BC’s teachers’ federation says Premier’s plan ignores court rulings

Jan 312013

The right to bargain working conditions is missing.

from the BC Teachers' Federation

Premier Christy Clark's proposed plan for a 10-year deal with public school teachers ignores court rulings, contradicts government's own legislation, and risked scuttling a positive bargaining framework on the eve of its expected ratification by the BC Teachers' Federation and the BC Public School Employers' Association.

"The premier's plan is flawed in a number of significant ways," says BCTF President Susan Lambert.

“The key problem is that it ignores the ruling of the BC Supreme Court that teachers have the right to bargain working conditions, such as class size and class composition.

"The Liberals' own Bill 22 also allows for these issues to be negotiated in this round but her new plan requires teachers to give up this hard-won right. Over the past decade, when Liberal policy regulated learning conditions, class sizes grew and suport for students with special needs suffered," Lambert said.

As a consequence, she said BC has the worst student-educator ratio in the country, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada. In order to bring BC's teacher staffing levels up to national average, the province would have to hire 6,000 more teachers.

Another major problem is the indexing of teachers' salaries to average increases of other government employees, she added.

"This is fundamentally unfair because it effectively prohibits teachers from negotiating for their own salaries. Under such a scheme government has all the cards."

Under the premier's plan, the gap in salary between BC teachers and other teachers in Canada would widen, she said.

"In recent months we've quietly had productive conversations with the employer about how to achieve a smoother, more effective (bargaining) round, and it's most unfortunate that government chose to intervene at this time," Lambert said.

The BCTF and the employers' association have since ratified the bargaining framework agreement.

Source

About BC Teachers' Federation

The British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF), established in 1917, is the union of professionals representing 41,000 public school teachers in the province of British Columbia, Canada. All public school teachers belong to the BCTF and their local teachers' association.

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