(The following article by Malcolm Howe, a professor in Niagara College’s School of Business, is a response to a commentary Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper posted on this site and in Niagara This Week on Jan. 21. That commentary, entitled ‘College Teachers Who Strike This Time Should Be Fired’ in NTW and ‘Any College Teacher Who Strikes This Time Should Be Sacked’ has been republished below Howe’s article. We encourage you to share your views in the comment boxes below these articles.)
By Malcolm Howe
I felt a sensational title, much like “College Teachers Who Strike This Time Should Be Fired”, was appropriate as this is the response you invited.
I understand, Mr. Draper, that you have a job to do and expressing your opinion is certainly within the rules. I wish, however, that you would take the time to make sure you understand the facts before you start writing.
I am a College teacher. Please understand that my opinions may not be shared by all of my colleagues. Also understand that I do not make the “Sunshine List” of those who earn $100,000+ per year. I will not make the list next year, regardless of the settlement we receive when the dust settles.
Like all College teachers, my pay is determined on a grid system. I have been at the College since 1992 and have been nominated by my students for awards several times. Over my tenure at the College I have worked for two Presidents, six Vice-Presidents Academic, and six direct supervisors. All of these individuals do earn significantly more than $100,000 per year. But this issue is NOT about money. I am not asking for a big increase in pay. I am not asking for fewer class hours per week. I am asking for the right to choose how best to deliver the material for which I was hired as an expert.
After the last strike in 2006, College teachers were ordered back to work and an arbitrator ruled in our favor. Most faculty members were asking for arbitration over the duration of the strike. There was seemingly no Management interest in settling. A key point of difference between the parties was the assignment of work and faculty involvement in course design and delivery. A joint task force of both faculty and managers produced a series of recommendations in this regard. The current management group accepted this report but refuses to implement the recommendations citing cost considerations. As it currently stands, Managers are free to “direct” how faculty deliver and evaluate courses. Practitioners who were hired for their expertise are not given the freedom to design methodologies that best suit the desired learning outcome. In fairness, some managers do work closely with the faculty. Unfortunately, there are others who do not. In my experience, some managers are more concerned with the cost of course delivery than the quality of the in-class experience. The students, their parents and the tax-payers deserve better than this. You did not take the time to report this part of the OPSEU platform.
Mr. Draper, I love my job. I never wake up wishing I didn’t have to go to work. You can sling arrows at me all day and I will take it. I appreciate the fact that I am paid well relative to a fair percentage of the population. Given my educational background and work experience, I could command much higher pay in the private sector. Of course, that is a different world and I chose my place. I don’t regret that in any way. As many will point out, I am not tied to a clock and I have a great deal of vacation time through the year. Again, that was part of the trade-off that pushed me to leave the private sector. Outside of my paid time, I volunteer countless hours to train and coach students who compete and win in provincial business competitions. If you are worried about how much income I make, I invite an open discussion of both our finances in a public forum. The College will be a great place to work and learn long after I am gone. Still, I like to think that many students have really benefitted from what I do. I see former students nearly everywhere I go and they are positive and friendly without exception. In fact, I have had many students go out of their way to thank me for working them as hard as I did.
I would like to see a fundamental change to our system. I find it ridiculous that we, the College teachers and Managers, hold our customers hostage while we squabble over contracts. Have you thought to ask why no Colleges gave students refunds or discounts after the last strike? They are no less to blame for any labour dispute than the Faculty. In my opinion, the Management negotiations are not often performed in good faith. During the last strike, I was bombarded with suggestions that the average College class size was under 30 students. At that time, my small classes averaged closer to 40 students. For every one hour I spent with groups of that size, I would spend two hours with classes of at least twice that many students. I suggest mandatory binding arbitration in times when the two groups cannot successfully negotiate. This would eliminate strikes altogether. With respect to salary, why not have ALL public employee salaries tied to some standard cost of living index? It is the negotiated wage settlements that “ratchet” up the entire system and cost taxpayers more than is necessary. Let me be clear – all politicians, educators, hospital workers, bureaucrats should have their salaries tied to an independently collected cost-of-living index.
I invite you to print this letter in its entirety but ask that you not use it in any other way. You are clearly bold enough to take a stand. Please be bold enough to print my response.
Any College Teacher Who Strikes This Time Should Be Sacked
By Doug Draper
It appears to be turning into a once-every-four years ritual for the union representing Ontario’s college teachers. And it goes something like this.
Receive a deal for a new salary and benefits contract in late summer or early fall from the presidents of the province’s 24 colleges and play around with it to the point of rejecting it by January of the following year.
The union then calls for and wins a strike vote from its members and, however weak or narrow the mandate for a strike might be, threaten to strike anyway. And always – and when I say always, I mean ALWAYS – make sure a deadline is set for some time in February or early March when a strike would exact maximum punishment on the very students the teachers belonging to this union claim they care so much about.
In other words, throw into jeopardy hundreds of thousands of students’ school year – one they and their families have scrimped and saved and sacrificed for – because well, you know, the teachers are entitled to a two-to-three percent increase in wages every year, regardless of how badly the economy and the rest of us are doing outside of whatever bubble they choose to live in.
