COMMENTS ON THE BC TEACHERS' STRIKE OF FALL 2005

A little less than eighteen months after the bitter health-care workers' strike, it was the turn of British Columbia's (BC's) teachers to face off against the Gordon Campbell-led Liberal government. And once again, one important section of the working class in BC was defeated as a result of being isolated from the rest of the class of Canada's western-most province. This was, like the near general strike of the spring of 2004, another important class battle, involving, once again, a large number of public sector workers. This strike, involving approximately 33,000 teachers, and thousands of other school support staff in sympathy, showed that the will of the working class in BC to resist further widespread attacks from the ruling class by way of an elected government remains strong. But it also showed that support for trade unionism, in its militant form, at any rate, also remains firm, despite the deliberate sabotage of both the health-care workers' strike and of this one by the BC Federation of Labour ((BCFL) i.e. of all the major trade unions) -- although there might be some more 'subterranean' questioning of the trade union form and function following this, yet another, failed struggle. That remains to be seen, however.

It was a failure by account of the terms that the teachers set for themselves when they embarked on this strike. Those terms included reasonable class-size limits at all public schools across the province and reasonable wage increases after several straight years of wage freezes. Such aims were not at all unrealistic, nor were they unattainable under the circumstances in which this strike was waged.

In early October, teachers voted 88% for strike action. The provincial government reacted by passing legislation in following days that made illegal all withdrawal of labour by teachers beyond 20% of their normal work activity, and that extended the existing collective agreement until the end of the current school year. In response the teachers’ union (British Columbia Federation of Teachers (BCTF)) held a second strike vote, a vote to determine the level of support among teachers for striking illegally. This time, the strike mandate increased to over 90%, demonstrating rising anger and determination to take on the Campbell-led Liberal government. On Friday, October 7 the teachers went on full-scale strike across B.C. The following week, the strike moved forward, and public support for the teachers increased as the media spotlight was on this open class conflict, and the “crisis” of tens of thousands of school kids around the province losing out on “precious class room time”. Media polls showed public support for the strike consistently at 55-60% (while support for the government hovered around 35%) at this time. However, on Thursday, October 13, B.C. Supreme Court declared the union’s assets frozen, thus halting teachers’ strike pay of $50 per day. That was the only court action taken at that time, and it did nothing to deter teachers from continuing their work stoppage. Public support, if anything, only solidified.

The second week of the strike found regional generalized strikes rolling around the province, led by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) of B.C. On Monday, Oct. 17, much of Victoria, the provincial capitol, and B.C.’s second largest city (and parts of the rest of Vancouver Island) was shut down by sympathy strike, and a rally of 15,000+ was held at the legislature. On Tuesday, the regional strike moved to northern B.C., while Wednesday was the turn of the southeastern part of the province. In each case, most unionized workplaces in the region were shut down for the day. Friday was to be the turn of Vancouver and the region around it. Thursday was the pivotal day for this strike. While another part of the southern interior had a significant part of its economic activity shut down in sympathy strike action, the teachers’ strike was being sabotaged in the union offices in Vancouver. While the BCTF leadership met with a government appointed mediator and representatives of the schools’ management, the BCFL announced that it would not support the one-day sympathy strike set for greater Vancouver region (which contains approximately one half of the population of B.C.). CUPE leaders must have been convinced that without BCFL support their walkout was not worth undertaking, so, on Friday, only teachers were not working. Friday was also the day when the mediator issued his first proposal, a proposal which was significantly better than what the government had “offered” to teachers. But the proposal of the mediator was still far from the relatively modest aims the teachers had set for themselves at the outset of this strike. Further increasing the pressure on the BCTF, the provincial Supreme Court issued a $500,000 fine against the union. Under these conditions, the union leadership “buckled”, announcing that if they could get written promises from the government to set limits on class sizes, that they would recommend membership support for the mediator’s proposal. Although such promises never materialized, the BCTF leadership recommended the deal as it was, and called for an immediate vote on it. This was two weeks to the day after the strike began. Over the weekend, the membership of the BCTF voted by 77% to accept the union recommended deal. The strike was over, and on Monday, Oct. 21, all teachers returned to work.

There was, nevertheless, a lot of anger at not having achieved any of their goals, and yet having so much support from other workers and the public throughout the province. Some must have sensed that they really weren’t very far from having gotten a lot more than they did. The mediator’s proposal, after all, was only his first one, and that came after less than two days of mediation. If teachers had been able to hold out at least a few days longer, they would undoubtedly have come out of this fight with significantly more results. There was, in the media-induced climate a pervasive sense among the public, after two weeks of illegal strike action, that that was about “enough”, that was about all they would support. It was, of course, though, the withdrawal of active solidarity support by the unions of the BCFL which led to the demise of the teachers’ struggle of 2005. BC’s teachers will renew this struggle the next time. They have some important lessons to learn from this round. The first one is that as long as they don’t take active control over their struggle from “their” union (and likewise for workers in other unions), they will end up defeated.

Nonetheless, while this particular struggle was a defeat for the teachers of B.C., it also constituted a breakthrough for them from the larger, historical perspective of the development of the consciousness of the class in this part of the world. This strike demonstrated that (public school) teachers are clearly a part of the working class, that they share the same interests as the rest of the class, that they stand in an equally antagonistic relation to the ruling class (whether of the private sector or the state or ‘public’ sector), and that they are just as willing to engage in open conflict with that ruling class as any other section of the working class. The real breakthroughs, however, came in i) the large scale willingness and determination by the teachers to openly defy government legislation that prevents them from engaging in strike activity, and ii) the level of real, active solidarity – in the form of generalized strike activity – offered to the teachers by other workers, who had nothing to gain, and certainly something to lose, by doing so. These breakthroughs constitute a real step forward for the teachers, and for the class more generally, in B.C.

Wage Slave X