Happy Labour Day!
Starting tomorrow, with the Labour Day holiday behind us and another school year about to commence, Alberta news coverage will be “laser focused,” as our government likes to say, on the looming labour dispute between the Alberta Teachers Association and the Teachers Employer Bargaining Association.
The potential inconvenience to parents caused by a strike or lockout in Alberta’s public, Catholic and francophone school systems just as the school year is starting is enough to make this a major story by any journalistic yardstick.
Perhaps some time today or tomorrow the dynamic duo of Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides and Finance Minister Nate Horner will actually say they’re laser focused on resolving the impasse between fed-up teachers and TEBA. One can hope.
They should be, after all. They’re the ones who have been stubbornly insisting behind the scenes that there will be no pay increase for teachers larger than the 12 per cent over four years that is clearly unacceptable to rank-and-file teachers. In May, teachers rejected a mediator’s recommendation by 62 per cent, and in June 94.5 per cent of the nearly 39,000 teachers who took part in a strike vote supported strike action. So the union can now strike after giving 72 hours notice. This should have concentrated some minds at the top on the direction this was moving.
Indeed, had there not in fact been a secret government mandate given to the TEBA, most likely the employers would have shown a little movement on wages – if not enough to satisfy every teacher, enough to get a deal most of them could live with. We’ll never know for sure, of course, because the thing about secret mandates is that they’re secret.
To crank things up a little more, CTV reported yesterday that TEBA has asked the Alberta Labour Relations Board for approval to lock out the teachers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the government, which as noted is pulling TEBA’s strings, would be so foolish as to order a lockout.
Such applications by employers are routine when a union’s in a position to legally strike because, since without a lockout notice, there are plenty of ways a union could make life difficult for the employer without actually throwing up a picket line. And a TEBA spokesperson did tell CTV that the employers would only lock teachers out in response to unspecified union tactics.
Still, at this hour, a work stoppage for one reason or the other is definitely possible, and possibly likely, although it’s always worth remembering that, as in politics, a week is a long time in labour relations.
As has been said in this space – here, and here – Dr. Nicolaides and Mr. Horner have not exactly covered themselves in glory with their attacks on the ATA for having the temerity to try to bargain collectively instead of taking their medicine like good little children.
The ministers’ ludicrous effort to pin the blame for the strike on the teachers by accusing the ATA of trying to divert resources from classrooms to their pockets after years of mostly zeroes when it came to pay increases may fool some Albertans, but it doesn’t seem to be fooling enough.
So, at this point, about the only thing Dr. Nicolaides and Mr. Horner could do to make the situation worse and make themselves look more foolish would be to lock the teachers out.
Well, never say never. As former ATA president Larry Booi, who led the teachers strike in 2002, told me yesterday, “if teachers walk out, no matter how justified they may be, they will take heat. But if the government locks them out, they will get the blame. Locking out teachers would be an act of political hari-kari.”
Casting his mind back to 2002 when more than 20,000 teachers then working for 22 school districts hit the bricks, Mr. Booi said Feb. 4 was chosen for the walkout to begin to ensure students wouldn’t waste a year.
“There was a great deal of concern in the public that teachers would go out just before the diploma exams in late January in order to cause maximum disruption,” he recalled. “But no one on our executive council was comfortable with that approach. It would have created enormous problems for Grade 12 students, and I think it would have been viewed extremely negatively by the public.
“When we announced that we would not disrupt diploma exams but would go out shortly after they were completed, there was a lot of relief in the public.
“I think that was one of the reasons why we ended up having a good deal of public support after the strike – because we were seen as trying to be fair and reasonable during an exceptionally disruptive and difficult time.”
The Progressive Conservative government of Premier Ralph Klein passed legislation ordering an end to the strike on Feb. 21, 2002.
