The 2014 Strike

The 2014 strike began as a work-to-rule campaign. Teachers refused to administer province-wide tests, attend staff meetings, or do lunchtime supervision. When teachers increased pressure with rotating full strike days, the government responded with what they called a partial lockout. Teachers’ pay was reduced by 10 percent, and they were told to leave school property during non-instructional time.

Frustrated with the lockout, teachers chose to fully withdraw services in late June. The initial two weeks created limited pressure, as the government was able to win a case at the labor relations board declaring secondary school marks an essential service, and the BCTF instructed teachers to comply.

From the start of the walkout, the BCTF leadership viewed the strike as short term. At general meetings, the message was always that we would have a deal by the end of June. Early on, they had to acknowledge that the strike fund could only provide three days of strike pay. The union, in effect, constructed artificial deadlines that set specific expectations in teachers’ minds.

Rather than prepare for the worst, the union promised the best. In tandem, the union, very early, both watered down its offer and called for mediation. To teachers, this was sold as a way to appear moderate and win parental support. But the leadership drastically underestimated the staying power and strategy of the government.

No deal came in June, and requests for mediation were rebuffed. In late August, the government announced they would provide $40-a-day childcare stipends for parents if the strike continued into the fall. While ridiculed by the BCTF leadership (and others) as a cynical ploy, there is no doubt the tactic made it easier for the government to let teachers lose significant amounts of pay. By the middle of September, after three months without pay, many teachers were feeling very financially insecure.

Meanwhile, at a delegated provincial meeting, the union decided to remain on strike, but with no specific plan of action. The BCTF executive committee met during the first week of September, while the strike resumed, and decided to hold a membership vote on a call for binding mediation.

Many teachers viewed this as a rather bizarre decision. It was fairly clearly a media tactic rather than a real engagement of members in decision-making about the course of the strike. No further provincial meetings were called, and no mechanisms for input into the strike strategy were available. Unsurprisingly, the government rejected the proposal.

In the third week of September, five weeks into the strike, teachers were advised a deal was near. There would be closed-door, round-the-clock meetings, but no details or information were shared. It was only after the contract was signed, and the vote completed, that Canada’s national mainstream newspaper, the Globe and Mail, reported that Canadian Labour Congress leader Hassan Yusuf orchestrated a private meeting between Christy Clark and BCTF president Jim Iker.

The meeting produced the outlines of a very tepid deal — a way out for the BCTF leadership. Wages remained essentially the same as in the government’s offer in June. Class size — the most important issue on the table — was addressed through a class-size fund that effectively meant repeating the shell game that previous funds were known to be — money given in one form, but taken in another through reductions in core funding.

On the contentious issue of how to respond should teachers subsequently win on the class-size issue in the courts, the government agreed only to reopen the issue before the end of the agreement. Teachers winced as premier Christie Clark appeared on television gloating over the six-year accord within the terms of the public-sector mandate.

While the 2014 strike was BC teachers’ longest, it wasn’t the most militant or the most confident. The 2005 strike is a useful contrast. In that strike, teachers walked out after the government imposed a rollover contract through legislation. One day in, the government went to court and won a contempt order: teachers were in violation of the law. Yet they remained on the picket lines for two full weeks.

And although the strike ended in mediation, teachers never requested such negotiation. Instead, the government used it as a way to resolve what became an increasingly impossible situation as the specter and reality of solidarity strikes from other public-sector unions loomed. While the union leadership went back on its word that it would not hand over control of bargaining to a third party, we still entered the mediation process in a far superior position.

All of these factors led to what was arguably a modest win in very difficult circumstances — $20 million for the teachers’ pension fund, significant wage increases for teachers on call, and the reintroduction of very limited class size limits via legislation. Moreover, the pressure from the strike also impacted the following year’s negotiations, which resulted in wage increases that outpaced much of the rest of the public sector.

Union Democracy

The internal union processes in 2005 looked considerably different than those in 2014. The discussion of the need to defy back-to-work legislation, which pushed teachers on strike back into the classroom, began at provincial delegate meetings as early as 2004. Motions for actions to prepare the membership for a fight came from locals and individuals.

Prior to the strike, the delegates even addressed the issue of a potential capitulation by leadership. By 2004, two other unions in the health-care sector had had their strikes called off by union leaders after government intervention. Convinced that teachers should make this decision themselves, delegates successfully passed a motion that would require a full membership vote to end job action, not just to ratify a contract.

But in 2014, this new constitutional rule was misused to force an early vote on a deal when members had only hours to actually look at it. Frustration at the short time frame for ratification was widespread. This was combined with out-and-out misinformation.

