Entering the blogged world

The blogged world has never been the same! screamed the headline as I started my "contested" Blog. Well not really and that was indeed a lame joke. But i could only imagine that were I an important politico there would have been a headline of some sort or another...

But alas, I been enjoying several blogs as of late and thought I would join in. Three of my favorites: Al in the city, (she has promised to update it) Uncorrected Proofs and What the Beans.

These have been alot of fun to follow, so I decided to join the conversation. As my passion is politics (well that and the Ottawa Senators) I couldn't imagine a better place to start then posting to a blog. We'll see how it goes...

I have been following various events, but the one that has captured my attention in the past three weeks has been the the British Columbia Teachers Strike. As an intro, here is a piece I penned for a small magazine in Toronto. Let the debate begin:

Law and Dissent: Examining the BC Teachers Strike

As the British Columbia teacher’s strikes concludes this week, it is important to review how the state sought to consolidate resistance to the right to strike through the imposition of restrictive legal tactics. One of the themes running throughout the strike was that the BC teacher’s union faced immense legal pressure to return to work. This kind of pressure is not without recent historical precedent. In the past, provincial governments have often resorted to questions of legality in order to quell trade union resistance to governmental policy. To recount, this pressure has come from strong-armed anti-strike legislation passed by the Liberal government early in its first mandate when it introduced The Education Services Collective Agreement Act (Bill 27) and The Public Education Flexibility and Choice Act (Bill 28) in January 2002. Under the conditions of Bill 27 and 28, the Liberal government repealed an existing contract and imposed an agreement which unilaterally dictated the conditions of work, legislated class room size and held the teachers to a zero, zero, and zero wage increase over three years. By destroying an existing collective agreement (a legally binding document) the government went a step further and declared that the act of teaching was itself an “essential service,” which is a politically loaded legal device meant to shred workers of the basic right to withhold their labour in the event that the employer takes drastic action to change the conditions of work. In breaking the terms of a legally binding collective agreement, the government chose to ignore decades old collective bargaining procedure and instead invoked a narrow definition of parliamentary procedure (closure) in order to speedily defy existing legal precedent. In short, in its position as the employer and as the government, the Liberals unilaterally changed the rules of the game in order to meet their own political agenda.

The Liberal government’s most recent decision to extend the conditions of the BCTF’s collective agreement in The Teachers Collective Agreement Act (Bill 12) in October of 2005 again imposed a collective agreement on teachers. This time, however, the teachers responded by defying the Liberal’s rules and walked off the job. It is this act of political defiance—disobeying the rules imposed by the Liberals in their dual role as the employer and as government—which shaped and define the Teacher’s strike in British Columbia. Indeed, commentators in the mainstream media, including those in the Globe and Mail and on radio throughout British Columbia denounced the teachers for defying the law by participating in an illegal and therefore illegitimate strike. Yet, these same commentators scarcely mentioned that it was Liberal contempt for the “law” which started the strike in the first place.

Despite the sanctimonious position of the mainstream media, there has been little attempt to place the events in British Columbia in any historically comparative context. In so doing, we can see that there is enough historical evidence to show that when governments attempt to vilify public servants for not obeying the draconian rules imposed by the employer, the public will often turn on those that poisoned the workplace in the first place. Indeed, what we learn through an examination of public and private trade union struggles is that the extension of collective bargaining law in Canada was not handed to workers by benevolent employers or compassionate governments. Rather, workers have only won the right to collectively bargain and to strike by challenging the law which prohibited workers from forming trade unions in the first place. This has been true across Canada, but has been paramount in teachers’ strikes in both Ontario and in British Columbia in the past three decades.

Ontario

The economic history of Ontario has been shaped by labour unrest since the time of Confederation. Indeed, until the Toronto Printers walked off the job to protest low wages and a dangerous work environment in 1872, the very act of forming a trade union itself was defined by the law as “a conspiracy in the restraint of trade.” It was only by defying the employer’s (in this case, George Brown and his paper The Globe and Mail) use of the law to break the Printers union that trade union’s themselves were able to emerge from behind the veil of illegality.

