NORTH Shore public schools will likely be open but teacherless for three days next week after B.C.'s instructors voted to escalate strike action.
Members of the B.C. Teachers' Federation voted 87 per cent in favour of the initiative Wednesday night in response to a government plan to legislate an end to all job action for six months. The vote opens the door to a walkout Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week - but not to picketing - in accordance with a recent Labour Relations Board ruling.
"(Teachers) have voted overwhelmingly to resist the unjust actions of the provincial government in yet again moving to impose a contract on the province's 41,000 public school teachers," said the union in a release.
In a conference call Thursday morning, Education Minister George Abbott said the province was not encouraging parents to take their kids to school, but that if they had no alternative for care, they could drop them off to be supervised by principals and other administrative staff.
"We're certainly disappointed by the teachers' union decision," he said. "We already feel there has been significant disruption to student learning with Phase 1 of job action, which has gone on now for six months."
During that phase, teachers have refused certain nonclassroom duties, most notably the writing of report cards.
Any strike - including the Phase 1 action - will be nipped in the bud if and when the province's bill passes, but it's not clear yet when that will be. Abbott said the legislation will be going to second reading at 2 p.m. Thursday, and that debate will likely continue into next week.
"How long discussion goes on is going to be a product of the 85 members of the legislature and how long the opposition, in particular, wants to take," he said.
The LRB ruled Tuesday that teachers had to give two school days' warning before going on full strike, that the walkout could last for three consecutive school days initially and then for just one school day in five after that.
The document at the centre of the escalated strike, Bill 22 or the Education Improvement Act, was introduced by Abbott Tuesday. If passed, it will impose a six-month "cooling-off period" - a forced suspension of all forms of job action - and appoint a mediator to negotiate a deal between teachers and the employer within certain strict guidelines.
Those guidelines include the elimination of questions of class size from negotiations - a key demand from teachers - and the exclusion of any proposal that would involve a net increase in cost to the employer. Both restrictions will stay in place for a year and a half, until the next round of contract negotiations begins. The minister announced the plan just an hour after the LRB ruled that teachers could legally walk off the job.
In interviews Wednesday, the North Shore's union representatives were heavily critical of the province's move.
"It's anti-bullying day," said Rob Millard, president of the West Vancouver Teachers Association, "and we're being bullied."
A cooling-off period may sound reasonable on the surface, he said, but in reality it's just a strong-arm tactic that will ultimately hurt students.
"Teachers are pretty upset and pretty disappointed," he said. Millard's North Vancouver counterpart Daniel Storms was more emphatic.
"It's appalling," he said. "It doesn't befit a democratic society."
Forcing a mediator only to consider proposals that assume no net cost increase or restrictions on class size guts the negotiations and swings the process wildly in the government's favour, he said. And the fact it threatens fines against individuals who take part in illegal job action - $2,500 a day in Storm's case, as a union officer, and $475 a day for rank-and-file teachers - is intended unfairly to intimidate, he added.
"This befits a dictatorship," said Storms. "I would suspect that the BCTF will consider a legal challenge to the constitutionality of this bill."
The rejection of caps on classroom size will impact students' ability to learn immediately, said Millard, but the imposition of a contract could also hurt them in other ways over the long term if individual teachers start rolling back their involvement in extracurricular activities in protest.
"They might start shutting down what they give in their voluntary time," he said. "They might say: 'Why would I coach?' The teachers are fed up after 10 years; there's a lot of talk about that."
But the province defended the legislation as a reasonable and necessary step, pointing out that teachers might achieve some wage increase within the net-zero mandate by making trade-offs in other areas, and that although it eliminates rules on average class size for grades 4-12, it requires that teachers be compensated for taking more than 30 students in a class.
Also, the bill comes with a $165-million "Learning Improvement Fund." That money, spread over three years, can be used to hire additional staff or for other purposes.
"Taken together, these are significant gains that recognize the important role and contribution of teachers," said Abbott in a release Tuesday. "Using legislation to resolve stalled negotiations is never the preferred option, but we need to end the disruptive strike that's creating a strain in our schools and classrooms."
Bill 22 extends the previous collective agreement to the end of August, while mediation is underway.
