Union Bosses For College Teachers Continue To Leave Students’ Academic Year Twisting In The Wind

By Doug Draper

In case you haven’t heard or read it already, a vote this February 10 on a contract offer Ontario’s colleges have made to their teachers is so close to call it could take several more days before the final results are known.

This parking lot of Niagara College's Welland campus could be empty soon if college teachers' union follows through on its strike threat.

That means that more than four-hundred thousand full- and part-time students at Niagara College and more than 20 other colleges across the province are left worrying about whether there will be a teachers strike that disrupts their studies as they should be working toward their final exams and the end of this academic year for possibly another 10 days or so.

The February 10 vote by some 9,000 college teachers across Ontario was reportedly so close that slightly more than 51 per cent of the teachers – by a margin of 210 votes – said “yes” to the college presidents’ offer. Apparently there are about 300 “mail-in votes” left to be counted by the Ontario Labour Relations Board which must hire the most sluggish people in the world to recount votes because we are told it may take the OLRB another week and a half to let the students and public at large in on the final count.

The whole thing is disgusting for the young people and their families investing well over $3,000 a year now for tuition and for over-priced text books (often foisted on them by college teachers who author them with information anyone can find on the internet or in any well-stocked library) to pay the freight, including the salaries and benefits of college teachers who are already among the best paid in all of Canada.

It is also disgusting given that the 5.9 per cent salary increase the college presidents have offered teachers over the next three years would raise the maximum salary of college teachers to $102,000 annually -the highest in the country.

But obviously that is not good enough for a small group of zealots from the Ontario Public Service running the union. They continue demanding a 7.5 per cent wage increase over the next three years, even while insisting that salary is not the issue in so much as possible increases in workload around their 15 or so hours per week of classroom time and the possibility more students per teachers in their classrooms.

An increased workload? More students to serve? Well get out of the classroom and join the real world where many of the rest of out here are lucky enough to see any kind of raise at all while we put in more and more hours per week, often taking it home on weekends, just to stay afloat.

In all fairness to the college teachers themselves, it appears that half of them – given the vote on the colleges’ offer – realize that and they are willing to do the socially reasonable thing on behalf of their students, their families and the larger communities they serve, and accept what is, by all accounts, the only offer the college presidents can afford on behalf of the taxpayers of this province.

As for the rest and the small group of OPSEU reps that are willing to hold the remainder of the school year for students up for ransom as they make for one more greedy pitch to suck whatever is left out of the wallets of their students and the taxpayers of Ontario who pay their salaries, I will go back to basics.

If the final vote count by the Ontario Labour Relations Board shows the college presidents’ offer has been rejected by a few votes, just move forward toward a strike toward the end of the academic year for these students. And please spare us this business, as one of your OPSEU bosses said, that you really “don’t want any disruption of the students’ year.”

That is baloney and you know it. Threatening to wreck the students’ year is the only bargaining chip you have. If you were really concerned about disrupting the remainder of the students’ year, you would agree right now to go out on strike this July and August, when the students’ academic year is over and they have half a chance of getting a summer job to pay the tuition that helps support your salaries next year.

I will repeat what I have said in columns before. Those teachers who are so out to lunch with the realities so many of the rest of us are facing in this economy and would strike against the offer the college presidents’ now have on the table, should be fired. How can they teach young people to go out and work in the real world if they are that out of touch with the real world themselves?

If I were the college presidents, I would be working now to find talented people out there who are willing to take their place in the event they go on strike. There are many talented people out here who have a passion for their fields of work and would likely do a wonderful job of passing their passion and knowledge on to younger generations for the money that these teachers are being paid now.

Call their bluff! If you move to fire them, I’ll bet the majority would be back in the classroom faster than it would take them to mark a ‘true-and-false’ test.

As I said in an earlier column on this, I don’t take what I am saying about this bunch lightly because I once helped start union and I have been a long-time supporter of the union movement. I continue to believe that if it were not for the United Auto Workers (now the Canadian Auto Workers on the Ontario side of the border), the steel workers, paper mill workers unions and other, generations of us would not have enjoyed the middle-class lifestyles we have since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But I’ve found it harder and harder to make that argument in a new age where unions have lost so much of the strength they had in the 1960s and 70s. And this bunch of bozos in OPSEU don’t make the job of defending unions any easier because it is so blatant that they are ready to put their grab for another two-to-three pay raise per year ahead of the interests of their students and the taxpayers they work. They are actually pitting their self-interests ahead of those of the larger community of working and middle-class people they should feel honoured to serve.

If you also feel it is time the provincial government step in and stop this group of OPSEU bullies from using the academic year of young students as a pawn in their game, contact your local provincial member of parliament and demand that the government put an end to this nonsense Right Now!

You can contact St. Catharines MPP at jbradley.mpp@liberal.ola.org, Niagara Falls MPP Kim Craitor at kcraitor.mpp@liberal.ola.org. Niagara-West Glanbrook MPP Tim Hudak at timhudak@niagara.net and Peter Kormos at pkormos-co@ndp.on.ca.

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