We won't back down? What else do you call this ragged retreat, first three unions, then a fourth, then at last the fifth? The largest teachers strike in Canadian history began as a show of muscle by one of the most powerful organized labour groups in the province: a naked attempt to dictate education policy to an elected government, in defiance not only of democracy but of the law. And what have the teachers to show for two weeks' lost pay? Union has been set against union, strikers against anti- strikers, the membership feels betrayed by its leaders -- and the government hasn't budged.
Bill 160, the legislation supposedly at the heart of the dispute, remains unchanged in every major respect. The province will assume control of education property taxes, as before, rudely shoving aside the school boards.
It will determine the amount of paid preparation time teachers are allotted -- more to the point, it will cut it by a third -- as well as maximum class sizes, issues that were previously decided in negotiations between the unions and the boards. These were the issues on which the union leadership led the members into battle: money and power. These were the prizes the teachers were told were theirs to be won. How cruelly they have been misled.
If anything, the teachers lost ground. Principals and vice-principals, who began the strike as members of the teachers unions, end it on the outside, the legislation having been amended mid-strike to remove them. The government, for its part, began the strike denying it had any plans to cut education funding. It has ended it unapologetically vowing to slash another $700-million out of the $14-billion education budget, with much of the savings coming from the elimination of 7,500 teachers' jobs. To add to the divisions within their ranks, then, the unions come out of the strike with fewer members, less money, and greatly diminished power.
Yet to read most accounts, you'd think it was the government that had collapsed in a heaving mass of bitterness and recrimination. Not wanting to be seen to gloat, the Education minister declines to assess who won or lost, while the press seems content to parrot the union line -- it helps when you have five different leaders to quote -- that the unions had won a great "moral victory," that they remained "united in opposition to Bill 160", that indeed the strike had not really ended, but would continue "in another form." (What would they call a divorce, one wonders? Marriage in another form?)
Moral victories are for losers. The basis for this claim seems to be that the teachers had won support from a larger section of the public on some polls than they started with. Yet as the union leaders themselves admitted, this was at best a temporary advantage: the longer the strike lasted, the more likely it was that the public would turn against them. What exactly are we to understand from this strange boast: the public is behind us -- for now? That we sold out at the top of the market?
If you really want to assess the impact of this strike, you have to look at the longer term. The unions like to say that they have "exposed" the government's hidden agenda for school reform: vouchers, charter schools, and other instruments of "parent power." But if this is true, then it will be the unions that have put it on the agenda, not the government. And if that is where the battle-lines are drawn the next time, it's hard to see this as a winner for the unions. What will the teachers chant then? No to school choice! Parents, stay out of our schools!
At that point, all of the unions' rhetoric about "local control," used to such vivid effect in recent weeks, will come back to haunt them. It was easy to drape themselves in the mantle of democracy when the government was seen to be wresting money and power away from the local boards, however corrupt and ineffectual these may have been. But when that money and power is to be passed down to parents, when the interests of the unions and parents are seen to diverge more clearly, how will the "moral victory" be won then?