And the angry teachers are coming out.
Bill Tieleman's 24 Hours Vancouver / The Tyee online column
Tuesday May 20, 2014
By Bill Tieleman
"Don't
poke a hornet's nest and expect butterflies to come out."
Call it
the government that kicked the hornet's nest, because the BC Liberals have done
exactly the wrong thing in trying to reach a deal with the BC Teachers'
Federation.
On
Friday, the BC Public School Employers' Association announced
it would cut teachers' salaries by five per cent unless the two parties reach a
deal by June 30, intending to scare the union into accepting positions it has
rejected to date.
BCPSEA
will make it a 10 per cent cut if teachers take further but limited job action.
But
instead, the government poked the proverbial hornet's nest and no butterflies
flew out -- just angry teachers on Twitter.
Unfortunately,
that's the pattern the BC Liberals repeatedly follow when it comes to teachers,
despite being warned by a recent B.C. Supreme Court decision that they've been
dead wrong.
Rather
than increase the likelihood of a settlement, veteran government negotiator
Peter Cameron -- a former militant union representative
-- has angered teachers and hardened the union's resolve to fight harder.
The
threat also obliterated any goodwill from Thursday's employer offer
of a $1,200 signing bonus if a new collective agreement was reached by June 30
and to give up on its 10-year deal demand.
The
union will now ask the B.C. Labour Relations Board to stop BCPSEA from
threatening to dock teachers' pay.
Gov't
genius: reuse failed tactics
Can the
board's decision be predicted before the hearing even begins?
Not
with 100 per cent certainty, but one needs only look at B.C. Supreme Court
Justice Susan Griffin's scathing January decision, which trashed the BC Liberal
government for deliberately provoking a strike in a previous 2011 dispute, to
get a clue.
"Another
aspect of these pressure tactics was to have BCPSEA [the teachers' employer
group] apply for an order of the Labour Relations Board to vary previous
essential services orders so that districts could reduce teachers' pay. This
application was brought but was unsuccessful," Griffin wrote.
More
government genius: use tactics that failed before again.
Of
course, Cameron and his boss, Education Minister Peter Fassbender, say this is
simply the stick to go with the bonus carrot -- that's how you bargain. And
they say that Griffin's overall ruling that the government intentionally tried
to provoke a full-scale strike in 2011-12 is under appeal.
But
they are provoking a strike again, and the reason is simple.
If all
teachers walk off the job, the government believes it can legislatively impose a
contract that it couldn't negotiate fairly.
Indeed,
that was Griffin's conclusion
regarding the 2011 situation: "The government thought that a teachers'
strike would give the government a political advantage in imposing legislation
that the public might otherwise not support."
But with zero
success to date, and multiple court decisions in favour of the union over the
years, it's more than likely the BC Liberals are going to get stung again.