NOTE TO READERS: Speaking of Labour Day, this post will probably be the last one from your faithful blogger for a spell. I am about to embark on a long-planned vacation. Indeed, this plan has been on the back burner for about 60 years now, and it occurred to me that I’d better make it reality while I was still ambulatory. I anticipate being away from the keyboard for most of the month of September, which inevitably means I will miss a lot of interesting and important Alberta political stories. But then, that’s pretty much been the case in Alberta since the spring of 2015, when the most boring political scene in English Canada unexpectedly became the most interesting. I anticipate returning to my normal frenetic pace of posting as soon as I return toward the end of the month. You never know, though, I may be moved to post a picture or two, or even a short commentary, from afar. DJC
“Labor” in the secondary headline.
The Air Canada workers set an interesting precedent by defying the CIRB (government) Back to Work Order. Instead of having to accept a less than generous contract imposed by an arbitrator, they got a settlement plus an investigation into unpaid work. (I think that the board was shocked to discover that unpaid work exists in the airline industry.)
If a teacher strike or lockout should come to pass, will the rank and file have the resolve to refuse to return to work? Will the UCP have to blink?
Enjoy your time away. I look forward to your next posts.
John: Thanks for noting that. I also missed a possessive apostrophe in the same headline, which I was fiddling with at the last moment. Both have been fixed. DJC
Re spelling: one interesting tidbit is that the Australian Labor Party uses the no-‘u’ spelling.
Jerry: But what’s their programme? DJC
Fijne vakante !!
A teachers’ strike, what are parents going to do when the kids don’t leave the house in the a.m. Of course in B.C. they anticipate a strike but of a more serious nature. Its like a whole industry may crash. Not a big deal for me, but others, disaster. Provincial government employees strike and as expected and past strikes, first hit is the liquor stores and ware house. Oh the wailing, tourism will end, yada yada yada.
Have a great vacation. Have fun, eat a lot of food you won’t tell your doctor about, don’t get arrested the readers may not have enough money to bail you out, don’t go into war zones–they fire guns with real bullets. If you find some new liquor do give a report upon your return.
e.a.f.: I still haven’t recovered from awamore. (Okinawa, 2012). DJC
David, enjoy your well-deserved vacation!
What would happen to TEBA or the agreement if TEBA said phooey to the UCP and gave the teachers a 13 percent increase? Would TEBA be sent to El Salvador or Uganda? Would Smith burn the agreement before the cameras on the steps of the Legislature?
Interesting question. We have a public court system in this country, so how could a provincial government prosecute a public-sector employer for violating a secret mandate, and still keep it secret? I don’t expect we’ll have any opportunity to find out, though.
Jerry: That’s the most interesting question I’ve heard in a month! DJC
I recall the teachers’ strike in 2002. Together, teachers in the thousands picketed the legislature; the media reported only a few teachers protesting, especially after Klein said that the teachers did not show up. Also, Klein vilified teachers using the media as his amplifier. Some teachers left the profession or were declared “surplus.” Still, many teachers supported Klein and there was much tension between teachers.
Today, we have book banning, no vision in public education to move students into the world in which they will be living in survival mode. Education in Alberta is like the UCP government, moribund and worse. Henceforth, anyone who can afford private schooling chooses that over public schools. Of course the UCP have been underfunding public education making learning and teaching a worse case scenario. But the reality is that public education has been a favourite hobby horse of the provincial government for decades. It is doing God’s work to kick children and teachers down by cruel intolerant “adults.” In all fairness, some teachers align with the evangelists and fully support the UCP in their desire to make schools an extension of their churches. Keep your mouth shut for 30 years if you make it that long in the teaching profession.
Tis that way here in Alberta these days – most people keep their mouths shut because there is no where for them to speak up where they will be heard, or perhaps because no one can do anything and most don’t care at all, while the world destroyers (the climate change deniers, the flat earthers, the convoy people, the separatists, the organized crime syndicates, the oligarchs for examples) go about destroying Canada, neglecting citizens by weaponizing medicine, and withdrawing services for seniors, people on AISH, and hurting people with a host of other malicious initiatives, I am sure that the public is unaware of (I heard that the UCP has recently laid off paramedics behind closed doors, not sure if it is true, but I wouldn’t put it past the UCP to permanently lay off every public employee if they had their way.
