By Doug Draper
Great news this February 24 for students at Niagara College and 23 other colleges across the province.
The flag of Niagara College will continue to fly above its campuses with students walking in and out of their classrooms thanks to the end of a strike stand-off with the province's college teachers union.
Late this day, the Ontario Labour Relations Board has finally confirmed that a slight majority of college teachers across the province – 51.45 per cent – has accepted an offer by the province’s college presidents. This close vote in favour of the offer averts a strike that could have wreaked havoc for some 450,000 students – just as they are working to complete an academic year so many of them and their parents have sacrificed so much for in time and money.
The confirmation that a slight majority of college teachers – a total of about 54 per cent of them at Niagara College alone – has accepted this offer that gives the most senior teachers in the province’s college system the highest annual pay (more than $102,000 a year by 2011) of any college teachers in the country, is a tribute to slightly more than half of our province’s college teachers who showed some grounding in the realities most of the rest of us in the world out here are facing today.
As for the union representatives for Ontario Public Services Employees Union – the union that continued playing a game of brinkmanship with the academic year of our province’s college students, even when it was clear, this January, that they had the thinnest of mandates to strike – I would suggest that those responsible college teachers out there take another look at them to the point of replacing them with representatives that show more respect for the concerns of students and the general public – many on fixed and lower incomes – who are struggling through their taxes to pay for our post-secondary schools and the good work they are doing.
These OPSEU representatives – so arrogant and self-righteous during this latest, so-unnecessary stand off with a college presidents’ group that has offered them a 5.9 per cent increase in teacher’s salaries over the next three years – should be run out off their bully pulpits on a rail.
They are certainly not doing at least half of the college teachers across this province any favours when it comes to giving the public that pays your salaries a proper impression of the best of our teachers.
In urging the teachers earlier this February to vote against an offer most other workers – to the extent that people in this and surrounding regions still have jobs – they have shown a total disconnect with the realities the rest of the community are facing today. And one cannot help but wonder what kind of parallel universe they are operating in.
These OPSEU representatives have done responsible, hardworking teachers across this region and province a disservice through their lack of sensitivities to students and to the public at large as they continued to make demands for salary and benefit increases – even when it was obvious that they did not have a truly solid mandate – that were completely out of line with the realities so many of us in the rest of the community are facing today in one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depession of the 1930s.
I would suggest that the next time you get a chance to take vote on who should be representing you on your union, that you vote out these arrogant ideologues and vote in people who have the concerns of the greater community of students and taxpaying residents of our province in mind.
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