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Why Teachers Are Primed to Strike

Campbell government's freeze strategy ignores widening salary gap.

John Malcolmson 26 Sep 2005TheTyee.ca

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BC teachers have conducted a province-wide strike vote and given their leaders a mandate to initiate job action. Planned strike action is aimed at pressuring the employer and the government to negotiate a new collective agreement. Teachers have worked without a contract since the last one expired in June of 2004.

Labour disputes tend to be messy situations. In the course of collective bargaining and the run-up to a strike situation, many issues get thrown into the mix. Within the current context, however, two “big picture” issues come to the fore.

Big issue #1: Salaries

First is the question of salary. Teachers expect to receive a “reasonable” increase in the new agreement. The employer, backed by government, is determined to hold the line on any hike for teachers. This would freeze teachers’ salaries for all of this past year and at least an additional year.

It is useful to look at the salary increase issue in the context of recent negotiation experiences and outcomes. The last collective agreement ran three years before ending in June of 2004. BC’s newly-elected liberal government imposed that agreement after contract negotiations became deadlocked. In it, teachers got 2.5 percent increases in each of three years. Consumer prices in Vancouver and BC rose at virtually the same rate over that period so real salary levels stayed near-constant.

If one goes back farther in time, a different picture emerges. A Category 5 Vancouver teacher earning the maximum salary saw her earnings grow just under 10 percent between June of 1998 and June of 2004. Prices over that period increased at a faster rate and have climbed another 1.5 percent in the past school year. What this means is that earnings lag inflation by about four percent over the last seven years. This is a significant but not enormous drop. However, what galls teachers is the fact that a salary freeze would be imposed at a time when economic growth, rising energy prices and increased federal transfers have pushed BC’s public accounts far into the black. And current forecasts have the province’s finances staying out of deficit territory over the full term of a new collective agreement.

So, if government can afford to reduce corporate taxes and put more cash in the pockets of big business, why is it loathe to pay teachers a “reasonable” salary increase? If it can put more money into roads, buildings and infrastructure, why not into supporting those who makes our public services work?

An aging teacher staff

These questions acquire a different urgency when looked at in light of the ongoing ageing of BC’s teacher population. At the start of 2003/04, almost two-thirds of our teachers were over age 45 and a full 43 percent of BC teachers were aged 50 plus. The latter group is within five years of possible retirement. Given recent layoffs of younger teachers having less seniority, that percentage is almost surely higher today.

BC’s post-secondary system does not graduate anywhere near the volume of education students to offset this impending attrition. Years of compressed funding at colleges and universities have left these institutions ill-prepared to meet the challenge of supplying enough teacher replacements to address staffing needs for the near-future.

The advancing retirement bulge means that we will have to attract and retain new BC grads here as well as compete nationally and beyond for more bodies if we are to replenish teachers’ ranks. Historically, this has been the approach BC has taken to address this need. A sizeable chunk of BC’s teachers were educated elsewhere in Canada and many internationally. They migrated here to start or continue their teaching careers.

This “strategy” may have worked in the past. However, today’s teachers are aging everywhere in Canada. School authorities and provincial ministries across the country all face a need to replace the high volume of educators expected to exit the system in the coming decade. It is a classic situation where demand will increase at a rate outstripping available supply. The winners in this kind of market scenario will be those offering, guess what -- superior salaries, good pensions (which are tied to salaries) and decent career working conditions.

It is for reasons like this that the BCTF is working to focus attention on the yawning teacher salary gap between cities like Vancouver and urban centers in provinces like Alberta and Ontario. A just-published report by staff researcher Colleen Hawkey and titled “Inter-city Teacher Salary Comparisons, 2005-07” provides some startling comparisons with what teachers earn in other parts of the country.

For example, a new Category 5 teacher in Vancouver this September actually earns $329 more than her counterpart in Toronto, but after 10 years on the job, will trail the annual Toronto salary by almost $10,000. The same Vancouver teacher lags her starting colleague in Edmonton by more than $5,600, a gap which doubles in size over the next decade of movement up the experience grid.

These gaps are calculated for the current year only. They will grow in size if a salary freeze is imposed in BC. This is because teachers’ salaries are not frozen in these other jurisdictions.

If a new Alberta teacher can earn thousands more starting out in Edmonton, why make the trek to BC? Or, if a young teacher is struggling to pay the bills here in this province, why wouldn’t she take a long and hard look at a Toronto or Ottawa career that promises $300,000 more in lifetime earnings and a better pension to boot? There are surely good reasons these folks might come to or remain in BC, but we would do well remembering that nice scenery and Lotusland winters will only go so far.

Big Issue #2: Working and learning conditions

The second “big picture” issue referenced at the start concerns working conditions. In crucial respects, this is the real story of the current contract stand-off. BC has seen a wholesale deterioration in school working conditions since the last imposed settlement stripped out class size and staffing provisions.

In the past four years, salary and other cost increases have forced our school system to cannibalize itself. Since negotiating working conditions was made ultra vires and in the face of ongoing budget restrictions, class sizes have increased and thousands of teachers have been let go. Schools have become more difficult places to work and, for students, more difficult places to get an education.

This year, the province pumped an additional $150 million into school operating budgets. Judging from its strategy at the bargaining table, the Ministries of Finance, Education and Treasury Board are eager not to let much of this increase find its way into the pockets of teachers or other staff.

Back to freeze mode

School budgets are projected to re-enter freeze mode next year and remain there into 2007/08. This much was re-affirmed last week in Carole Taylor’s budget. Her speech to the legislature mentioned the word “education” only once, in the context of plans to build new relationships with First Nations.

Accompanying budget documents confirm that last spring’s forecast of a two-year school funding freeze remains the Liberal party line.

What better way to lock the freeze down than to put the clamps on a teacher salary bill which currently accounts for more than a half of all public school spending? And what better tool to free up money for other priorities, including corporate tax cuts, than to engineer a multi-year respite from rising cost pressure on the school salary front? Many parents and other members of the public may not relish the prospect of a school shutdown this fall. However, we would all do well to remember that, as messy as labour negotiations are, they provide a vital forum for raising and resolving issues necessary for our schools to adapt for the future. By short-circuiting this process, a legislated settlement blocks such adaptation. Given the issues at stake, we will all lose with that outcome.

John Malcolmson is a consulting sociologist doing research and evaluation in the fields of public education and education finance, literacy, labour relations, justice issues and social policy. He publishes the digital newsletter Finance Watch, where a version of this appeared. To subscribe, email [email protected]  [Tyee]

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