Mandryk: Questionable whether unhappy teachers will ratify contract

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If there is a teacher in your life, you probably aren’t surprised that this latest contract offer has made them much happier now than they’ve been for much of the last year in which they’ve been chided and scolded by the Saskatchewan Party government.

Yes, they have a deal in front of them that the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation calls “mutually acceptable.”

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But will that be the view of the STF membership? After a yearlong fight, is what’s on the table good enough for a majority to ratify it?

Teachers sure seem unhappy on social media and elsewhere. It might be touch and go.

Some are clearly fatigued by this long labour dispute that became increasingly acrimonious and politicized as responsibilities were transferred from previous and retiring minister Dustin Duncan to current Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill.

While Duncan agitated teachers with that taxpayer-paid billboard campaign last summer, what Cockrill has offered since has pretty much been a “How Not To” manual on public sector negotiations with a large and highly educated bargaining unit. If this contract doesn’t get ratified, it will have a lot to do with Cockrill’s insults.

Everything up to and including the Parents’ Bill of Rights (Bill 137, or the “pronoun bill”) was a greater priority for the entire Ministry of Education than classroom complexity and overcrowding, which has contributed to the animosity. Again, the government’s inference is that teachers were the problem.

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As such, it wasn’t surprising to see a 90 per cent vote earlier this month rejecting a wage offer of eight per cent over three years in a contract with no binding language to address classroom complexity and composition.

That the vote came with a 92-per cent participation rate was a huge middle finger to the attempts by Cockrill, Premier Scott Moe and others to portray the teachers as greedy or divided between urban and rural.

That teachers then voted overwhelmingly in favour of the ability to carry on job action into the next school year surely sent chills down the spines of government MLAs with plans to seek re-election and not wanting to be hounded by striking teachers while on the campaign trail.

So it wasn’t surprising the government came up with a better offer. What seems surprising to many teachers is that it’s not that much better.

Here’s what we know about the offer:

According to contract details first reported by the Leader-Post’s Larissa Kurz, the government is offering an eight per cent salary increase over three years, along with a “one-time, one-per cent market adjustment” to the teachers’ salary grid.