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A Form of Compact
Teacher collective bargaining in Alberta
It’s interesting to compare, from time to time, the status of collective bargaining across the country. There’s absolutely no question that bargaining in the public sector has been really tough in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. After all, no right wing government would want to waste a crisis when it can diminish public sector expectations and roll back or freeze salaries in the face of even greater competition for scarce public resources. That’s certainly the story in teacher collective bargaining—Alberta in the Alison Redford era was no different than most other Canadian provinces.
Alberta’s unique history has produced a bargaining history that varies from many other Canadian jurisdictions. Through an odd combination of legislated provisions, mutually agreed policy and abundant good faith, Alberta’s collective agreements in the public education sector are dramatically smaller than agreements in other provinces. So how could this be? Could they be at risk?
In Alberta, some things that would be bargained into collective agreements exist in legislation. For example, the School Act provides for teacher contracts of employment, and the fact that these provisions are statutory means that every school board is required to follow the same set of rules. In addition, the provisions are stable and not subject to bargaining every year. The basic rules of teacher pay and sick leave are also legislated, which makes collective agreements smaller and takes some issues “off the table.”
You won’t find anything relating to the termination of an individual teacher’s employment contract in an Alberta collective agreement, either. In the early days of the William Aberhart government, the provisions of the Board of Reference were strengthened to provide an independent review of an employment dispute between a school board and a teacher, including the power to reinstate the teacher. Some of the rules pertaining to the operation of the Board of Reference are developed in regulations. The rules do not vary from school board to school board; they are the same for all teachers and all school boards, providing greater stability.
The same is true with respect to teacher evaluation policy and the standard by which decisions are made about teaching quality. There is a strong consensus among teachers, school administrators and central office administrators that the Teacher Growth, Supervision and Evaluation Policy still works very well. So does the Teaching Quality Standard. After a teacher’s professional practice is recognized as meeting the standard, the teacher is assumed to be competent, there is regular supervision by the principal and there is evaluation if concerns develop. The emphasis is on professional growth; making a good teacher’s practice even stronger. The approach has worked well, and the result is that these areas have not been bargained into collective agreements.
There are very different approaches across the province with respect to instructional time or even assignable time. For some boards, the requirement to cap instructional time (at 907 hours), as required by the Ministerial Order, was new. In some collective agreements, there are provisions that govern assignable time. There is considerable variation in how professional development concerns are handled—there will be some provisions in collective agreements and some in school board policy. Compared to other collective agreements in the education sector across the country, in Alberta there is very little on seniority, transfer procedures, employee health and wellness, redundancy and the availability of continuing positions for substitute teachers. (An important caveat—the Association represents some private and charter schools, and it is often necessary to bargain many of these issues into collective agreements because the protections are not available elsewhere.) In Alberta, the bargaining table has not been the only place to discuss issues.
However, such a structure only works if it produces results that work for the parties. If teachers have difficulty with the Teacher Growth, Supervision and Evaluation Policy, they will bargain the provisions into the collective agreement. If workload issues cannot be addressed, they will come up at the bargaining table. If the teacher board advisory structure does not produce results that satisfy teachers, there will be a different venue to discuss the concerns. I’m not an advocate of 250-page collective agreements, but that also means that effective solutions to legitimate teacher concerns need to be identified and implemented, and there has to be confidence that the solutions will work for our members. So in Alberta there’s a kind of compact—it’s not all in the collective agreement. It’s in legislation or regulation or government policy or board policy, or the collective agreement—and it achieves members’ needs.
