Murray Mandryk: Sask. teachers, government entrenched in stalemate

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You really can’t say talks have broken off or that anyone walked away from the bargaining table.

The Saskatchewan Party government and the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) haven’t been at the bargaining table. The two sides haven’t been there for months, so there really hasn’t been any talks to break off.

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Where kindergarten to Grade 12 education in Saskatchewan is at coming out of the Easter break is where we’ve been for some time — at a seemingly unresolvable stalemate. We may be stuck here for quite a while.

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The STF has essentially served notice that the so-called “accountability framework” the government and the Saskatchewan School Boards Association (SSBA) put forward won’t work without a sort of dispute resolution mechanism.

So the STF announced about the only course of action it could Friday — indefinite work to rule. This likely won’t get the union any further ahead by withdrawing extracurriculars, but government can’t really legislate teachers back to work when they are still teaching …

… not that the government really wants to legislate them back and run the risk of an arbitrator ruling in the teachers’ favour.

Expect government to now huff and puff that teachers are robbing students of their Grade 12 graduation. But past such government huffing and puffing hasn’t exactly moved this dispute forward.

Government tried to do so by claiming that the initial negotiating position of the STF was a demand for a 23 per cent raise — a notion it splashed on its petty and largely partisan propaganda billboard campaign that we have been paying for as taxpayers.

It didn’t really alter public opinion — the thing government hoped would force the union back to the bargaining table to talk about anything other than classroom complexity and composition.

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That said, the union has made its own share of strategic blunders. Withdrawing extracurricular services after the reduction of Hoopla to a one-day event will likely mean a further loss of public support.

Public opinion is crucial to the STF if it hopes to get something out of this contract that would be unprecedented in this province.

The STF is a strong union (yes, while some prefer to call it a professional association, it is a union engaged in collective bargaining) with its own collective clout quite capable of negotiating salaries. However, what it’s asking for has been considerably more than just wages.

Asking that its contract address the work environment issue of ensuring the government lives up to spending commitments in one of biggest budgetary departments is an unprecedented request in Saskatchewan — regardless of whether teachers in other provinces have been successful in securing such language in their contract agreements.

To pull this off would require either: a co-operative government that already sees the value of making such a spending commitment in a legal contract or an ability to force government to come to an understanding of the value of the above.

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The unfortunate reality for Saskatchewan teachers is that they still require massive public support capable of swaying government. What this Sask. Party government has make clear is that it has no intention of being swayed.

One reason may be that government does legitimately see the problem with the precedent created. After all, if teachers are successful, one assumes nurses and other health care providers would make similar demands.

For a government dealing with a budget that already has serious structural problems plus the unpredictability of resource revenues and crop insurance costs, giving in to teachers would be the thin edge of the wedge.

Also, this is a government facing an election this fall. Politicizing these negotiations would surely beat admitting it hasn’t exactly managed growth all that well.

That said, the dilemma for the government is that it can ill afford to allow this teachers’ strike/work to rule to linger on as it begins to campaign for re-election.

So government and teachers now, oddly, find themselves stuck in this same stalemate.

Murray Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. 

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