has already become acrimonious after 12 years of Liberal de-funding of schools, would become so terrible that it would be very difficult to sustain a vibrant school system. Failing to achieve a deal at the end of a full-scale walkout, the teachers would revert to a slow-burn work-to-rule paradigm which would disrupt school for a long time, and prevent the government from being able to implement systemic change. Without the cooperation of professionals, the government can not run an education system. The students would continue to lose out – big time.

It’s likely that many people would fault teachers for all this disruption, but teachers are well-informed and well-educated, and they have an acute sense of justice. They are not likely to be easily cowed by the opinion of people outside the dispute.

Right now in negotiations, the teachers are willing to compromise on some of the court-ordered compensation. Eventually, the full weight of the court decision will come down on government, and by extension on the citizens of BC. The Liberals would be wise to quietly settle while there is time for people to forget this mess before the next election. To drag it through a low scale job action and court appeals will ensure that the issues follow the Liberals well into the next election campaign.

Furthermore, the casualty count of this battle has already begun. Education workers should be getting paid, and they’re not. Students should be in school, and they’re not. 

 

 

When you really think about it, the BC Liberals are a mean-spirited bunch.

Lets review the way the government negotiates with teachers.

Before the provincial election of 2013, negotiations with the teachers were going well. There was a positive bargaining relationship at the table. Christy Clark campaigned on a promise of labour peace with the BCTF, suggesting a 10 year contract.

Then, in what really seemed like a miracle, she got elected. Suddenly she turned on the BCTF like the evil queen realizing Snow White is still alive. The bargaining agent that had previously worked a deal with the teachers was fired.

After months of fruitless talks the BCTF started a mild job action, one that did not affect students in any way. The only thing they would not do is meet with administrators or supervise the playground at recess. They still ran extracurricular events and field trips. They still met with parents, answered their emails, did all their prep and marking, ran clubs etc.

The government decided to turn up the heat and tried to cut health benefits to the teachers.

Then, without any explanation of why, they abandoned this tack. I suspect that their lawyers advised them that they would not be able to cut health benefits. Whose idea this was, I don’t know, but it was as mean-spirited as it was stupid. I’ve never heard of an employer pulling a stunt like that.

They needed to find another way to punish teachers, so they decided to “lock out” teachers, effectively turning them into babysitters as they were unable to do any of the things teachers need to do to run programs and evaluate properly, while docking their pay 10%.

Teachers would now no longer be able to participate in Grad ceremonies that they had fundraised for, nor would they be able to run field trips they had planned.

Then, not having anticipated the consequences of this lockout, they reached into their pockets where they keep the Labour Relations Board (LRB), and found a way to make letter grades for grade 12s essential, even though the two biggest universities in the province, UBC and SFU do not need final marks (their acceptance letters had already been sent out).

Next, they had the LRB deem provincial exams to be essential.

Then they found that grading said exams would be too onerous a task, so they took those “essential exams” and waived the essay sections of the Social Studies and English exams.

Then they deemed Grade 10 and 11 letter grades to be essential and gave teachers a day to try to craft some kind of mark for them, even after the lockout denied struggling students any opportunity to improve their marks, and denied teachers the ability to mark any significant work.

Teachers have done what unions do, withdrawing services in a strike, but far from trying for labour peace, the government has done everything it could to kill any good will that teachers might ever have, and have completely disrupted the lives of BC’s students.

And through all this, they want to deny the teachers what other unions have been given. (Their “pattern of settlement” neglects to mention that the teachers are on their third year of 0% increase, unlike other unions.).

But what’s worse, is they have tried to convince the public that the teachers don’t know what they’re talking about when they say they need smaller classes. Education Minister Fassbender, who has never been in a classroom, cites some nebulous research that focuses only on outcomes, and that has been roundly refuted in most modern research, while denying what is said by people who work in classrooms every day. The arrogance!

Teachers are doing a fine job maintaining a system that is collapsing from lack of funding. We’re like sailors running around trying to patch holes and bail water after our ship has been hit. So far we’ve kept it afloat, but it’s taking on water badly, and it’s not moving forward.

I don’t know how this labour dispute ends. I’m going to continue to fight until the government is either tossed out or the whole the system collapses. I don’t care any more. The government wants to get something for nothing out of education, using a failed U.S. model. They want to allow their corporate cronies to enjoy the lowest tax rate in Canada, while they leave the good people of the province with less and less.

