The union representing Ontario’s secondary school teachers is calling for the repeal of a “broken system” that it says has stalled negotiations weeks prior to the expiration of teacher contracts. “Our members are dealing with job loss, growing workload, larger class sizes, increasingly complex student needs, contracting out, staffing shortages. These are the conversations we should be having at the bargaining table,” Martha Hradowy, the president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF), told local union leaders in downtown Toronto on Wednesday. “Instead, we’re waiting for a legal process to tell us which table is even permitted to have them. That should concern every single one of us, because local bargaining matters.” The School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, which became law in 2014, lays out the rules for the education sector’s collective bargaining process, which has two tiers: central and local. At central bargaining, the groups that represent all English and French public-school boards will negotiate with the four education unions, which usually involves wages, benefits, and policy issues. At the local table, boards talk with bargaining units to address issues that are specific to their school community. Hradowy shared on Wednesday that after multiple rounds, the bargaining has been stuck at determining which table certain issues should be discussed. “For the two of three rounds of bargaining we’ve had with this government, we have been unable to reach agreement on it,” she said. Hradowy claimed that the province is pushing more issues to central bargaining. “At some point, you have to stop trying to make a broken system work and acknowledge that the system itself is the problem. We’ve reached that point,” Hradowy said as she called for the repeal of the bargaining law. “Repeal it because workers should not have to fight for the right to bargain before they can actually bargain. Because local bargaining units should have a meaningful voice in negotiating the issues that affect their members, and because collective bargaining should be about solving problems, not spending months arguing about which table is allowed to solve them.” In a statement to CTV News Toronto, Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra confirmed that bargaining talks are currently in the first stage, which is to determine what issues will be negotiated at central or local tables. “Those decisions are still underway, with some unions choosing to bring this matter to the Ontario Labour Relations Board. We respect their decision to do so and at all times are ready to continue discussions on the scope of central versus local issues before proceeding to the next stage of negotiations,” Calandra said in a statement. Speaking to CTV News after her speech, Hradowy reiterated that the bargaining law is no longer working, especially at the local level, and said Ontario needs “to start from scratch.” “The introduction of the School Board Collective Bargaining Act was designed to have the parties negotiate the funding, and then the funding be able to flow to the locals. And we have not seen that,” she said. “We have seen the government take a more central role in negotiations rather than the unions and the employers discussing the issues that are important to them.” Hradowy said the language around transfers, layoffs, and redundancy, which has been dealt with at the local table, is one example of an issue that the province wants to include at the central table. “What happens in Kenora cannot be equally applied to large urban boards like in Toronto or Peel. There has to be an ability for locals to talk about local circumstances that are unique to their boards,” she said. The collective agreements for all of Ontario’s teachers’ and education workers’ unions expire on Aug. 31. Earlier this week, the unions said job action isn’t off the table amid the negotiation impasse.
