Not the best method for solving the BCTF dispute
By Nelson Daily Staff
When bargaining between the B.C. Teachers Federation and the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association resumes January 4, 2012, the two sides will have a report to mull over.
Tuesday, the British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board concluded bargaining between teachers and their employers is so dysfunctional that changes are needed.
But those changes could increase the impact on students and their families.
The three panel members for the board said so-called Phase One of the teachers’ strike action isn’t putting pressure on either side to come to an agreement.
The panel called it “fundamentally flawed.”
Teachers have refused since school began in September to fill out report cards or monitor extra-curricular or school ground activities while working without a contract.
The board said both sides need to come up with a narrow definition of what teachers do that is essential, and what parts of their jobs students can live without, at least for some time.
Provincial legislation declares teachers to be an essential service and bars them from walking off their jobs en masse.
But the board said the teachers and employers in this dispute have taken an unconventional and overly broad view of what constitutes essential.
The ruling repeated the words of the board’s earlier finding, which concluded that the meaning of essential “may not be the same for every grade and may not be the same for any time of year.
“If the parties determined the minimum number of days of instruction necessary to meet the core learning outcomes, the balance of instructional days may be the number of days that a teacher may be absent from the classroom.”
The board noted that although there’s no question education is critically important, the same goes for workers in the health-care sector and there are disputes there that involve withdrawal of services without endangering lives.
“These are difficult matters,” the ruling said. “Taking an effective approach in the educational context would also very likely require taking hard-nosed decisions with their concomitant serious impact.”
The bargaining agent for the teachers’ employer, the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association, had asked the board last week to take another look at its November ruling that threw out the association’s demand to force teachers, through their union, to pay back 15 per cent of their salaries and benefits.
The association argued that the teachers’ job action since September allows them to continue teaching and drawing their usual salary while still refusing to report cards and out-of-classroom duties.
But the board refused again in Tuesday’s ruling to roll back teachers’ salaries, saying that’s not a solution that will solve the problem.
With files from Canadian Press
Comments