The message is clear from this government. They have no respect for the public school system or the teachers who run it. There’s a difference between hard bargaining and humiliation. No other industry would do this to the union. No other industry has the endless supply of revenue that a government has. And there are consequences for other industries having employees who are bitter and resentful.

But this is our government. They will insult and offend a sector of 40,000 people. They don’t give a tinker’s damn about labour rights or labour peace, so long as they get to have fancy lunches with their corporate sponsors.

The Appeal Court will uphold the two ignored BC Supreme Court’s decisions against the government for ripping up teachers contracts, as will (eventually) the Supreme Court of Canada. But this government will continue to defy the law, challenging the electorate to stop them. Ethics-be damned. They’ll do it if they can get away with it. What can the courts do, really?

A government that doesn’t care about its people.

Can we now agree that the BCTF represents its members?

British Columbia’s teachers have made one thing clear: they are in solidarity with their union. Can we now, finally put to rest this notion that the BCTF does not represent its membership?

In the midst of an exhausting contract negotiation which has shown that the BC Liberal Government is more interested in destroying BC’s biggest union and privatizing schools than supporting public education, 86% of the teachers who voted have supported the union’s mandate for a full scale walkout in one of the biggest voter turnouts in the union’s history.

The more the government has tried to humiliate and harm teachers (Yes, “harm”: Docking pay by 10% is harm.), the more teachers have become galvanized in purpose. They know what they stand for. It’s time for respect.

Why I will vote ‘yes’ for escalating job action

On Monday, February 27, 2014, twelve years after BC Education Minister Christy Clark stood up in the BC Legislature and smugly proclaimed her pride in a new legislation which stripped hundreds of contract provisions from teachers, something amazing happened.

Wearing the biggest grin I’d ever seen, Mike L, the senior teacher on my staff, literally danced into my classroom and handed me a memo.

What you should know about Mike is that in 1998, he was on the local bargaining committee that chose to improve classroom conditions rather than take a salary increase. Mike is a helluva teacher and a helluva guy. But I digress.

The memo that Mike handed me announced that the BC Supreme Court had finally ruled on Bill 22, the BC Liberals’ most recent reiteration of the original contract stripping legislation from 2002. The court had recognized the government’s bad faith bargaining with teachers, and its violation of the Charter. The government was ordered to pay the teachers’ union $2 million in damages, and to set class size and composition levels in BC’s schools back to the levels identified in contract language in 2001 – the very language that Christy Clark had stripped all those years ago. Furthermore, the government was to make amends retroactively for all 12 years, and cover all the teachers’ legal bills. The wording of the ruling was very damning of the government’s behaviour.

For 12 years teachers had witnessed egregious cuts to education, suffered nasty labour disputes and goading from the Ministry, and endured apathy from the public, who didn’t seem to understand what the government was up to.

At last, we had been vindicated. We had won in court! It truly felt like surfacing after being lost in a dark underground maze. We stood there blinking in the light, dazzled by new hope. We all wore huge smiles. We high-fived. We hugged. We wept.

Of course the joy was short lived. The government announced almost immediately that it would appeal the decision, and we’d be back in court for who-knows-how long.

Fast forward five months, and we’re once again stalled in contract talks with a government who has been targeting public education for years.

But this time it’s different. Through social media, teachers have been able to dispel public apathy. We’ve been able to refute government talking points with a barrage of non-partisan statistics and historic facts, most of which can be pulled directly from the Supreme Court ruling. This time, we’ve finally got a chance to make things better instead of watching them get worse.

But the government is lashing out like never before. In the most mean-spirited act I’ve ever seen by an employer in my lifetime the government has imposed an unprecedented “partial lockout” in order to justify docking teacher paycheques by 10%. Nasty. If any private sector corporation did this to its employees, it would be in trouble. Companies know that in labour disputes, there are lines you must not cross lest you do irreparable harm to the employer/employee relationship. But this government is a nasty group of ideologues. Far from their stated desire to mend the bargaining relationship with BC Teachers, their actions prove they want to crush the teachers’ union – to shame them. They are adamant. And they’re desperate.

They know their chance of overturning the Supreme Court ruling on appeal is very slim. Their appeal is just an attempt to buy time. It’s now June, and the October sitting of the BC Court of Appeal is short months away. A loss in this fight will cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars, and will almost certainly sink them politically.

And now, the teachers have called a strike vote.

