Sask. labour lawyer's pitch to end teachers' job action: 'empower the principals'

As the contract stalemate between the province and the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation (STF) continues, a Saskatoon labour lawyer says some creative thinking is required to get both sides back to the negotiating table.

Steven Seiferling, managing lawyer at Seiferling Law, says the dynamic between the STF and the province is a unique labour negotiation because of the pressure each party is trying to exert over the other.

"In your normal unionized work situation, you've got the ability to strike or the employer's ability to lock out is based on putting economic pressure on the business," Seiferling said. "The conundrum here is that in the public sector, when we're dealing with teachers, they are falling into a different category where the employer is government, and the economic pressure doesn't exist."

Without that economic pressure, Seiferling says the STF is instead playing a delicate balance of exerting political pressure on the province, raise awareness of its concerns while also trying to maintain support and not negatively affect parents’ lives.

"The burden is put on the parents and I don't know if the union is looking at the parents to try and put pressure on government," Sefierling said. "There's a whole dynamic there."

"There's no logical connection between that pressure on parents and getting the government back to the table for the teachers."

At a news conference Tuesday, Premier Scott Moe said the government has been working to do its part in getting teachers back to the table.

Last week, Moe took the unusual step of announcing the education portion of the upcoming provincial budget two weeks early. He says the budget represents an additional $180 million in education spending, or about a nine per cent increase.

Two days later, the province struck a four-year deal with the Saskatchewan School Boards Association with $356.6 million in funding for the 2024-25 fiscal year until 2027-28 to address classroom complexities.

The figure represents a $45,600,000 increase last year's budget.

"We've tried to move on every initiative that we can — that's what it will take," Moe said of the government's efforts to get back to the negotiating table.

Seiferling said working class size and complexities into contract language — the crux of the dispute with STF — is the exact opposite goal of the government’s recent announcements.

"Anything you put into a collective agreement as an employer is something that you're giving away the right to manage," Seiferling said.

"The complexity and managing on a province-wide basis means that you do have to keep your collective agreement to the basics"

Clint Johnston, the president of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation, said there's immense benefit in having the most urgent needs for teachers worked into a contract.

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"I think you also have to think when a government says they want to maintain that ability to control it, often the government's version of control is centered around money," he said. "And unions and teachers and parents are much more concerned about what's the learning situation of students in classrooms."

The BCTF ended a 14-year dispute with its provincial government in 2016 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that class size and composition was a negotiable item.

But Johnston says the current agreement in place in B.C. was negotiated when school districts were local. Some have class size worked into their agreements and others don't. While a school in Regina or Saskatoon may not be facing the same issues as a rural school, having union mechanisms in place ensures accountability for both sides.

"Once there's language in the contract, it gives you the levers to pull. If that language isn't being met, if that situation isn't being met, it gives you the proper grievance procedure," Johnston said.

On Tuesday, Moe didn't budge when asked why the province won't include class size and composition into a collective bargaining agreement.

"It would directly be moving the decision making ability on allocation of those classroom supports from duly elected local school divisions to a provincial union, and we just simply will not do that," Moe said.

Seiferling is suggesting a creative way to end the stalemate: take principals out of scope.

"Empower the principals of each of the schools to manage. Right now, they're beholden to the school boards who are beholden to the government — there's lots of layers of red tape and bureaucracy," he said.

"There's ways to address this without changing the collective agreement at all. But it would require some serious review of the entire system, and I don't think we're gonna go with that."

Seiferling said both sides shouldn't look at what other provinces are doing, and that a new agreement should be "made in Saskatchewan."

Johnston noted a teacher shortage in B.C. is compounding class sizes and composition right now. If there isn't aspirational language in the contract, he says fewer people will want to teach under increasingly stressful conditions.

"That the working environment is good enough to make people look at and go, 'you know what? I'd like to go be a teacher because it looks like a job where I can contribute positively and still have a manageable workload,'” Johnston said.

Teachers across Saskatchewan are not running extracurricular activities through Wednesday, and will be withdrawing lunch hour supervision from certain schools on Thursday.