The current bargaining system in education isn’t working and needs to be scrapped, says the head of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.
Martha Hradowy told a meeting of about 300 of her union’s leaders Wednesday afternoon that reforms introduced more than a decade ago by the previous Liberal government — creating both a provincial level of bargaining on major issues and local talks for more administrative matters — have become too centralized.
“Right now, the biggest obstacle isn’t disagreement over major bargaining priorities — we haven’t even been able to get there,” she said. “In our school board sector, before meaningful bargaining can proceed, the parties have to determine which issues will be negotiated centrally and which will be negotiated locally. And for two of three rounds of bargaining with this government, we’ve been unable to reach agreement on it.”
The Ford government, she added, “continues to push more bargaining to the central table and shrink the space for local bargaining. In this round, they are taking that even further.”
While still supporting talks with the province on major funding issues, “we don’t see an opportunity to amend or fix” the act, she later told reporters. “We need to start from scratch.”
The bargaining act has undergone some changes since 2014, and earlier this year the Ford government made some further legislative changes, removing trustee associations and instead putting the Council of Ontario Directors of Education at the negotiating table.
Under the act, central talks cover costly items such as salary, benefits and some working conditions given the province holds the purse strings. That leaves non-monetary items to be hammered out between union locals and individual school boards.
Hradowy said the province is now seeking to handle sick day notes and staff transfers and layoff/redundancy issues, among other matters, when they should be left to local talks.
Most of the education unions have appealed to the labour board to rule on the central/local questions, which has left the current round of talks in limbo for now.
The Star did not receive a comment from Education Minister Paul Calandra’s office about Hradowy’s remarks, but regarding the delay, he has said that ”at this early stage of bargaining, the first step is to determine what issues will be negotiated at central or local tables. Those decisions are still underway, with some unions choosing to bring this matter to the Ontario Labour Relations Board.”
“We respect their decision to do so and at all times are ready to continue discussions on the scope of central versus local issues before proceeding to the next stage of negotiations,” he has also said.
While it is rare for new collective agreements to be reached by the start of the school year — all education contracts expire at the end of August — the unions had asked to begin talks in March, but the province said it preferred the usual June start.
Hradowy said unions are looking for better supports in schools, because “a student cannot receive support from a position that has been eliminated. A teacher cannot give every student the attention they deserve when classes grow larger, and supports disappear. An education worker cannot be in three places at once.”
