Extracurricular activities
Sep. 14th, 2012 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeA couple of points to make regarding Ontario teachers (and BC ones, for that matter) pulling extracurricular activities:
Extracurricular activities have come up before in labour negotiations with teachers. Boards / governments don't want to pay for them, but still want to treat them as a "part of the job". When this goes to adjudication, these activities are regularly stated to be "voluntary" (even though at normal times there is intense social pressure on teachers from their colleagues as well as their superiors to engage in them). Unions have in the past been willing to trade this for pay; school boards and governments have been unwilling to fork out the additional funds.
If governments really want to treat extracurricular activities as essential to school -- there was a Toronto Board member on Metro Morning this morning talking about how important they were -- the solution is simple: pay for them on an hourly basis and thereby include the activity in the contract. (I say "on an hourly basis" because some types of activity -- e.g. being the staff member who helps with the Philately Club -- will have very well-defined hours of X hours after school each week and some (Drama productions, school sports which can go to inter-school championships at regional and provincial levels) will both be less well defined and will sometimes spill over into weekends.) If they refuse to pay the extra money, they are implicitly agreeing that the activities are non-essential.
And if they're non-essential, then it's entirely reasonable for teachers to withdraw their support. And if this inconveniences the public, then it should properly result in the public applying political pressure on the government to change the status quo by behaving fairly.
In the situations in both BC and Ontario, it also needs to be recognized that the teachers have very few options. They have had their right to strike removed without the usual compensatory allocation of decision-making regarding a collective agreement to an adjudicator. Instead, governments have taken the ability to determine core elements of the contracts out of all parties' hands by legslation.
(As a side note, I'll add that bankable sick days were popular with employers in the past because they allowed benefits to be provided which (1) were quantifiable with employees who did become sick -- there was no grey area regarding how much time might be charged to sick days; (2) generally did not have costs accrue until the far future (most employees aren't sick for the full number of their allocated sick days, so payment of the benefit gets put off); (3) tended to accumulate to the benefit of employees later in their careers -- a healthy employee at age 26 is more likely to have health issues at 55, when the accumulated benefits will be there. Even in the event that an employee retires with unused days and receives a payment in lieu at retirement, that cost has to be considered in terms of the present value at the time that each day was earned. It's a biggish lump sum, but it's earned over the course of many years, with siginificant deferrals from (some of) the periods when it was earned. These rights were bargained for and given in trade-off for other benefits of the same actuarial value -- that is, it's reasonable to assume that had these benefits not been granted in bargaining other benefits of equivalent worth to the estimated actuarial present value of the benefits would have been -- for example, a larger number of sick days of the sort that vanish at the end of the year, along with a possibly better short-term disability plan to offset the likely effects on older employees.)
In the long term, of course this sort of thing (legislated imposition of contractual terms) brings in its own revenge. There's currently a glut of new teachers (caused in part by clumsy manipulation of the market by expanding spaces in colleges in the early 2000s), which tends to make it easier to impose harsher conditions on teachers now, but in the early 2000s there was a shortage of teachers across the board. (It isn't necessarliy an entire coincidence that this followed the Harris years in Ontario.) However, a shortage of qualified math and physics teachers seems to have become a fact of life -- the required skills can translate into better-paying jobs elsewhere. If conditions become less attractive, or are perceived as such, supply will fall and even where supply doesn't fall quality will. (There have been other straws in the wind indicating that the Ontario government, at least, is leaning to spending relatively more on health and less on education for political reasons. The net effect of this -- higher fees and lower quality at the tertiary level, lower quality at the primary and secondary level -- will take a long time to build and a long time to reverse.)
In the end, a society gets the school programmes, and teaching quality, it's willing to pay for. Feeling outraged because teachers are threatening the (partial, in Ontario) withdrawal of services which society has basically signalled it's unwilling to pay for is irrational and short-sighted.
Extracurricular activities have come up before in labour negotiations with teachers. Boards / governments don't want to pay for them, but still want to treat them as a "part of the job". When this goes to adjudication, these activities are regularly stated to be "voluntary" (even though at normal times there is intense social pressure on teachers from their colleagues as well as their superiors to engage in them). Unions have in the past been willing to trade this for pay; school boards and governments have been unwilling to fork out the additional funds.
If governments really want to treat extracurricular activities as essential to school -- there was a Toronto Board member on Metro Morning this morning talking about how important they were -- the solution is simple: pay for them on an hourly basis and thereby include the activity in the contract. (I say "on an hourly basis" because some types of activity -- e.g. being the staff member who helps with the Philately Club -- will have very well-defined hours of X hours after school each week and some (Drama productions, school sports which can go to inter-school championships at regional and provincial levels) will both be less well defined and will sometimes spill over into weekends.) If they refuse to pay the extra money, they are implicitly agreeing that the activities are non-essential.
And if they're non-essential, then it's entirely reasonable for teachers to withdraw their support. And if this inconveniences the public, then it should properly result in the public applying political pressure on the government to change the status quo by behaving fairly.
In the situations in both BC and Ontario, it also needs to be recognized that the teachers have very few options. They have had their right to strike removed without the usual compensatory allocation of decision-making regarding a collective agreement to an adjudicator. Instead, governments have taken the ability to determine core elements of the contracts out of all parties' hands by legslation.
(As a side note, I'll add that bankable sick days were popular with employers in the past because they allowed benefits to be provided which (1) were quantifiable with employees who did become sick -- there was no grey area regarding how much time might be charged to sick days; (2) generally did not have costs accrue until the far future (most employees aren't sick for the full number of their allocated sick days, so payment of the benefit gets put off); (3) tended to accumulate to the benefit of employees later in their careers -- a healthy employee at age 26 is more likely to have health issues at 55, when the accumulated benefits will be there. Even in the event that an employee retires with unused days and receives a payment in lieu at retirement, that cost has to be considered in terms of the present value at the time that each day was earned. It's a biggish lump sum, but it's earned over the course of many years, with siginificant deferrals from (some of) the periods when it was earned. These rights were bargained for and given in trade-off for other benefits of the same actuarial value -- that is, it's reasonable to assume that had these benefits not been granted in bargaining other benefits of equivalent worth to the estimated actuarial present value of the benefits would have been -- for example, a larger number of sick days of the sort that vanish at the end of the year, along with a possibly better short-term disability plan to offset the likely effects on older employees.)
In the long term, of course this sort of thing (legislated imposition of contractual terms) brings in its own revenge. There's currently a glut of new teachers (caused in part by clumsy manipulation of the market by expanding spaces in colleges in the early 2000s), which tends to make it easier to impose harsher conditions on teachers now, but in the early 2000s there was a shortage of teachers across the board. (It isn't necessarliy an entire coincidence that this followed the Harris years in Ontario.) However, a shortage of qualified math and physics teachers seems to have become a fact of life -- the required skills can translate into better-paying jobs elsewhere. If conditions become less attractive, or are perceived as such, supply will fall and even where supply doesn't fall quality will. (There have been other straws in the wind indicating that the Ontario government, at least, is leaning to spending relatively more on health and less on education for political reasons. The net effect of this -- higher fees and lower quality at the tertiary level, lower quality at the primary and secondary level -- will take a long time to build and a long time to reverse.)
In the end, a society gets the school programmes, and teaching quality, it's willing to pay for. Feeling outraged because teachers are threatening the (partial, in Ontario) withdrawal of services which society has basically signalled it's unwilling to pay for is irrational and short-sighted.