The timing is tough. Teachers are weary by June. We are uncomfortable leaving the students with a bad feeling before summer break, and we’re tired of fighting –of losing pay to strike days, of having 10% cut from our salaries. Many teachers would rather not further anger parents.

On the other hand, a strong ‘yes’ vote will show a cynical government that it can never defeat us. It will show the government that no matter what it does to us, we will stand up in solidarity.

In this last, desperate battle before the judiciary lowers the boom, the government will throw all of its grenades, and things are likely to get ugly. Already rumours abound of a lockout for September, whether we strike or not. They want to punish us.

But for me there is no more fear. I don’t care what the government does to me any more. I have fought too long, and endured too much heartache to give up now. We are so close! If we hold rank we can win. We have the Charter and the Court of Law on our side.

And if we lose… well… I’ll be okay. But pity the future. Pity the children of the children I teach today. Pity the teachers who are starting out in the system, and pity Canada, a country that used to see public education as a chance for the downtrodden – a way for everyone to aspire to a fulfilling life.

I’m a teacher. I never saw this coming.

Before I started teaching in my own classroom in the fall of 1987, I would sneak into the quiet, empty school daily, starting in early August just to get a feel for the place: to set up my bulletin boards and arrange desks; to familiarize myself with some of the resources and to develop unit plans and a year overview. Actually, the planning had begun in June, but by August, I was revising and fine tuning.

I was terrified. Making it work was going to be very difficult, as I had learned through many a late night during my practicum.

Ah yes, the practicum – the rite of initiation that made or broke you as a starting teacher. It was in the practicum that we learned the harsh reality that no matter how much work we did as a teachers, we could always do more – that no matter how long we worked, the work would never ever be finished.

Haunting every new teacher is an awareness that we can never achieve the ideal of teaching. We can never be on top of every child’s every individual learning need in every subject all the time. The world of the classroom teacher is not such a world. That world is reserved for the extremely wealthy: princes and the like, who have private tutors in each subject area. Education in the real world would never be ideal.

And as we got to know our students, we were haunted by other facts: that some of our students suffered abuse; that some suffered from mental illness or neglect; that some came to school simply unready to learn for myriad reasons, poverty being the one unifying factor for most cases.

So we learned to work as much as we could, keeping in mind that we had to stop, to eat and to sleep, and that once in a while our lovers or friends might want to have us around, or we’d have to attend a staff meeting. The teaching practicum was about imbalance. It became the centre of our lives. We spent pretty much every waking hour doing education.

After a few months and years on the job, we became more efficient. We learned to fight the easily winnable battles first, and balance out our lives a bit. Very few teachers live in situations in which they can devote their whole lives to teaching. And more power to those that can.

And the wages? Well, when I started, I understood the salary grid. I understood that the career would never make me rich, but that if I kept at it, I’d buy myself a decent pension to retire on, and if I combined my income with my wife’s I would be able to live in my own house. It felt like an agreement. Teachers would always earn just so much. No more, no less – a comfortable wage. That was the deal.

What I didn’t foresee, though, is that over time, this deal would be reneged on. My income would erode; teachers would make less and less real dollars throughout the course of my career.

I also didn’t foresee the negative attitude toward teachers that seems to have grown. Sure we complained about teachers when we were kids, but we also secretly loved them. We trusted them, and we were impressed by their vast knowledge of the world. As a new teacher, I knew that this would be part of my pay – the great dignity ascribed to teaching – being part of a centuries old tradition – I thought of Socrates.  To be a teacher was to live in a positive world of people, and to be able to do work for the betterment of individuals and society.

But now, the things have changed. Some of it is still the same; the kids are still the same, bless their hearts. But the outside world has changed. In BC teachers are making 15% less in real (inflation adjusted) dollars than they did 10 years ago. And the public narrative, led by our own government is that we’re irrelevant – that we’re somehow in need of special supervision lest we are lazy and incompetent.

Our efficacy is being taken away through cuts to the system. Class sizes are bigger and more needy kids are getting less specialist attention. Librarians are being cut; counselors are being cut. We’re asking parents to pay more and more in user fees – fees that some kids just can’t afford – those kids who mysteriously take sick on field trip days, so their parents won’t have to admit they don’t have the money to put their child on the bus. Our college was disbanded through government legislation. People are clamoring for more accountability. Citizens now call themselves “taxpayers”, and begrudge every nickel that goes into the system.