For example, the BCTF, in a message to teachers and in the media, claimed that the new teacher fund would mean 850 new teaching positions. This was an unrealistic and misleading estimate. The BCTF’s own research on the previous classroom “fund” showed that it amounted to an accounting gimmick. In a subsequent research report, published six months after the end of the strike, the BCTF reported a net loss of nine teaching positions despite the new education fund.

Perhaps the epitome of the change in the BCTF was the way information was communicated to membership. Most membership meetings consisted of a video livestream projected in a hockey arena to thousands of teachers directly from BCTF President Jim Iker. This was hardly a mechanism to facilitate bottom-up decision-making, engagement, or activism.

The Rise of Teachers Viewpoint

Why was there such a change in tactics and strategy, and diminution of democratic participation? The BCTF and its local unions have a long history of militancy. The first teachers in the British Empire to strike were in Victoria, BC, in 1917.

A province-wide strike in 1971 pushed for pension improvements. In 1987 teachers won full legal bargaining rights, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s waged three rounds of bargaining with local school boards that yielded scores of victories, including class size limits.

Teachers also played a central role in the provincial solidarity movement of 1983. During this period of radicalism, two internal caucuses developed. The first, Teachers Viewpoint, took a variety of progressive positions (such as support for full unionization), and its name reflected the composition of its membership — teachers rather than administrators, who were also part of the union at the time and often held many of its official positions.

Viewpoint was counterpoised to Teachers for a United Federation (TUF), who arguably represented the status quo, or a more conservative, bread-and-butter unionism. Members of TUF tended to dominate the BCTF executive committee.

During the 1980s and ’90s, Teachers Viewpoint was an effective, activist, rank-and-file organization and organized on the convention floor for many internal democratic reforms, as well as for a wide variety of social justice issues.

But a significant change took place in the mid-1990s that disrupted teacher bargaining. In response to the perceived successes of public-sector unions in the late 1980s, a New Democratic Party (NDP) government imposed a scheme of provincial bargaining with the Public Education Labour Relations Act. All BCTF locals, who had previously negotiated locally with school boards, were forced into a single provincial bargaining unit controlled by the provincial federation.

While there were undoubtedly other reasons for the erosion of grassroots organizing (this was, after all, a period of growing neoliberal attacks on all types of bargaining), the imposition of provincial bargaining proved a death blow to the rank-and-file activism that had developed within union locals who bargained directly with school boards.

While rank-and-file organizing can occur under different bargaining structures, it is still significantly more difficult to build rank-and-file networks among a membership of forty thousand across a massive geographic area than in a local of a thousand within a single city. A bargaining team of five, chosen province-wide, is significantly more remote from the membership than one chosen from the local high school that teachers see in the staff room or at least in the local union hall.

The changes were immediately evident in the first round of provincial bargaining in 1998. This round was significant for two reasons. Firstly, it created a rift between the BCTF and other provincial public-sector unions, because the BCTF accepted a government-imposed wage freeze, thereby setting the stage for other public-sector unions to do the same. (In exchange, teachers did negotiate province-wide class size limits.)

The second important feature of this bargaining round was the way it was conducted — in closed-door meetings between BCTF president Kit Krieger and the government. This lack of democracy and transparency lead to the defeat of the TUF caucus, and Krieger lost the presidency.

At about the same time, aiming to win control of the BCTF executive, Teachers Viewpoint began focusing on electoralism internally. Viewpoint members formed a new electoral caucus, Coalition, which ran a full slate for the executive positions.

Judged in electoral terms, they were quite successful. From the late ’90s until the 2013 elections, Coalition won the BCTF executive office. But their shift to electoralism was complete. Teachers Viewpoint, although formally in existence, now does little other than provide electoral support for Coalition.

And the position of the Coalition caucus, while remaining in favor of strike action, has consistently moved more and more toward alternative strategies in the face of an openly neoliberal government — namely, using the courts and supporting the NDP in the hopes of changing the government.

Over this period, the government used every tool available to smash the power of the BCTF. In 2001, it enacted essential service legislation that severely limited teachers’ right to strike. In 2002, it unilaterally removed the provincial class size limits from teacher collective agreements. In three rounds of bargaining (2001, 2004, and 2011) it used back-to-work legislation to end job actions.

The one time during this stretch that teachers stayed out on strike despite the imposition of fines — in 2005  — it was in no small measure because many members of the Viewpoint caucus engaged in rank-and-file organizing and pushed for action regardless of the legal threats.