Might as well take all pensions away from everyone, take away all services, turn Alberta into a nuclear haven for terrorists, constantly lie to the people, turn the population in to an angry horde and when the people turn on each other deny any responsibility, create a theocracy just like Iran – but deny you are doing so, rule the province with a punitive, cruel fist, just like the Third Reich, but deny you are doing so constantly pulling the wool over the eyes of your misguided ignorant followers and there you have it – current and future Alberta! Good luck to the gate keepers who maintain the current status quo – err I mean teachers.
Well said
Klein was a disgrace as a human being and a drunkard.
Lock out or strike, I wonder how long the public/parentsl support will last; the UCP neoliberal narrative is well entrenched.
“Happy trails”
Enjoy your holiday and many thanks for the superb reporting you do.
“And a TEBA spokesperson did tell CTV that the employers would only lock teachers out in response to unspecified union tactics.”
It seems likely that some smart teachers might have figured out what those unspecified tactics are. TEBA would look very bad if they chose to lock out teachers right now. This might even throw a spanner in the premier’s rumored plan to call an election before the deadline for the Forever Canadian referendum petition. Plus various scandals aren’t leaning in her favor, especially that lawsuit for wrongful dismissal by Athana Mentzelopoulos. Her book bans aren’t in her favor, either. The clock is ticking on a fall election and deus ex machina from South of the border will add to the chaos. Danielle Smith doesn’t hold any cards.
Given that nurses just got a 20% increase in pay, it only stands to reason that the stupid UCP ministers think 12% over 4 years is perfectly fine. All the unions need to stick together and send back a great big F*** Y** to Smith and the idiots in cabinet, especially since all the unions (teachers, paramedics, government workers and the so many more) have not had a decent increase in wages for years.
UCP = Unending Conflict Party
Goal: To turn Albertans against Ottawa, that’s all they want.
Hello DJC,
Thank you for all the great commentaries. I hope you have a great vacation, and look forward to your next columns in late September.
I’m afraid to say that I think organized labour, especially in education, is on its last legs. Like they did with health care, the Cons have privatized much of the sector so far, and continue to do so, that nothing will be left of it over the next decade. Your teacher just might have to deliver pizza at night or stock shelves at Walmart to make ends meet. But this is what happens when citizens elect corporatist petro-politicians: the wealthy become wealthier and more powerful and the poor poorer.
I hope you enjoy your well deserved vacation, Alberta will still be here when you get back.
It’s an extra burden upon the caring professions in public service to be demonized by their ultimate employer as if ordinary, negotiable issues were a stark and permanent choice between paradise and perdition.
Even from the political aspect, working contract issues are pretty simple and almost always the same. Birch-syrup MAGA heads might believe that teachers are out to “groom” children for some fantastic, re-gendered 5th-column of “com-nists” or nurses complicit in secretly implanting anti-freedom chips in the unwitting ill so’s to spoil the Rapture, but collective bargaining is not a general election campaign nor a critical debate on citizens’ rights.
But naturally Take-Back-Alberta thinks it can cherry-pick from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Or even cherry-paint, like a pig on a ladder with a pail of whitewash, the right to bear arms so it might be submitted as a “First Amendment” right in CANADIAN COURTS whenever Freedumbites run afoul of the CANADIAN Emergencies Act. And of course they did elect DanielleSmith their leader who went on to win the UCP’s very first incumbency bid—who evidently has taken the lyrics from the late Steve Goodman’s “Lincoln Park Pirates” to heart: “What care I for the law?” That was the easy part.
Most spent most of my working career in union-friendly BC, proud to hear Folk Fest regular Utah Phillips remind us to be proud that BC is —or was, back then—one of the last bastions of labour unionism fighting for workers’ rights, his usual preamble —for I saw him perform more than once over the years—to his signature hymn, “Get The Bosses Off Your Back”. Posthumously in his honour I used to perform Joe Hill’s “Where the Fraser River Flows” which I first heard Phillips sing, long ago. I always got a bang out of the aspirational line “when the red flag is unfurled,” an anachronism from the rougher days of union organizing that leaders like Hill and our local hero, Ginger Goodwin (who was killed by a coal-mining company’s bounty-hunter and Hill commemorated), actually endured, a harder time from which our society is supposed to have progressed—until, that is, I witnessed some of my construction buddies getting threatened for participating in a sign-up for a sprinkler-fitters’ union during one of my working sojourns to the beautiful Wild Rose province. And that was when St Peter was Premier! I felt so coddled and naive!! There’s still places like this in Canada?
