Quote:
Originally Posted by BagoPucks
For sure there are problems in the classroom and our school system and yes I am late to the party. I am open to be corrected that's why I posted here looking for some feedback on why my view is wrong. The cost of living argument is not something I care for. I don't know how many industries have gone ahead and matched all the market changes. