After nearly four years of relative labour peace between the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) and the provincial education ministry, it appears the government expects teachers to go voluntary where MLAs are too fearful to tread and turn down guaranteed pay increases.
Alberta Education is currently in talks with the ATA and Alberta School Boards Association to hammer out a new five-year labour contract. While the current collective agreement doesn't expire until Aug. 31, 2012, a new deal could come into effect before the next school term that would see teachers forgo a scheduled 4.3 per cent wage hike, as determined by a percentage of the Alberta Weekly Earnings Index. In return, teachers would see “significant and enforceable” limits put in place for instruction and any tasks outside the classroom like supervision and parent-teacher conferences.
The proposal comes four years after Alberta taxpayers were asked to swallow huge concessions when the current collective agreement was signed in 2007. That deal saw Albertans pick up the $2.1-billion teachers' pension fund, guaranteed wage increases tied to the weekly index and one-time $1,500 payments to boot, all in exchange for a five-year moratorium on strikes. That was then, when the province spent at a record pace thanks to natural resource revenues that kept government coffers topped up almost as fast. Today, the government is still spending at a rapid, $39-billion clip, money from the natural resource tap has tightened a few turns and the government is staring at a $5-billion deficit.
On the surface, the proposed labour deal could help the province trim away at the deficit, but it also raises several more questions. For instance, if teachers give up wage increases in favour of less time in the classroom, what does that mean for the quality of education students will receive? Hiring more teachers to cover off the classroom gap would conceivably erode any cost savings. Given the province's track record of short-changing everything from school boards to cities, perhaps the plan is to pass the buck and leave it up to individual divisions, left with little to no powers, to figure out how to make do with less.
The fact that the ATA and education ministry have been in talks for five months is an encouraging sign that teachers recognize the scope of the province's fiscal quagmire and at least are willing to listen. Everyone needs to share the pain to get a stranglehold on next year's provincial budget, something Ed Stelmach and his cabinet ministers to this point have been unwilling to do. At the same time they're asking teachers to give up raises and mandating wage freezes for bureaucrats, Stelmach et al have consistently refused to reverse their MLA paydays tied to the Alberta Weekly Earnings Index or bonuses for cabinet. This display of poor leadership comes in spite of Progressive Conservative MLAs voluntarily reducing their workload by putting off the spring sitting of the legislature by a month. If the government is really serious about reigning in spending and sharing the pain, it should extend to everyone on the provincial payroll.
- St. Albert Gazette, a Great West Newspaper