Except for the single NDP term, 2015-19 (when Premier Rachel Notley was likened to the Sainted Lougheed), it’s been a disturbingly erratic hopscotch of further and further retrogression for workers in Alberta:
2009 (Alberta Alliance, forerunner to Wildrose, wins a by-election seat in the Assembly); 2012 (Calgary School Board destroyer Danielle Smith leads party into a general election WR was predicted to win —but lost because her rebuke of a WR candidate’s homophobic and totally impolitic “lake of fire” comment was tardy and tepid); 2014 (WR party destroyer Smith crosses floor to the teetering ProgCon caucus); 2015 (WR/ProgCon party destroyer Smith fails to win her PC nomination but PCs lose anyway after 44years in power, the longest governing party in Canadian history): 2019 (unite-the-right crusader and former cabinet minister from the defeated HarperCon federal government, Jason ‘K-Boy’ Kenney, shotgun weds survivors of Smith’s carnage); 2022 (K-Boy destroyer TBA ousts Kenney before he completes a single term leading the party he created—and subsequently elects two-time party-of-the-right-destroyer Danielle Smith); 2023 (Smith wins the UCP’s 1st incumbency —the NDP winning the largest Loyal Opposition in Alberta history); 2024-25 (Donald F tRump re-elected US presidunce, federal CPC leader Pierre Poilievre emulates this success only to be deftly handcuffed to the Orange One by Liberal stalking-horse Justin Trudeau when the “sunny ways” kid goaded tRump into threatening Canada’s sovereignty and Smith subsequently refused to play ball with the other Premiers of Team Canada—convened in this national crisis— by instead going to Florida to kiss tRump’s ring, thence ramping up secessionist sentiment among her potentizing-but-shrinking MAGA North base; PP, who lost his Ottawa seat in April, wins a by-election in the safest CPC seat in the country). Making surly, anti-organization threats on the job site almost half a century ago seems so quaint in comparison. But worse, the retrogression is accelerating.
So far tRump’s crazy term is befogged in the fire-hosing rush into whatever breach he thinks he can make. Bereft of strategic thinking, tRump can only make tactical errors and response hasn’t had time yet to provoke him into the rhetoric of tactical retreat which we may be assured is coming. However, we don’t want any of that, as karmatically justifing and narratologically thrilling as it is.
Yes, it’s easy for me to utter such apparently idle assurances, safe and sound as I am, here on the West Coast. But I’ve been on strike and despite the concessions won on the bargaining table, though a good tide that elevates all workers, unionized or not, can’t get back the pay you didn’t make while out on a lengthy job action. Nevertheless it’s necessary if the employer refuses to negotiate. Not to put too fine a point on the fact that this particular province is at the centre of importance, the hole in the dyke holding back tRumpublicanism, as ‘t were, I wish our sisters and brothers every strength in keeping this dispute focused on the issues important to them and, naturally, to their charges for whom they care, our shield against disease and ignorance. This shouldn’t be about some other country’s culture war or the single link from which our own dangles.
I wish I didn’t have to rationalize that the TBA/UCP government won’t be around forever. It could be another two years and I know that’s a very long time for a young student—and literally an eternity for the ill. You are in the right and the UCP is in the wrong and everybody knows it. For what it’s worth, I wish you all the best.
And, David, I wish you a swell vaycay—60 years in the making it sounds like it’s gonna be a good one. Pacing, sir, pacing. Alberta will still be here when you get back. Bon voyages!
I feel with languishing oil prices, an increasing deficit and their general stingyness there is a risk the UCP will cause a lock out or provoke a strike.
However, I also feel the UCP would like there not to be more attention drawn to how they have under funded education for years compared to the rest of Canada. Smith prefers to keep the focus on external enemies and scapegoats and not on her bad management.
So hopefully this can be resolved without a drawn out shut down of schools.