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.

This Niagara College campus In Niagara-on-the-Lake is a target of possible strike action by college teachers' union

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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