Picketing Burnaby teachers plan to stay a thorn in the side of the school district and its maintenance and building plans this summer.
The Burnaby Teachers’ Association has organized weekly pickets since July 14, targeting high visibility schools, the board office and the Schou Education Centre, which is undergoing major renovations to convert it from a professional development space to an adult education centre.
“We have, in general, a supportive board,” local union president Rae Figursky told the NOW, “but they are management, and we are kind of honour bound to do a little something.”
Legally, any member of the local union can picket on any weekday at any school district site, she said, and it only takes one teacher to make a picket line that CUPE secretaries, plumbers and carpenters won’t cross.
The only exception is the district’s maintenance services yard.
The school board successfully applied to the Labour Relations Board for an injunction before July 14 to prevent teachers from picketing that site because no teachers work there.
“That hadn’t seemed to bother our board before July was coming, but it apparently bothered them afterwards,” said Figursky, referring to the 12 days in May and June her union had picketed the site.
The weekly BTA-organized pickets will continue through August, Figursky said, and individual teachers may also decide to picket sites spontaneously on their own.
The provincial government fuelled anger among local teachers last week, when it announced it would pay $40 a day for daycare or educational programs for every child under the age of 13 if the labour dispute dragged out into the school year.
One local elementary teacher told Figursky that – at $40 a day – her 30 students would have netted her four times her daily wage and she wouldn’t even have had to teach.
“It is, I think, also meant to be an insult to teachers, and we caught that really clearly,” Figursky said.
Burnaby school board chair Baljinder Narang said the board is also troubled by the $40-a-day offer from government.
“It’s very troublesome because as a board our expectation is that the focus would be completely on a negotiated settlement come September,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, people do have to be realistic; they have to make strategic plans; they have to think of that, but I think the government needs to be focused, both parties need to be focused on hard bargaining and reach this negotiated agreement before September startup.”
The provincewide teacher labour dispute, which began with work-to-rule action in April and culminated in a full-scale teacher walkout at the end of June that wiped out the district’s summer school program, has created a lot of uncertainty for the upcoming school year, according to Narang.
“Nothing is regular about this summer or end of school,” she said.
One glimmer of hope at a provincial level is that the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and B.C. Public School Employers’ Association have agreed to meet Friday for their first bargaining session since the end of the school year.
Even if a settlement is reached by September, however, Narang said the district will have its work cut out for it, both logistically and in terms of professional relationships, to launch the school year successfully.
“We have fractured relationships that have got to be built again,” she said.
