teacher strike

[se7entse7en]

True, but think of the risk on the Gov't's side.

[nature boy]

whoa, i didn't know about the government offering to get more support workers. i always thought that it's the union behind all of this. as in, it was never the government vs the teachers or the government vs public education as much as it was the government vs the union.

unions suck. i always thought so. all they do is protect the lazy workers and take away the benefits of the hard workers. kinda reminds me of communism haha.

[joel]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... -1.2762788
teacher vote result 99% in favor of binding arbitration to end strike

[Wetundies]

That's what the teachers want, not the gov't. I still don't see why teachers need to increase benefits? They already have a pretty good benefit package. Who really uses 50 massages a year?

[se7entse7en]

I thought the massages were taken off the table long ago. The real question, imo, is why's the gov't still bring them up?

[geForce]

So the new deal that the teachers have voted yes on has been kept mostly a secret. They released some major points to the media, like a 7.25% wage increase, signing bonus, improved benefits and $400million budget to hire more teachers within the next 6 years. However, as I expected, there isn't much in there about the class size and composition, at least not from what they've released to the media.

They negotiated for bill E80 to be negated, but that doesn't improve things. It just makes it so it doesn't supposedly get worse. I guess there's also the $400million for more teachers to be hired, but that doesn't directly address the class size or composition issue because within 6 years because there may be an equal increase in the number of new students. I actually feel sad that things turned out this way... I am not a big fan of the BCTF or the government.

[joel]

...that's because basically the teachers caved, due to the financial strain of the strike...

... the only minor win for the teachers is the E80 taken off, so that the court battle could continue to settle the classroom size/composition issue. The government never had any intention of caving on this issue and is why they continue to spend considerable finances to litigate the issue in court.

Unfortunately with the new wording of the CBA, I think the BCTF have weakened their case in the courts too. the government were particular to indicate that signing bonus as a "grievance" payment, which they will likely use that in their appeals case...

the financing for this grievance payment, which by the way they have easily made up and then some from teacher wages that they have not paid out since June.

in many cases, the increased wages (over the 6 year period), the signing bonus, and increased benefits will not even cover the loses of wages that the teachers have already accumulated, despite some adamant that the "teachers are only in it for the money"...(this is not even considering that teachers have had a pay freeze over the past two years, so technically, factoring in even a very conservative inflation rate for that 8 year time span, teachers are getting a pay reduction. )

the 75 million a year to the learning improvement will directly help address class size and composition though. that budget is ear-marked for new hires, so since it affects the teacher to student ratio as a whole (regardless of how many more students there are), which affects class size.

In fact, if the expectation is that student enrolment is going to increase over the next 6 years, it makes even more sense, that this improvement fund should increase year over year... which it won't be.

if you consider that the government bills that have been affecting class size since 2002 have roughly cut 300 million a year in education spending for the past 12 years. then the 75M doesn't even cover a third annually of what the teachers had previously negotiated it to be...

...this deal is a huge win for the BC Liberals in terms of what they want.

[geForce]

[nature boy]

yay ryan's in school.
so far he likes it, but we got the teacher that we didn't want (the other kindergarten teacher is cooler and seems more fun, and this one is supposedly going on mat leave soon... go figure).

i still won't go for private school though. not unless the government pays me for it tee hee.