A Letter, An Update, and A Wish

Seasonal type greetings everyone,

 The Board’s letter

The Minister of Education recently sent a letter to all of the school boards in the province where he outlined the liberal government’s so-called “Cooperative Gains Mandate”. This is their new code for the old, “Net Zero Mandate”, which is all code for screw any fair wage increase. In the letter McRae calls on Boards to find a further savings in their budgets to fund a 1.5% wage increase for support staff.

There has been very interesting responses from Boards across the province. They have all replied to the minister with very firm “NO’s”. They make it clear they have no room to cut. Attached is our Board’s response to the minister’s letter. A number of Boards (ours included) have gone one step further and called for a fair wage increase for all employee groups, to be funded from the government.

I sent a note of appreciation and support to our Board for the stand they are taking.

Retirement Workshop

We have been trying to arrange a retirement workshop in our local for a while. For one reason or another it has not worked out.

Well, wait no more. We have recently arranged to have a retirement workshop in our local on Saturday February 9th, 2012. We had to choose between having a workshop in the evening or on a Saturday. An evening workshop would mean lots of travel at night after a long day and there would be no time to book individual appointments after the workshop. So, we opted for a Saturday seminar. We will probably start later in the morning and there should be time to book some appointments with the presenter after the workshop. We should also be able to provide some snacks or lunch as well.

More information about time and place will follow in the New Year.

Local Bargaining

Each time you look at our Collective Agreement it becomes very clear, very quickly that it is a wee bit out of date. We have not really been able to re-negotiate most issues for over twenty years. The so-called ‘big ticket’ items, class size and composition, salary, benefits and prep time are dealt with at the provincial table. If you recall we tried to get our Board to negotiate some more substantive local issues last year, however BCPSEA soon put an end to that.

It seems as if we may be able to engage in some meaningful local bargaining in the New Year. This is not simply trying to negotiate relatively minor issues such as bulletin boards and internal mail. We should be able to negotiate more substantive local issues such as post and fill.

Last year we surveyed everyone about their priorities for local bargaining. From there we developed a list of local bargaining objectives and ratified them at a general meeting and we then worked on proposals to bring to a local table. And, that’s just about as far as things went.

It appears we will be able to try some local bargaining again. As soon as we know exactly what items could be on a local table we will visit all staffs to discuss our local bargaining objectives.

Learning Improvement Fund postings

If you remember we first started to talk to the district about the LIF back in June. We negotiated an agreement as to how the money would be spent. We consulted school staffs and we brought a proposal to the table, as did the district. We did not achieve everything we wanted but at the end of the day most of the money was spent on teaching staff spread across the district. It resulted in about 2.0 FTE extra positions in the district. ( Mind you there were also staffing cuts in September due to declining enrollment – but I suppose that is another discussion)

All the positions generated by the LIF were filled by September. They used the average cost of a teacher to work out how much would be allocated to each position. As it happens, most of the positions were filled with teachers very early in their careers and at the beginning stages of the salary grid. We argued there needed to be an accounting of the actual costs of filling the LIF positions. It was likely there would probably be more money available to be spent. After a little humming and hawing the district agreed to review the accounting early in the New Year.

We then decided it would be better to push that meeting forward to December and have the postings out and filled by the end of the school year. There was sufficient money left to fund about 1.0 FTE for the rest of the year. The LIF postings were coordinated with other postings in the district and have recently been filled. It should give everyone a better idea of LIF postings in the spring.

Happy, Happy Holidays

We have difficult jobs and lord knows the job of teaching is not getting any easier. Thank you for doing what you do. You make a difference in children’s lives.

I do hope everyone is able to enjoy a peaceful holiday. See you in the New Year.

Fred