Our government won’t listen to what we say about what the system needs. Instead they ignore our expertise and simply legislate what they think is best. They have violated the Charter and international law in their dealings with us, and have engaged in nasty campaigns of ridicule and goading against us. All of this has been well documented in Supreme Court rulings. And the topper? Our own premier called us “greedy”. Then we express our outrage and we’re called whiners. Lawyers, doctors, nurses, truckers, lab scientists: I’ve never heard any of them called whiners, but I hear it all the time about teachers.

The only people I can talk to these days are my colleagues. We’re all like dogs that have been beaten too much. We’re skittish and reactive around the public. We don’t trust the motives of the parents of the students we teach, lest they believe the narrative that our own government has created about us. We are afraid to put a bad mark on a paper, or discipline a child lest we be called to the carpet. We have been violated, and demoralized. And we seem to be alone.

I never saw this coming.

Teaching: It’s not ALL about the kids.

Yesterday, I bent my virtual ear toward a Twitter discussion about teachers. The topic: Provisions in teacher contracts do not always benefit both teachers and students at the same time. Some provisions can actually disrupt student learning.

Ignoring the fact that I had not been invited in to the conversation, I chimed in anyhow. I pointed out that class size and composition issues correlate very well in terms of benefits or detriments. It was quickly pointed out to me that there are other contract provisions that don’t correlate so well.

Fearing the depth of the virtual waters I was about to wade into, I ventured to ask for an example of what those provisions might be. The immediate reply was “maternity leave in October.”

This indeed may be a concern for students, especially younger students, for whom relationship with the teacher is very important. However, the answer rattled me a bit. Maternity leave? I suppose the same concern could be raised with sick leave. So teachers should not be allowed to get pregnant (or sick) if it disrupts the class? An oversimplification, perhaps, but we “went there”, didn’t we?

Aside from issues affecting teachers’ human rights, there are other teacher contract provisions that can disrupt learning environments. Sometimes teachers miss class due to other professional obligations, or scheduled professional development. Sometimes there can be restructuring of classes due to unforeseen enrolment issues. Sometimes teachers leave because they are promoted, or they have a new job opportunity.

These are certainly inconveniences, but the very mention of them gets my blood boiling. Inconveniences to clients due to issues that benefit workers or the longterm wellbeing of the system exist in every workplace. Lawyers, doctors, bankers, accountants and politicians: All of these schedule their time in ways that are not always convenient to their clients.

These examples may be obvious, but for some reason, when it comes to teaching, it is not obvious why inconveniences to students should to be tolerated.

The very fact that maternity leave is even mentioned gives me great pause.

It was not long ago in Canada that teachers, particularly teachers of young children tended to be either nuns or other women who did not have anyone depending on them. There were actual policies in place that mandated that women quit teaching once they got married.

Professor Emeritus, Pat Schmuck (University of Oregon) tells a story of a teaching job interview early in her career in which she was asked point blank if she was using birth control. She laughingly tells her (adult) students that she responded forthrightly because at the time, she thought, “Of course they’d want to know if there was a possibility I’d be having babies and needing time away from the school.” She laughs at her naiveté and at how complacent everyone was in days gone by of an inherently sexist vision for the work world, particularly the world of teaching.

I submit that the larger societal view of teaching still hangs on to remnants of this sexist vision: a vision that teaching is a “vocation”, and not a job; a vision that the students come first in teachers’ personal lives; a vision that teacher volunteerism is “part of the job”.

This is not fair. Teachers, while they themselves may be mothers, are not everyone’s mothers. Teachers enter the profession because they are passionate about education, and therefore, they bring a professional commitment and ethic to their charges, but that doesn’t mean that they should be taken advantage of.

Convenience should not be the only directive guiding contractual obligations for teachers, or anyone else. We work FOR A LIVING, not just for the students.

 

On Blended Learning™

Excerpt from a previous post:

Blended Learning

“Blended learning” is a term being bandied about a lot these days. It is the latest and greatest “technique” that will revolutionize teaching and learning! Hallelujah!

What blended actually is, is the integration of technology into sound pedagogical practice. I do NOT oppose blended learning. What I oppose is Blended Learning™. This term creates a little clique of teachers and administrators who can become “experts” on it, thereby identifying themselves as teacher leaders, as if the idea of integrating technology into pedagogical methods is some new technique that only those who’ve been to the workshop can understand.

