Question: Why did Provincial Executive Council recommend the mediator’s proposed terms of settlement to teachers, and what does that mean?
Answer: Based on what I have been seeing on social media, this might be the most contentious question I have ever answered in this space. In doing so, I hope to bring some clarity to a nuanced and complicated question. I don’t anticipate winning any friends.
Let’s start out by talking about mediation and the nature and purpose of the recommended terms that have emerged out of it. The process that the Association and the Teacher Employers Bargaining Committee (TEBA) initiated when the parties reached an impasse at the bargaining table was formal mediation. Unable to proceed, a senior mediator, Deborah Howes, was brought in to see if they could be brought to some agreement. It’s important to note that Howes is entirely independent — she does not take orders from the government.
Also, Howes was engaged in formal, not voluntary, mediation. That distinction is important because it is the last procedural step when a union’s remaining option is to proceed toward a strike. It also explains why we are in a different place now than the United Nurses of Alberta’s (UNA’s) members were when they turned down their first proposed settlement, a product of voluntary mediation. When that happened, the UNA and Alberta Health Services still had the opportunity to go to final mediation, which ultimately produced a revised settlement that nurses have now accepted overwhelmingly. Teachers, however, do not have the luxury of taking another kick at the mediation can to see if something better might result. If these final, mediated terms are rejected, the ATA will then proceed to seek authorization from members to conduct a supervised strike vote.
There is a joke about mediators that the most successful ones never leave anyone feeling happy. Deborah Howes is very successful. After listening very carefully to both the Association and TEBA bargainers, and having moved between them, testing where their core interests lie and where there might be room for some flexibility, Howes came back with proposed terms for settlement that were very disappointing and highly problematic for both sides. Although the ATA had pressed hard for substantially larger salary increases and for significant enhancements, including explicit limits on class size and reduced hours of work, these were not on offer. Many of you are disappointed and angry they are absent. There is a lively discussion going on among teachers about the perceived failings of the proposal, so I won’t detail here the concerns that you have shared and I have heard.
But it is important to note that Howes’ proposed terms have also pushed TEBA and the government beyond what they would previously have regarded as acceptable or even possible. The provision of salary increases and allowances above the 12 percent government mandate, and the adoption, provincewide, of the Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan (ASEBP) are very hard pills for them to swallow. In particular, the provision that the government, in the face of highly volatile economic and fiscal conditions, will set aside $405 million in new money above and beyond the budget to improve classroom conditions, and that teachers would play a formal and decisive role in determining how those funds are spent provincially and locally, pushed the government well beyond its comfort zone to the very edge, requiring final approval to be secured at the very highest levels.
So that was the imperfect proposal that was presented to your elected representatives on Provincial Executive Council. They had to decide whether to recommend the mediator’s proposal to the membership. Fundamentally, making this decision involved answering a two-part question: “Are these proposed terms the best that are likely to be achieved in the current circumstances through the means available to teachers, and are they at least minimally acceptable?” There are other much simpler questions that might be asked, but in the final analysis, they are irrelevant.
After much deliberation and considerable soul-searching, Council voted to recommend the mediator’s proposed terms of settlement to members. This has had the result of advancing the proposals to members to vote on themselves. Had Council taken a different course, the mediator’s recommendations would simply have vanished from consideration, and the two parties would be back to where they had stalled prior to mediation.
This gives rise to several issues. While individual Council members may have arrived at their own conclusions for different reasons, it was Council as a body that was charged by the mediator to decide, and it is that collective decision that now binds it. Some have suggested that Council voted the way it did just so that the mediator’s proposed terms could be put before the membership, and that it does not actually support them. This is incorrect. As I noted above, Council had a very specific question to answer: if Council members individually or collectively believed that teachers could do better through continuing negotiations or, more probably, through strike action, or if they believed that the suggested terms were not even minimally acceptable, then they were obliged to vote down the mediator’s proposal. Council decided otherwise and now, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm among its members, it is supporting the proposed terms of settlement and recommending that the teachers accept them.
If you think about it, there is no other way it could be. Final mediation is about attempting to find a solution that works for both sides. It is not about defining a new floor from which bargaining can proceed to the advantage of one party or the other. Final mediation can be nothing other than a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
Well, now you as teacher in the field get to share a personal version of your elected representatives’ pain. It will soon be time for each member to ask themselves not, “Is this what I would wish for or deserve to have?” but rather “Is this good enough under the circumstances, and the best that we can practically achieve given the available alternatives?”
As this column is going to print, the Association is running processes and producing materials that will help members with that critical question. Please attend one or even more of the member information meetings being held online and in communities throughout the province. Available on the ATA's website, both the public and members-only side, for detailed information about the mediator’s proposal and FAQs responding to specific questions that you are asking. Find out the salary implications the recommended terms would have for you by using the online calculator. Finally, cast your vote between May 2 and May 5. This is about your future; it is ultimately your choice to make.
ATA Executive Secretary