To the Editor:
A couple of weeks ago, Education Minister Peter Fassbender announced that Premier Christy Clark had put him completely in charge of negotiations with B.C. schoolteachers. A few days later, Clark announced the government can only negotiate with the teachers when they go back to work. Whatever happened to the Fassbender being in charge?
And since, as is usual with employer-employee contract negotiations, the union goes out on strike only when the employer won’t negotiate reasonably while they are working, Christy has presented the teachers with a real lose-lose Hobson’s choice.
The premier has also declined the teachers’ offer to submit to binding arbitration. Of course she did, because, as a right wing government, she does not want to lose control of anything, even to the judiciary that found she could not exclude class size and other working conditions from being negotiated. Perhaps she does not realize that smaller classes mean more teachers, the job creation she has been touting.
Christy tells us the teachers are asking for twice what other unions are getting but much of what the teachers are asking for is improvements to the public education system and that benefits the future of Canada. For their own benefit they are asking for eight per cent over five years. That is 1.6 per cent per year. With inflation running over two per cent, the teachers will be losing purchasing power and I have to ask: Are the other unions losing purchasing power faster than the teachers?
When I bought my first house in 1962 it was a renovated duplex in the Kitsilano area. It cost $17,500 and the real estate agent advised us that the payments should be less than 25 per cent of after-tax income. I hear that homeowners are now paying 60-70 per cent of their monthly income for a similar home and the purchase price is close to $1 million. And Christy Clark doesn’t want wages to keep up with the inflation rate? Sorry, Christy, that is an express train ride to excessive debt, bankruptcies and a collapsing market economy.
If the wage earners, who are the market, are not paid enough to meet the prices set by the one per cent without overloading themselves with debt, then the economic activities generally set in motion as a function of supply and demand cannot get started. The wage earners must be paid enough to meet the prices set by the suppliers for the cycle of supply and demand and employment to work, and that wage should be the goal of union/company negotiations.
Lister