He said there is much more for the government to lose in arbitration, because it is the only body at the negotiating table responsible for ensuring teachers, students, and the province's taxpayers are respected, in addition to balancing the budget.
While the minister said he "very clearly understands" what the union wants, neither he nor Peter Cameron, the employers' association's chief negotiator, has received a written proposal for binding arbitration, despite Cameron asking for one several times this past weekend.
The union posted the proposal to its website today, however, after a press conference with union president Jim Iker this morning.
'We want a mediated settlement'
Fassbender rejected the preconditions the union proposed for binding arbitration, including leaving class size and composition and teacher staffing ratio issues to the pending B.C. Court of Appeal case, and dropping the employers' association's proposal E.80.
E.80, which calls for the class sizes set in the School Act and the $75-million annual Learning Improvement Fund to become part of the teachers' agreement, has been the subject of much contention between the two parties, particularly in the past week.
The union describes it as the government's attempt to take away teachers' court-acknowledged rights to bargain working conditions like class size and composition. But Fassbender, who said today that "the misinformation being put out by the teachers' federation on E.80 is driving me crazy," maintains the proposal is simply a method for bargaining class size and composition and will not impact the court case.
"We want a mediated settlement," he said, adding the "preconditions" set out by the union have no place in mediation or arbitration.
Both the education minister and Premier Christy Clark, however, have said teachers must cut the cost of their proposals to levels closer to the contracts settled with other public sector unions before government can reach a deal with the teachers.
Proposals still waiting, both sides say
Instead of arbitration, Fassbender reiterated the proposal he made to Cameron and Iker on Labour Day weekend.
This included putting aside any grievances arising from the B.C. Supreme Court ruling until the appeal; entering into mediation and suspending the employers' lockout on teachers, which included a 10 per cent pay cut; and asking the union executive to put a two-week strike suspension to a member vote, allowing students to go back to class while both sides bargain.
He pushed back against accusations that the government has not moved at the bargaining table, noting while the employers' association put a "comprehensive written proposal on the table" that contains 80 contract proposals two days before the full-scale teachers strike began in June, it's still waiting for an equally comprehensive written response to those proposals from the teachers.
The union, however, said it has responded through mediator Vince Ready, and that proposals for moves the government has since suggested, such as dropping proposal E.81, have yet to be put in writing, too.
While teachers have moved by cutting their own salary proposals several times and cutting $125 million from a proposed $225-million fund to settle grievances regarding the stripping of class size and composition from teachers contracts in 2002 -- a fund they promise to drop if binding arbitration is used -- teachers still want control over a different $225-million annual fund for issues like extra supports for students with special needs or oversized classes.
That isn't acceptable, Fassbender said, since the government has made clear it won't provide one union with a contract far exceeding the cost of other settled union contracts.
He also repeated his wariness about arbitration because of the 2001 doctors' strike arbitration that he called unfair to provincial taxpayers and involved the hike of provincial sales and tobacco taxes. He did not say how much the increases were, and the Ministry of Education said it would return a request for the numbers.
Iker said this morning the cost of the union's $225-million annual fund for learning needs -- which would start at $175 million in the first year and increase to $225 million a year thereafter -- is just $3 per student and should not require a tax increase to fund it.
Arbitration proposal 'a ploy': minister
Fassbender said the union shouldn't be surprised by the government's rejection of the arbitration proposal, and that he believed the union was counting on the government saying no.
"That ploy was to make them look like they're trying to be reasonable, trying to come to a settlement through binding arbitration, knowing full-well that it would be very unlikely if not impossible for this government to agree to it because of the history that we've seen with binding arbitration," he said.
Regardless, a union vote on whether teachers would agree to end the strike if the government agreed to binding arbitration is still scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 10, with results expected later that evening.
Original Article
Source: thetyee.ca/
Author: Katie Hyslop
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