Our Demands Are Essential to Solving the Crisis in EducationGeneviève Royer is a secondary school remedial teacher in Montreal. Workers' Forum: Teachers employed by the school service centres put forward their demands for changes to their collective agreement in October 2019, and the agreement expired on March 30, 2020. What is the status of negotiations with the government? Geneviève Royer: The two organizations that represent the approximately 122,000 teachers in Quebec have both taken strike votes. On February 1, the Federation of Teachers' Unions (FSE-CSQ) adopted a mandate for rotating strikes over five days, and the member unions of the Autonomous Teachers' Federation voted for an unlimited general strike starting May 31.
It can be said that after all these negotiation meetings and 12 mediation sessions, the only thing that has changed is that teachers are now in a legal strike position. It is the government that is inciting teachers to take this action. The newspapers have already begun to talk only about the strike issue and not about our working conditions. But what is it that the public needs to know? It must be what the teachers have proposed to the government, which is responsible for the education system. We say that reducing the number of students per class, increasing direct services to students (more educators, speech therapists, etc.), creating specialized classes for students with special needs, is what is needed to improve our working conditions which are the the learning conditions of our students. It is important to know that the number of students in Quebec who, according to the criteria of the Ministry of Education, are entitled to educational services for at-risk students and students with disabilities, adjustment or learning difficulties (EHDAA) increased by 71.8 per cent from 2001 to 2016. In 2018-2019, there were 216,821 EHDAA students in our schools, and of these, 164,936 or 76 per cent, are in regular classes, not special classes.
WF: Do you want to say something in conclusion? GR: We want our proposals to be discussed in the public domain. We feel that we are taking up our social responsibility by raising the real problems in education and proposing solutions based on our expertise and experience. The question for us is not whether or not to go on strike. The issue is that it is our working conditions and our demands for change that must be publicly discussed and that the government must be held accountable for its repeated refusal to negotiate with us. (Photos: WF, S. Osbourne. Translated from original French by WF.)
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In 67
meetings, government officials have had ample opportunity to hear our
demands, which were tabled, as you said, in October 2019. But our
negotiators are being told by their employer counterparts, "We don't
have the mandate to negotiate that." Now, if the education experts, if
the people who work every day, have no power to change
the situation, to have a say in the decisions that are made, we have a
serious problem.
The government is
engaging in provocations against teachers in the negotiations regarding
our wages and our working conditions. For example, it wants to add
wording to the collective agreement saying that it is "the
responsibility of the teacher to adapt his or her pedagogical approach
according to the needs and abilities of each student
entrusted to him or her." This will allow the government to deny
services to teachers and students on the basis that it is the
teachers' responsibility to implement personalized intervention
strategies. The government is also proposing to add two reasons why
class sizes will be allowed to exceed planned ratios. None of these
conditions address
the mental, physical or educational well-being of students and teachers
at a time when we are all witnessing multiple forms of distress in our
schools.