Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org

Published August 31, 2014 by Voices for BC Education

Imagine a client hires you for a job. The pay isn’t great but the work is steady and you like the hours.

A little while later they come back and tell you that the scope of the job has grown substantially and they understand you can’t do it alone so they let you hire a team of 10 people. With 10, you can do the job, just. It’s more challenging but you agree.

As time goes by they stop paying some of your team. You find yourself with a skeleton crew. You go to head office and tell them what is happening. They tell the client they have to pay for the 10 people they agreed to hire.

The client comes back saying they won’t and tries to rewrite the terms of your agreement. You stop working. They stop paying.

They come back to you and say… we will hire you back, just you, not your team. The condition? They will hire you if and only if you agree to sign this document that says “Should head office decide more people are needed to complete the job, either party can tear up the contract.” and the client doesn’t have to hire more people.

Would you do the job?

 E80 is asking us to agree to let the government decide if they will abide by the court rulings.  It’s giving them the right to tear up our contract if they don’t like what the courts have to say. Would you agree to that? Would you go back to work?

Teachers want to be in the classroom. They want to be teaching but they can’t if E80 is part of the deal.

Sources say Clark gov’t insists on clauses insulating it from another Supreme Court loss.

By Crawford Kilian | Published 25 Aug 2014 by TheTyee.ca

The long summer stall in teacher bargaining may be due to terms the government is insisting on including in the next contract, The Tyee has learned. One proposed clause, apparently a major sticking point, appears to stem from the legal, financial and political bind the BC Liberals face after rulings against them by the B.C. Supreme Court.

While a media blackout continues, information received (not from anyone bargaining on either side) suggests that “one of the major stumbling blocks in the contract that the government wants the teachers to sign is that there is language/wording that virtually recreates all the conditions set out in Bills 27, 28 and 22.”

Bills 27 and 28, passed by the Gordon Campbell Liberal government in 2002 when Christy Clark was education minister, effectively tore up the contract teachers had been working under, and removed class size and composition from the bargaining table.

In 2011 the BC Supreme Court declared the bills unconstitutional. It gave the government one year to make amends, and in 2012 Victoria introduced Bill 22, effectively restoring what the Supreme Court had rejected.

Read more: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/08/25/Teacher-Bargaining-Jams/

By Michael Stewart | Published by Rabble.ca June 20, 2014

Excerpt:

All enemies of labour would like to colour contract negotiations in the crassest terms: how much? This impulse even impacts how unions enter into bargaining — over-emphasizing how wage increases are not the real issue (even though they often are — and why not?) and governing much of the public relations battle large unions are now tasked with in a public increasingly hostile to collective bargaining rights.

But teachers — teachers are different. It’s okay to say it. Or maybe it’s better to say that things are different when it comes to teachers. First of all, the notion that teachers are only in it for the money just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. This is particularly true in B.C. where a whole generation of teachers have only known underfunding and job precarity. Teachers undergo six years of schooling, sometimes more, to enter a workforce where annual layoffs are commonplace while mainstream media derides them and their profession on a daily basis — all this for a starting salary $3000 less than the national average in Canada’s most expensive province. Yeah, they’re probably not in it for the money.

Read more:http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-stewart/2014/06/teacher-strikes-make-british-columbia-better

BY MARK LEMSTRA | Published JUNE 19, 2014 by THE STARPHOENIX

Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

Teachers are stressed out today. On the one hand, they have a government that recently has unilaterally imposed multiple changes on their working conditions. The latest contract offer was rejected not only because it included insufficient remuneration, but because all other components essential to working and learning conditions would be negotiated at a later date.

On the other hand, teachers are represented by a federation that is having problems communicating the incredible challenges that face learning environments.

Some of the unilateral decisions by government include reducing the number of educational assistants, attempting to introduce standardized testing with no evidence to support it, and making top-down changes to curriculum by ministry officials who are too far removed from the classroom. In the media, however, the main discussion point is wages. Teachers’ recently refused a four-year offer with a 7.3 per cent increase, but this needs more explanation.

Their previous contract was for 985 hours of total assigned time for teaching as well as other duties such as preparation and staff development. Last year, the government unilaterally mandated a minimum 950 hour instruction time. Assuming teachers only worked this minimum, that would leave just 35 hours a year for all other duties.

Read more: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/touch/story.html?id=9953324