This is the stance this same grievous union – the Ontario Public Services Employees Union (OPSEU) representing more than 9,000 college teachers across the province– has taken again this January with a strike vote it won by a margin of roughly 57 per cent and a strike set for sometime in February if the college’s presidents and province don’t agree to their demand of a 2.5 per cent annual salary increase for their members over the next three years.
Well this time the college’s presidents, province, students and the rest of us who are paying for all of this should stand up to this bully union and say ‘No. We are not going to let you hold the academic year of some 150,000 full-time students and more than 300,000 part-time students hostage. Not this time.’
Either accept the offer the college presidents have put on the table – one that is pretty damn generous given the fact the rest of us are suffering through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and one that would given your members an eight-per-cent salary increase over the next four years up to a maximum of $103.975 – or any of your members that go out on strike are fired! And that should be the public’s final offer to these bullies – no retreat, no surrender.
Indeed, Ontario’s premier, Dalton McGuinty should show the courage to make this same kind of statement right about now to these thugs and place the anxiety more than 450,000 college students across this province to rest.
By now, I can almost sense what some of the long-time readers of my columns in various papers over the years may be thinking. ‘Gee, Draper has always come across like a diehard old lefty – even like a socialist or a bit of a ‘commie’ some times. Don’t tell me he is going to attack a union?’
Yes, he is going to attack a union. And I want anyone out there who’s prepared to now write me off as some sort of a right-wing, union basher to know that you are reading a column by someone who helped start a union at a newspaper in this region at a time when ‘His Lordship’, the now jailed Conrad Black and his minions, were firing people in the newsroom where I was working out the door.
As a columnist, I’ve also had a long record of showing support for unions representing our auto workers, paper mill workers and others in the trades (and they certainly know that) who’ve gone so far as to make repeated concessions on their wages and benefits in the face of relentless job cuts. These are unions that also regularly get involved in other broader civic causes across the community, and the president of CAW 199 president Wayne Gates showed it again earlier this month when he joined a gathering of residents in south Niagara (where his local has few members) to protest the closing of hospital services there.
We don’t get much of that broader civic interest from teachers’ unions. For them, it is mostly about how much more they can get for themselves from the milk cow – the milk cow being we the tax payers and the students who are going further and further into debt paying for the tuitions and the overpriced text books to cover their salaries and benefits.
Four years ago this winter, this same college teachers union was warned repeatedly by the province’s college presidents that if they got the 12.6 per cent wage they were demanding, they would suck dry most of an infusion of funding the province granted to the colleges for a number purposes other than their wages. But the union didn’t much mind. It orchestrated 18-day strike anyway – a period that came dangerously close to gutting the winter term for students – and in the end got virtually everything it wanted in the wage category.
It was disgusting enough then that this union demonstrated, through its actions, that it could not give a flying fig for using an infusion of our tax dollars and dollars and students’ jacked-up tuition fees for anything other than their wages and benefits.
It is even more obscene to think that this union and a majority of its members are trying to pull the same act now, as so many others of us out here – outside their bubble – have lost jobs or have had them downsized and are struggling to pay the bills in the middle of an economic tsunami.
In fairness to more than 40 per cent of the college members who are members of this union, they voted against strike action and must certainly realize that the rest of us, including their students, are feeling a bit of pain out here. At least some of them must get it, that the milk cow has been drained and there is no more money. The province is facing record deficits. We’ve been sucked dry.
But that probably won’t register very much with the college teacher union’s president, Warren ‘Smokey’ Thomas, who has already had a few months to think about it. Instead, Smokey and his gang will likely be sending out to their members the same kind of talking points we heard in the weeks and days leading up to the last strike.
They talk about how hard teachers work and how much value they add to the community. But then most of us are working hard at things that add value to the larger community. Just ask the people of Toronto, for example, how much value sanitation workers bring to their communities after a strike last summer that saw their neigbhourhoods infested with stinking piles of household waste. Ask anyone who has had a water pipe burst in their home how much value a plumber brings to their lives at a time like that. Probably a lot more than a teacher Smokey, unless the teacher happens to have a background in shop.
Then there is the one that frosts this veteran of being on the receiving end of teachers unions’ talking points the most. ‘We care about the students, you know. … We are also out here on this picket line for them.’
No you’re not. Spare us the crap!
You are using these kids and their dream of successfully completing their year so they can hopefully find a summer job to help pay your wages again as a pawn. They are the only real bargaining chip you’ve got Smokey, and you know it. If they weren’t, why not start your strike in June and let your members beat the pavement in front of these campuses all through July and August?
If you didn’t have the option of threatening to disrupt and possibly gut the school year for hundreds of thousands of students across this province, who among the rest of us would care if you were out there marching around with picket signs for the next four years? Probably no one.
So here’s what should be the final offer to you Smokey. Show some social responsibility – recognize that many of these students and the rest of us out here are feeling pain in this economy – and accept the deal the college presidents have put on the table.
And here’s the counter offer. If you don’t accept the college presidents’ deal, those teachers who go out and form pickets should be fired immediately. There are plenty of qualified people out here who are willing and able to take their place for the salaries college teachers are getting paid today.
Don’t believe it Smokey. Then take a chance. Make our day.
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Being shot is a rather harsh punishment for expressing an opinion, don’t you think? It certainly would go a long way to bringing the press in line, though.