Oppose Attempts to Eliminate Our VoiceA challenge facing teachers and education workers as they come together for the annual meetings of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation and the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association is the necessity to expose and oppose the attempts to eliminate teachers' and education workers' decision-making authority over their day-to-day working conditions, which are students' learning conditions. Step by step since the 1990s the ruling class has moved to curtail the right of teachers and education workers as well as locally elected trustees to decide what happens in education. In order to extract billions from funds dedicated for K-12 education, and turn education into an arena for profit-making by global technology, childcare and education monopolies, the legal right of teachers and education workers and elected trustees to say No! has been eroded to the point that negotiations over local working conditions between locally-empowered unions and school boards has been all but eliminated.
The recent ruling by the Ontario Labour Relations Board codifying that all matters related to money in education are to be negotiated centrally, and the ongoing hearings on whether the government has the right to dictate class sizes through regulation without negotiation are two examples of the new precedents being set in this round. Another is the constant refrain from the Ford government that under governments of all stripes it is the teachers and education workers who are the problem, not the anti-social offensive these governments all pursue in their own ways. The Ford government is trying to lay the groundwork to eliminate the legal right to strike of teachers and education workers, by which it hopes to permanently subdue their resistance to its schemes to further privatize public education. This situation shows the importance of education workers speaking out about these matters and establishing new ways of organizing within and outside the structures that exist such as union affiliation, job classes, geographic location etc. so as to ensure that their united No! to cuts and privatization cannot be suppressed. Giving expression to this No! through new forms of organizing will clearly show that, try as they might, those who want to usurp the decision-making power of the working people cannot eliminate their No, which is their right to speak and act in their own name -- a fundamental human right. Around the world and across Canada teachers and education workers have become a front line of defence against the neo-liberal wrecking of their societies. They stand as a bulwark against privatization and other neo-liberal reforms because they see the consequences of it every day and bear the brunt of the breakdown of society and the social fabric which necessarily results from the attempt to make everyone fend for themselves. The more that teachers and education workers stick to their direct experience and fight for solutions to the problems they see day in and day out, including how education should be funded and to what level, the more they will overcome all the attempts to divert their ranks and eliminate their voice, and through this will find a way forward to once and for all go from resistance to decision-making power. It can be done!
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
This round of negotiations is aimed
at codifying the grip of the provincial cabinet
over all decisions of substance. This includes
their desire to establish new ways of changing
the content of what students learn to better
serve the private monopolies that want
"just-in-time" changes to how the youth are
educated. The great fear of the ruling class is
that teachers and education workers will not
submit and will find new ways to break out of
the limitations being imposed on them.