A 91-year-old veteran of the B.C. public school labour trenches gave striking Burnaby teachers a shot in the arm Monday.
Betty Griffin, a retired elementary teacher whose career began in 1954, joined picketers in front of Edmonds Community School with a sign reading “Seniors Support Teachers” attached to the front of her walker.
“Don’t ever get down on your knees; stand up for your rights,” she told the NOW, summing up the accumulated wisdom of 74 years of union activism that began when she was 18 and building planes for Boeing during the Second World War.
Griffin launched her teaching career at age 34, when her two step children started school, but because women hadn’t yet won the right to maternity leave, she had to quit four years later when she became pregnant.
“I had to be re-hired,” she said. “It was as though I had never taught before. It wiped out everything I had done.”
Once she was rehired, she rejoined the local union’s negotiating team and, shortly after, Burnaby became the first local in the province to win maternity leave.
Griffin also spent 10 years pushing for teachers’ pensions to be indexed to the cost of living – something they won in 1980.
“Our pensions had no indexing in the beginning,” she said, “and there were teachers who started out at $300 a month and they had to see if they could go back to work so that they could eat.”
Despite today’s teachers enjoying a lot of advantages over those who taught in her day, Griffin remains a passionate supporter, especially when it comes to class composition.
When she first started, she said, special needs students had their own classes.
To facilitate their integration into regular classrooms later on, each class was allotted an extra teacher per a certain number of special needs students.
“Then they just cut them out,” Griffin said. “And they cut out the librarians. You can’t have a school without a librarian. It’s unthinkable.”
Griffin’s presence on the picket line, meanwhile, was an emotional boost for battle-weary Edmonds teachers.
“It kind of gives you that energy to keep on going,” Grad 5/6 teacher Jaime Acker said. “We take for granted what she did for us in the past, so I’m hoping the teachers in the future take for granted what we’re doing today.”