Again, I am not against blended learning, but when the term is used as a hammer to attack teachers who are doing a superlative job without using computer gimmicks in their teaching, I object strongly. Teachers are exposed to this kind of tawdry proselytizing through their whole careers. Many of us will remember “new math.” None of this has ever made any positive impact on good teaching or learning.

What is particularly dismaying about Blended Learning is that it seems to ignore the fact that technology in schools is often more of a distraction than it is a learning tool. Walk through any school, or simply observe your own children. Their cel phone is constantly taking their attention away from a learning task. You may say, “So what?”, but there are things in life that require intense, focused concentration. Persuasive writing, for example, is one of those things, as the writer needs to gather evidence, anticipate criticism, and articulate thoughts in a cohesive sequence all at the same time. Any distraction can be the death of a good treatise.

Amazingly, many teachers are ignoring the evidence right in front of their faces, and subscribing to the idea that students can be focused while listening to music or checking into social media. In fact, there is NO EVIDENCE that these things enhance concentration. At the very most, we find that there are some rare instances in which music being played through headphones can mute out external distractions and enhance concentration, but I will argue that the circumstances in which this is preferable to silence, are rare indeed.

At the heart of “blended learning” is the notion that students will have networked technology at their side, and that somehow all of the latest enhancements in technology will be able to enhance learning. There is no question that some technological advances will impact and likely benefit learning, but we need to dispel the ridiculous guilt trip that is put on teachers (quite often, venerated senior teachers) who dare to impugn God’s latest gift to teaching. There’s an ugly arrogance in some of the promotors of this new movement (that is not new at all), and their smug missive that those who raise concerns about student distraction are just “doing it wrong”. Please…

And we must also question the motives of the people funding these initiatives. I would be extremely wary of an ideology that is backed by, say… Microsoft.

Within and without the union: prejudices about the BCTF

I guess that I belong to the most despised union in the province. I’m not whimpering. It’s just a fact. The BC Teachers Federation gets a lot of nasty press. And I try to understand why that might be. To do so, I have to cast my memory back to my pre-union days.

I taught in a Catholic independent school for 11 years. And there was no union. As you can probably guess, a couple of decades ago, some of the BCTF proclivities didn’t play well with Catholics. For one thing, there was the issue of support for LGBTQ realities that the Church would have preferred to deny, but there was more. The Church was terrified of unions.

The Church did not want to give up its power to a union. The year I began teaching, there was a high school on Holmes Street in Burnaby owned by the Vancouver Archdiocese. It was called Marion High. At that time, Catholic teachers were covering the identical curriculum that was taught in the public schools, but they were being paid about 40% less than public school teachers, with no benefits at all. This arose out of a past in which the schools were populated mainly by nuns and poorly trained lay people – often volunteers, and typically women, who didn’t rely on teaching as a primary source of income.

The teachers at Marion High began a union movement. One of the issues on the bargaining table was that they wanted a fired teacher reinstated. She had been fired for violating the “Catholicity Clause” in her contract. She had been divorced, and was now remarrying outside the Church. The Church viewed such behaviour as sinful conduct, which could not be sanctioned in someone who was in a position of trust with children.

Long story short, the Archdiocese shut the whole school down permanently and sold the property so as to put a stop to the union movement. This effectively squelched any unionization dreams in the Catholic teachers to this very day.

In those days, I was prejudiced against the BCTF, seeing it as a political body more interested in political correctness and “socialistic” causes like poverty and LGBTQ issues than education. In retrospect, it wasn’t only because of my Catholic School background that I harbored this prejudice; it was because my dad was a vice president of a multinational mining corporation, so I had been indoctrinated into an ideology of “free enterprise.” I liked to believe that there were many good teachers who, through no choice of their own, had to give up union dues in order to fund such far-fetched activism against their will (I know, I know, I’ve learned a lot since then).

Eventually though, mainly out of fear that the governing NDP was gunning to have funding for religious schools cut (leaving me out in the cold), I left the Catholic schools and found work in the public schools. Here I was obligated to join the union. My first impression was the opposite of what I expected. Because the union was so much involved in the formation of its own contract, it had a vested interest in fulfilling its obligations, and in a professional “ethic” of inclusiveness and professional development. In fact, something that I didn’t realize is that the union had asked the school districts for a longer calendar year (without increase in pay) so that it could insert its own professional development days.

