- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,212
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
The Ontario Liberals’ payments to teachers’ unions for their drawn-out labour negotiations suggest the government has lost track of whose interests it’s supposed to be looking out for.
The story has dribbled out over days since the Globe and Mail broke it: The government has paid three of Ontario’s four big teachers’ unions a total of $2.5 million to cover the costs of long and nasty bargaining for their latest contracts. The fourth, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, is still in negotiations; its president Sam Hammond says ETFO wouldn’t take any money if it were offered.
Those negotiations are deteriorating: the elementary teachers announced Thursday they’ll stop running extracurricular activities next Wednesday. (You should know my two kids go to a public elementary school with ETFO-represented teachers who are lovely.) The government is also still bargaining with unions representing school support staff.
Here is the case for the payments, as given by Education Minister Liz Sandals. This time around, the province ordered changes in how teachers’ contracts are negotiated, so union leaders and provincial representatives have bargained face-to-face rather than trying to reach template agreements through proxies at individual school boards.
“As this is the first round under the [new system], the process required more time and resources from all parties involved. This will not be the case in future rounds,” Sandals says. The work involved in finalizing agreements between individual school boards and local unions based on the provincewide foundation also won’t be funded, she says. But they did make similar payments after negotiating contracts as far back as 2003, when the Liberals won power.
The case against the payments … well, there are several.
First, negotiations can go on and on if there’s no particular pressure on either side to settle. That’s a constant hazard in public-sector bargaining, where there’s no danger that labour strife will send customers elsewhere. Students and parents will still be there when the teachers and the government sort everything out, no matter how long it takes.
Second, there’s the look of the thing. Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals got a lot of help in 2014 from unions, especially public-sector ones, that were thoroughly freaked out by the prospect of a Progressive Conservative government that had promised to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs. Money, volunteers, advertising. Now the teachers’ unions are fighting with the government they helped elect, aiming to extract more public money for their members, and the government is helping them do it.
The elementary teachers, the ones increasing their pressure tactics, already got a $113-million payoff from the government, vastly greater than anything on offer here. That was to compensate them for having screwed up previously by misplaying their hand and losing out on pay hikes all the other teachers’ unions managed to negotiate.
Third, where did the money come from? The Liberals have lived up to the letter of their pledge to hold new public-sector contracts to a standard they call “net zero.” This is supposed to mean that any pay increases get balanced by cuts to compensation budgets somewhere else. And indeed, some of the money for inflation-level raises for public high-school teachers is coming from rejigging payouts for unused sick days.
But some of it has come from $20 million previously meant to be spent on hiring extra staff for programs to help students at risk of dropping out. Sandals says those programs have already fulfilled their function, dropout rates are down, and the money’s not needed any longer. The Liberals call this “no cuts to the classroom,” which is baloney. It might be a cut the government can justify, but it’s a cut.
Neither Wynne nor Sandals would reveal, despite direct questions put to them in the legislature on Thursday, where they found the $2.5 million for the unions. Wynne filibustered her way through multiple questions with a serialized history lesson on teacher bargaining going back to the 1990s.
There’s no sign in any of this of value for anyone outside the system — students or parents, taxpayers interested in an efficient government or citizens more broadly interested in an effective one. A government that can’t or won’t tell us where it’s finding money or why it’s spending it is not making a strong case for itself.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The story has dribbled out over days since the Globe and Mail broke it: The government has paid three of Ontario’s four big teachers’ unions a total of $2.5 million to cover the costs of long and nasty bargaining for their latest contracts. The fourth, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, is still in negotiations; its president Sam Hammond says ETFO wouldn’t take any money if it were offered.
Those negotiations are deteriorating: the elementary teachers announced Thursday they’ll stop running extracurricular activities next Wednesday. (You should know my two kids go to a public elementary school with ETFO-represented teachers who are lovely.) The government is also still bargaining with unions representing school support staff.
Here is the case for the payments, as given by Education Minister Liz Sandals. This time around, the province ordered changes in how teachers’ contracts are negotiated, so union leaders and provincial representatives have bargained face-to-face rather than trying to reach template agreements through proxies at individual school boards.
“As this is the first round under the [new system], the process required more time and resources from all parties involved. This will not be the case in future rounds,” Sandals says. The work involved in finalizing agreements between individual school boards and local unions based on the provincewide foundation also won’t be funded, she says. But they did make similar payments after negotiating contracts as far back as 2003, when the Liberals won power.
The case against the payments … well, there are several.
First, negotiations can go on and on if there’s no particular pressure on either side to settle. That’s a constant hazard in public-sector bargaining, where there’s no danger that labour strife will send customers elsewhere. Students and parents will still be there when the teachers and the government sort everything out, no matter how long it takes.
Second, there’s the look of the thing. Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals got a lot of help in 2014 from unions, especially public-sector ones, that were thoroughly freaked out by the prospect of a Progressive Conservative government that had promised to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs. Money, volunteers, advertising. Now the teachers’ unions are fighting with the government they helped elect, aiming to extract more public money for their members, and the government is helping them do it.
The elementary teachers, the ones increasing their pressure tactics, already got a $113-million payoff from the government, vastly greater than anything on offer here. That was to compensate them for having screwed up previously by misplaying their hand and losing out on pay hikes all the other teachers’ unions managed to negotiate.
Third, where did the money come from? The Liberals have lived up to the letter of their pledge to hold new public-sector contracts to a standard they call “net zero.” This is supposed to mean that any pay increases get balanced by cuts to compensation budgets somewhere else. And indeed, some of the money for inflation-level raises for public high-school teachers is coming from rejigging payouts for unused sick days.
But some of it has come from $20 million previously meant to be spent on hiring extra staff for programs to help students at risk of dropping out. Sandals says those programs have already fulfilled their function, dropout rates are down, and the money’s not needed any longer. The Liberals call this “no cuts to the classroom,” which is baloney. It might be a cut the government can justify, but it’s a cut.
Neither Wynne nor Sandals would reveal, despite direct questions put to them in the legislature on Thursday, where they found the $2.5 million for the unions. Wynne filibustered her way through multiple questions with a serialized history lesson on teacher bargaining going back to the 1990s.
There’s no sign in any of this of value for anyone outside the system — students or parents, taxpayers interested in an efficient government or citizens more broadly interested in an effective one. A government that can’t or won’t tell us where it’s finding money or why it’s spending it is not making a strong case for itself.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
