Ontario education workers start job action Thursday

Yorkregion.com
Sept. 10, 2015
By Lisa Queen

More than 5,000 education workers in York Region will join a provincewide work-to-rule campaign beginning this morning.

“It’s going to be difficult. We don’t want to go out on a full-blown strike. We always have the students’ concerns (in mind),” Elena Di Nardo, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 2331 in York Region, said.

The union represents 55,000 educational assistants, custodians, secretaries, library technicians, early childhood educators, student support workers and others across the province.

They are in a legal strike position today.

Di Nardo is more optimistic than she was late last month that a settlement can be reached after the provincial government agreed to additional bargaining dates, including today and tomorrow.
But she isn’t ruling out escalating job action.

“We’re hoping through these days of negotiations that we have centrally, we can come to an agreement without having to go, actually, on a full-blown strike,” she said.

“We could have escalating job action. We could step up work-to-rule. We could possibly go into a rotating strike or a full-blown strike, but we’re giving the opportunity to the ministry to come to an agreement with what we have on the table.”

As the work-to-rule campaign kicks off, students and parents should not feel any impact, Di Nardo said.

“We have to keep in mind students come first and the safety of students always comes first,” she said.

“It’s really not going to affect the students as much or the parents when we’re doing a work-to-rule, but it could be a completely different scenario if we go on a rotating strike or a full-blown strike, which is not where we want to go. We want to be able to get an agreement ... Our goal is not to go on a full-blown strike. Our goal is to be there for the students and to come up with a fair, tentative agreement that will work best for everyone overall.”

During the first phase of the work-to-rule, education workers will refuse to work overtime, not come to school early or work late, decline participation in any voluntary activities, not take calls or emails from supervisors if they are home sick, refuse to perform duties of fellow union colleagues and “work at a safe pace”, Di Nardo said.

Although she would not comment on the union’s demands, she said education workers want to be treated as fairly as teachers.

“The school does not run alone by teachers. We all play a very important part and we always seem to be put on the back burner, education support workers,” she said.

Public high school teachers and Catholic secondary and elementary teachers reached agreements with the province last month.

However, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario is still negotiating with the province, York Region union president David Clegg said.

The union announced last month it was escalating its work-to-rule campaign.

Teachers will participate in extracurricular activities, but won’t take part in field trips and “meet the teacher” nights, collect money for school-related activities, participate in fundraising activities, email principals and vice-principals outside work hours unless there is a safety concern and collect or distribute school or board paperwork to students.

Clegg isn’t optimistic there will be a quick resolution.

“While discussions at the provincial bargaining table have been ongoing since Sept. 1, the progress, if it follows the course of the concluded OSSTF (Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation) negotiations, may prove lengthy,” he said.

“Those negotiations reportedly took 29 days of bargaining. At this point, there is little reason for optimism given what appear to be concessions and a lack of significant gains in the other teacher federations’ tentative agreements.”