Fast-forward to the late twentieth century and eerie similarities continue to shape and define trade union struggles, particularly in the public sector. In Ontario, the Conservative government elected in 1995 put forward an aggressive plan to reign in costs by cracking down on government expenditures. A key component of this strategy was to reform education by limiting issues covered by collective bargaining and the elimination of direct job action by teachers. In 1997, the government introduced The Education Quality Improvement Act (Bill 160) which removed several thousand members from teacher’s bargaining units while virtually eliminating the ability of teachers to bargain over pension benefits, class size and prep-time. In response, 125,000 teachers walked off the job in order to prevent the passage of Bill 160. The government, having declared such action illegal, sought to have the court’s impede the ability of the teacher’s to strike by imposing an injunction. While the court refused to issue the injunction, the role of the court became paramount when the certain elements of the trade union leadership decided to end its two week strike because of the threats of fines and jail time for trade union members. That, however, was not the end of the story. The Conservative government was able to win re-election in 1999 but with labour relations in the public sector poisoned and teacher moral at an all time low. After 1999 the teachers continued to resist Conservative cuts through the initiation of rotating job action, limiting their job time to in class activity which virtually eliminated extra-curricular activities from public schools. The situation again boiled into an outright strike shortly before the election in 2003. In response, the provincial government legislated the Catholic Toronto District School Teachers back-to-work rather than face striking workers in the middle of the campaign.

In the end, the government applied three tactics to stop teachers from challenging government policy through job action: (1) it sought to eliminate teacher’s rights to strike through back-to-work legislation; (2) it then sought to eliminate job action by legislating teachers to resume extra-curricular activities; and finally, (3) in the campaign of 2003 the Tories promised to eliminate teachers’ right to strike by declaring them an essential service. Ultimately, however, the government’s strong-arm tactics failed to increase the idea that vilifying teachers was an adequate formula for actually improving the quality of public education in Ontario and the government was defeated in the 2003 election.

British Columbia

Like Ontario, British Columbia has a long history of aggressive government action aimed at limiting the ability of teachers to collectively bargain and strike. In 1987, for instance, the Vander Zalm government attempted to limit the rights of public sector workers by passing The Industrial Relations Reform Act (Bill 19) and The Teaching Profession Act (Bill 20). Bill 19 and 20 played an important role in the Social Credit Party’s strategy to limit the power of private and public sector unions from challenging the government’s austerity program. Bill 19 gave both government and employer’s more power to interfere in the internal workings of unions, especially targeting the ability of unions to initiate and maintain a strike. Bill 20, however, directly targeted the freedom of BC teachers to engage in meaningful collective bargaining. Bill 20 sought to weaken the bargaining strength of the teachers’ union by removing principles and vice-principles from the bargaining unit while placing numerous restrictions on the BCTF’s right to strike. In response, the teachers received a 70 percent strike mandate and called on all provincial locals to walk off the job in protest. The reaction of the BC labour movement was swift, as 300,000 workers walked off the job in a provincial wide strike on June 1, 1987.

Using a strategy that has become popular with government’s facing labour unrest, the Vander Zalm government appealed to the courts to declare the province wide strike illegal. Arguing that such job action by teachers was tantamount to a using force in a criminal conspiracy, the government hoped to have the strike weapon itself declared illegal. Yet, as it would in 2005, the court refused to declare the strike illegal per se, but warned that such labour unrest could quickly escalate towards illegality if there was general erosion of peacefulness on the picket-line. Stung by such moderate judicial support the Vander Zalm government was forced to moderate its program as it was quickly losing support from the general public. The continued assault on public sector workers and further labour unrest in the schools, combined with internal scandal and a general sense of incompetence was beginning to take its toll on the voting public. Ultimately, not even further legislation deemed to stream-line education policy by again limiting the collective bargaining rights of teachers in the School Act 1989 could save the government. In polls leading up to the 1991 election, respondents placed scandal, public education and economic stability as important areas of public concern.. In all areas the provincial government was failing and in the subsequent election, the Socred dynasty was ended and the party was soon wiped off the electoral map.

