Musings About the Teacher Strike

The teacher’s strike is now in its second week, and I suspect that it will not be much longer before the public support the teachers currently enjoy will slowly but surely turn against them. The BCTF leadership has unfortunately painted the teachers into a corner and now they can only lose.

The headlines in the Sun have both the labour minister, Mike de Jong, and the head of the BC Business Council saying, respectively, that they will not negotiate while the teachers are engaged in an illegal action, and that the rule of law must prevail or else (in a fine example of hyperbole), anarchy will reign. People forget that social change often comes through technically illegal actions. We don’t have 40 hour work weeks, benefits, and so forth out of the goodness of business owners’ hearts.

The government, no matter their history of legislating away contracts they didn’t like, ignoring “binding” arbitration rulings, and general roughshod approach to negotiations with public sector employees will soon not only still wield the legislative hammer but also public support to use it. As H.L. Mencken said, "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." It’s like watching a train wreck.

The problem is not the illegality of the strike per se, but rather that other public sector contracts are all due for negotiation and renewal this coming spring. If the government accedes to teacher demands now, then it will set some level of precedent for negotiations to come.

Unfortunately, it’s going to go very badly for the teachers. For all they are right about classroom conditions having deteriorated badly in the past decade, they have resorted to playing a high stakes “all-in” game which they can’t win.

The judge who didn’t fine the union but rather innovatively froze the BCTF assets gave the teachers a graceful out. The teachers could have gone back to work in the classroom and then worked on creative solutions to continue their protest. One very simple way would be to evaluate and mark work and communicate that to the students and the parents but refuse to report it to the administration. This then allows students to learn while putting pressure on the PSEA to come to some kind of accommodation. (Incidentally, this worked exceptionally well for the teaching assistants up at SFU a number of years ago).

They could also work to rule, which means no extracurricular activities for anybody. This might annoy parents enough to have them put pressure on the government to improve working conditions.

The dispute isn’t about money. Yes, they would like a raise. So would you. Show me someone who wouldn’t like and take more money for the work they do; the banal whine that it’s about money is a red herring.

The problem is much more complex than the newspaper headlines would have us believe; the challenge I’m putting to people is to become genuinely informed. Learn what the issues are, and then do something helpful to help get it resolved.