Where I thought I’d see slackers going home at 3:00, I found teachers spending as many or more after-school hours preparing classes. Where I thought I’d see an “us and them” dichotomy between administrators and teachers, I found a much more collaborative relationship between the two than I had in the Catholic school. And where I thought I’d see decisions made on the basis of contractual or political ideology, I saw decisions that were generated out of best practice ideals for education. This was probably the biggest difference.

In the Catholic schools, priests were the ultimate authorities, and as they received their license from God himself, their word was law. To be fair, some of them tried to remain at arms length, but there were many initiatives in the Catholic schools that had much to do with religion and very little to do with education. (I still remember having to move hot dog day to Thursday from Friday so as to not violate the “no meat on Fridays” tradition.) Reflecting on those days, I’m glad that policy was directed by God rather than say, Microsoft or Nike, but I digress.

So back to my union, and why people don’t like us.

I think that one reason has to do with relationships. There are two sets of people in anyone’s life who call him out for his shenanigans. One is his parents, and the other is his teachers. Given this “in loco parentis” role, we have earned a reputation as mealy, rule-bound, stuck up sticks-in-the-mud. Why? Well because we don’t let kids do whatever they want, and we insist that they “be nice”. We get into their business, and sometimes they resent it, just like we all resented it when we had to do household chores, or when our exasperated parents scolded us. And It doesn’t help our cause that virtually every teacher presented on popular television is a reinforcement of the stereotypical teacher-as-offbeat-bookish-sociopath.

When people leave school, and grow up, they don’t usually come back, unless it is as teachers. Our memories of what a teacher is were formed when we were children, when we couldn’t properly understand why a teacher was so insistent on deadlines, or what the big deal was about skateboarding in the hall. As children, we couldn’t possibly understand that what we thought of as “just jumping through the hoops” was actually part of a well-planned, research-based, sequential pedagogy – the fruit of many years of post-secondary training. When a student graduates from school he takes with him his childish understanding of what “school” and “teacher” are. And this memory is cemented right there. Throughout his life, he may never revisit or revise this understanding. He can’t “see” what he’s never known unless he has a reason to re-imagine his past.

A second reason we are not liked is because what we do may not be well understood by people. I recently read a formula that the U.S. government uses to calculate a teacher’s working hours for insurance purposes. The formula is 1 hour teaching equals 2.5 hours work. So a 6 hour teaching day represents 15 hours of work. People have a sense that because they have attended school for a big portion of their lives, they know what teachers do, but such isn’t really the case. It’s the work behind the scenes that you don’t see that is the much bigger part of the job.

A third, and perhaps the most nefarious reason for our bad PR is because people have been convinced that public sector unions are to blame for their high tax burden. And there is truth in this. Here I’m not going to waste words trying to justify how much I get paid. Suffice it to say, teaching is not the most lucrative profession – far from it, but we do fairly well.

The tax argument, however, is spurious. The same level of vitriol is never issued when people buy gasoline or groceries. People don’t curse the multimillionaire bank CEO’s when they get ding’d a-buck-fifty at the ATM just for taking out their own money. (By the way, when bank machines first came out, they were free to use, and still people were reluctant, as we knew that the banks were saving huge money laying off tellers). But for some reason, they don’t want to pay tax dollars for a system of universal education that is run and delivered by professionals. They say that in today’s economy we can’t afford it, which is funny, because our modern economy generates more wealth than ever before in history, yet as a percentage of GDP we funded schools much better in the past.

I’ve come to look at the issue as one that I just have to live with. I have worked a few different jobs in my life, finally coming to teaching, and I can say that teaching is most definitely the hardest job I’ve ever done. It can be very rewarding at times – not lately though, considering how hard the government has been working to discredit us. (It really doesn’t feel good when your boss tries to goad you into a fight). But that ‘s a story for my previous blog post.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how it is. I guess I’ll just have to quietly pay my union dues and do my thing. If I can leave you with just one thought though, let it be this: Better funded schools are better for teachers, yes, but they’re also much, much better for students.

A small class is far preferable to a big class for anyone. A teacher who has a stable personal life is a far better teacher for a child to have than a teacher who is struggling to put food on the table. And a society with a large middle class, including teachers, is a much healthier society both economically and socially than one with a tiny minority of rich people and a massive population of people barely making it.

