I have been following the news in the past few weeks about public school labour relations in Ontario, my home province, and was surprised to learn about the Education Relations Commission (ERC) the other day. I came across it here:
- Kristin Rushowy, “Teachers’ strike: Obscure panel to decide this week whether it’s jeopardizing the school year,” 18 May 2015, The Star.com, http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/05/18/teacher-strike-obscure-panel-to-decide-this-week-whether-its-jeopardizing-the-school-year.html
The article has a bit of background on the commission, and basic information about the ongoing strikes. It also provides a helpful link to an Ontario Labour Relations Board webpage explaining that the ERC reports to the Ontario Minister of Education when called on to determine whether a work stoppage imperils students’ chances of completing their courses. Good to know!
So I’ve now added this advisory body to my mental roster of players in Ontario’s complex public education sector. Public sector labour relations involve degrees of complexity normally not present in the private sector. For one thing, these relations are regulated on a sector-wide basis. That is not the case for private sector areas of work in Canada, for which, in any case, the unionization rate is low at around 15%. Roughly three quarters of the public sector workforce is unionized in Canada, and that includes public school teachers from Kindergarten through grade 12. (Overall union density in Canada is about 30%. A nicely accessible source citing these basic figures is David Doorey’s Law of Work blog.)
Ontario’s elementary school teachers, kindergarten through grade 8, are members of 76 local unions belonging to the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). Secondary school teachers are also organized into regional unions, or bargaining units, and a provincial federation, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF). The regional unions are mirrored by regional boards of education. So the Elementary Teachers of Toronto (ETT), and OSSTF Toronto represent teachers working for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Regional school boards are also part of a larger umbrella organization, the Ontario Public School Boards Association (OPSBA)
Under the new bargaining arrangements initiated by The School Boards Collective Bargaining Act of 2014 (Bill 122), school boards and teachers’ unions are to negotiate agreements about local matters, while the two federations (ETFO and OSSTF) engage in central bargaining with the school boards association (OPSBA) and the province about more broadly applicable issues, especially compensation. The new system formalizes the place of the government in bargaining, which has been directly responsible for school board budgets for over a decade. You can look up the law on the Ontario Legislative Assembly website.
The decision by the currently strike-affected school boards to challenge the legality of the secondary teachers’ strikes is evidence that actors in Ontario’s education sector are testing the new format established by Bill 122. The challenge to the teachers’ strikes that is currently before the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) is ultimately about whether local teachers’ right to strike is limited to central bargaining issues. A number of decisions in recent years have interpreted labour rights broadly rather than narrowly, and the OLRB is no doubt aware of the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision that defended the right to strike in constitutional terms, in a case involving Saskatchewan’s unionized public sector workers.
There may be further legal testing of the grounds for work action under this law regardless of the outcome of the hearings at the OLRB, and time will tell whether the new collective bargaining structure improves on the old.