Two decades of organizing and a militant orientation produced a coordinated group who argued successfully at provincial meetings for the necessity of action. The result was a strike that ended when government came begging to the union for mediation and the first contract with an openly hostile government that included some improvements.

Yet the 2005 strike did not fully address the single most fundamental issue — the reinstatement of class size limits. Instead of staying on the picket line in 2005 for as long as it took to win, the BCTF pursued an extended court battle over the legality of the contract stripping.

Initiated in 2002, the court battle has yet to be resolved. Having won twice at the Supreme Court of BC, a recent loss at the BC Court of Appeals has meant that a further request for appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada is still pending. In those thirteen years, an entire generation of students has gone through school without class size limits in place.

The union has also focused heavily on a provincial electoral strategy. Although officially nonpartisan, there are deep ties between the layer of leadership and staff in the BCTF and the NDP. Both David Chudnovsky, who beat Kit Krieger in the late ’90s, and Jinny Sims, president during the 2005 strike, went on to represent the NDP in government as a provincial MLA (member of the Legislative Assembly) and federal MP (member of parliament) respectively.

Couched as an issue-oriented approach — make public education a vote-determining issue — the millions of dollars appropriated from the strike fund over four provincial election campaigns did little to even convince the NDP to adopt pro-teacher positions in their platform. The provincial NDP has still never committed to reinstating the class size limits in the collective agreement or ending the practice of publicly funding private schools.

In the lead-up to the 2005 strike, there was a healthy debate within the union about what strategy was needed to win class-size language. The initial response in 2002, a one-day strike immediately following the enactment of legislation that stripped the language from the collective agreement, was often ridiculed as woefully inadequate. It was this sentiment, along with the grassroots organizing over the previous two decades, which enabled delegates to win the argument and votes in 2005 to stay out despite the union finding itself in contempt of court.

The Trouble With Electoralism

Looking back, 2005 was a high point. The organized work of militants won arguments at general meetings. A layer of local activists within schools and local meetings convinced the vast majority of teachers that we should defy back-to-work legislation and a court order. Since that round of bargaining, despite a commitment to striking and remarkably high votes supporting such action, the leadership has advocated caution. And the network of militant activists has all but disappeared.

With each successive strike, the union has exhibited more caution and less militancy. With no organized rank-and-file movement from below, militants did not win a plan of strike action in 2012 in response to legislation that imposed a collective agreement. Instead, teachers went back to school and engaged in a frustrating and divisive work-to-rule campaign.

And in the most recent strike, despite staying out for a significant period of time, teachers were instructed by the union to concede on practically every opportunity to apply pressure. This included agreeing to abide by a Labour Relations Board order to submit final grades, refusing to picket third-party sites such as school construction, failing to picket out CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) during the lunchtime lockout, and declining to picket or disrupt provision of services to international students.

Rather than look for ways to turn up the heat on the government, the union appeared desperate to end the strike as quickly as it could by seeking mediation. And with the union’s new style of “member engagement” — typified by the mass meetings in hockey arenas — educators, as one teacher aptly put it, “might as well be at home watching on [their] own TV.”

What are the lessons to be learned? For teachers in BC, it is that we will need a new grassroots rank-and-file movement — both in the teachers unions and across public-sector and private-sector unions — if we want to build the kind of actions and solidarity needed to push back neoliberalism.

But the BC teachers’ struggles also resonate outside of Canada.

In the US, as the drive to test, punish, and defund classrooms has reached a fever pitch, teachers have begun organizing and working to change their unions. Some of this new organizing is spontaneous — such as the 2011 uprising in Wisconsin in response to an outright attack on teachers and other public-sector workers.

Some is more planned and strategic, including the many new reform caucuses that seek to alter the culture and actions of their unions. While the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the Chicago Teachers Union may be the most well known of its kind, a reform caucus now leads the Los Angeles teachers union, and loose associations like the Badass Teachers Association are also resisting corporate education reform.

We are in an exciting moment when teachers everywhere are looking for strategies to be effective public education advocates. It is within this context that we need to examine our own histories, and carefully scrutinize what is usually the first reform impulse — taking over union leadership.

There are times and circumstances when changing the voice at the top is an effective part of an overall strategy. But the case of the BC teachers shows it also comes with pitfalls: the drive for leadership can become an end in itself, and the very same pressures that created the moribund unions of yesterday can eventually recreate a new moribund union in its place.

The key is to always orient our work around engaging and activating members as part of the struggle for concrete improvements. Tactics change. What cannot is our commitment to building rank-and-file power.