Understanding unionism: the BCTF

This post goes out to anyone trying to understand how a unionist views the BCTF. It is especially targeted at young teachers, who were hired after 2002 when our bargaining rights were stripped. Let me just preface any further remarks by stating that when I was a boy, my father’s job was to negotiate against a very powerful union in a factory town. As a result, I believe I understand anti-union sentiment perhaps as well as anyone. And yet, I stand in solidarity and full commitment to my union.

A little background to union protocol

In a unionized workplace, everyone MUST belong to the union and pay a portion of their wages in dues. This allows the union to act on our behalf. In return for this sacrificing of union dues, we are given the benefit of protection from being fired if we collectively refuse to work (i.e. strike). At first glance, this rule may seem a denial of one’s autonomy. To be told one MUST belong to a union may seem heavy-handed. But this system was created in law in order to protect vulnerable people from being exploited by employers.

One need not look too far back into history to know that employers view workers as capital, and therefore will naturally try to extract as much work for as little compensation as possible. In fact, there are many examples of corporations in our very midst who benefit from sweatshops in other countries.

Clearly we can’t rely on an employer to care that workers have enough to live on – to pay the rent and all the bills. This fact explains why teachers’ pay has been in decline relative to the cost of living for the last 20 or so years. The employer has no interest in our pay scale keeping up with the cost of living. What we have now, we stand to lose without the union.

Unions have been so successful in narrowing the gap between rich and poor over the years, that it’s easy to forget the huge struggles that unionists went through to achieve these rights – life and death struggles. It’s easy in our relative comfort to forget that it is because of the very existence of unions that we have this comfort.

The most important principle of the union is solidarity. The union is the greatest fruit of democracy. Through solidarity, it puts power in the hands of working people.

And let’s be realistic. The system is not perfect. It can be bulky and inefficient at times. For example, although seniority is, by and large, the most fair practice for determining pay scales, it’s not perfect. Furthermore, different union leaders have varying philosophies about which benefits and whose benefits to prioritize, and not all members will be in agreement all the time. This is true of any democratic organization, and it is the reason that members must find in their busy lives a little bit of time to participate in union activities. Commitment and camaraderie make us stronger and better.

What did the government do that has led to all this legal action?

Before 2002, we had a contract that forced principals to keep class sizes down to a certain level. If there were students with special needs, class sizes had to be reduced to specific maximum numbers of students according to the contract, and a number of support teachers had to be hired. It wasn’t easier to teach in those days, but it was less frustrating because we were able to reach more students and teach to a deeper level of understanding.

In any contract negotiation, labour law states that if no collective agreement can be reached, the previous agreement is “standing” until a settlement is reached. Enter a very right-wing Liberal government, elected with a very strong mandate (There were only two MLAs in opposition, and the party felt they had carte blanche in public policy.). In 2002, the government ignored labour law and created a new law that stripped the standing contract. After this, the BCTF sued the government. We are now finally seeing the results of this lawsuit, though it’s quite likely that we have a way to go yet.

The BCTF – What have you done for me lately?

I have become greatly concerned of late that some our members, especially our younger members, have lost interest in unionism. There is little wonder why this might be true in BC. The government has crippled the union by legislating contracts rather than negotiating. This is illegal, but in an underfunded legal system, the issue of constitutional challenge is very time consuming. It has taken 12 years of very expensive legal action by your union to finally make some headway on this issue.

In the mean time, you are not able to see much success. Much of our money and effort has gone toward fighting in court. Believe me, this fact is not lost on the government. As the Supreme Court has recognized, the government has been very active in trying to disenfranchise teachers from their union.

So why support your union? Well imagine that there was no union. Not only is our employer rather egregious toward public education in general, but our employer is the government. One would think it rational to presume that the government would like to see a well-paid work force, but such is not the case.

If you were acting as a lone agent, what hope would you have of taking on a government that thumbs its nose at its own constitution? Our union has succeeded in legally challenging and striking down a LAW! This is no small achievement. We have accomplished this through our patience, our solidarity, and our financial sacrifice.

Perhaps the immediate gains are not obvious, but it is unthinkable to me that such reckless trouncing of the Charter of rights not be challenged. The BCTF has set legal precedents for generations to come, and for people not just in BC, but in all of Canada, in all types of employment. For this I am exceedingly proud of my union.

These are challenging times, times in which our country for the first time in its history has reverted to a long-term widening of the gap between rich and poor. Democracy as I have known it, has begun to slip from our grasp. But as people have shown in the past, no government can stand against the power of workers united. If we stay committed; if we stay strong, we will triumph.