The two NDP governments’s that followed Vander Zalm attempted to put forward a plan for peace within public sector labour relations. Bill 84, which amended the BC Labour Code erase many years of Socred duplicity within public sector labour relations, but the Party was unwilling to legalize secondary boycotts or political strikes in a labour disruption. This proved important as the NDP demonstrated that it was just as willing to use strong arm legal tactics when the collective bargaining process did not work in their favour. In May 1993 the NDP legislated teachers in Vancouver and Surrey back-to-work after an embarrassing strike showed that there were cracks in the government’s claim that BC labour relations were on a new, peaceful course. In order to avoid future strikes in individual districts, the NDP introduced Bill 52 the Public Education Labour Relations Act which restructured collective bargaining so that all major issues would be negotiated through the Province rather than through individual school boards. The long term affects of this reform would lay the ground work for the current labour dispute in 2005. By imposing Bill 52, the NDP’s changes sought to centralize bargaining with the government while eliminating political action as a legitimate form of strike activity. These changes immediately shifted power within the collective bargaining process to bureaucrats within the Ministry of Education and a range of industrial relations experts (lawyers, mediators and arbitrators) while taking it away from individual school boards and the BCTF itself.

After the NDP’s devastating defeat in 2000, the centralization of power within the Ministry of Education resulted in a string of imposed contracts and cost-cutting measures by the Liberal government. For the Liberals, there were numerous weapons to use against the teachers, who they saw as overpaid, overprotected and key supporters of the opposition. The Liberals took away the right to strike, imposed essential service legislation and mediated contracts. When that failed to stop the 2005 strike, they turned to legal experts: the labour board, the courts and the lawyers within the ministry. When that strategy failed to turn public sympathy against the strike, and forced with the possibility of a larger strike action by CUPE and other public sector workers in Vancouver, the Liberals acquiesced on their “no negation with law breakers” stance and appointed mediator Vince Ready. Ready’s eventual report included an award of $40 million to “harmonize” teacher salary throughout the province. According to sources, this amounted to a 2 percent wage increase, but only for teachers who were on the lowest end of existing salary levels. The report also committed the government to address and negotiate classroom size, which the teachers saw as the first sign that the government was willing to move on a negotiated settlement. In the end, the government was willing to give a verbal (it refused to give a written agreement), on classroom size and small salary increases. Tired and angry, the teachers accepted the mediators report with a 77 per cent mandate to return to work knowing that the next round of bargaining was only 6 months away.

Conclusions

Can the strike be considered a victory for BC teachers? In reviewing the recent history of both teacher strikes in Ontario and British Columbia the events of 2005 it is difficult to determine who “won”. In both provinces, the governing party in their dual role as employer and as the government, was able to define the way in which collective bargaining took place or if it would take place at all. In every case examined, a government aimed at scaling back public expenses, as was Vander Zalm, Harris and Campbell, will always vilify public workers who defy such austerity programs. They are able to do this precisely because they maintain the legislative hammer to change the law so it fits their political goals. Under such a pretense it became easy for the media to argue, as the Globe and Mail did (Editorial, October 12 2005), that a democratically elected government has the right to limit the use of the strike in order to set its own finances in order. Yet, hidden behind the façade of public finance reform is a very real attempt by government to use the legal tools available to it in order to restrain political dissent. In both cases, the government wrongly assumed that public support would fall on the side of legal experts dictating the terms of collective agreements. In both cases, they were wrong. In this regard, the teachers strike must be seen as limited, albeit important, victory.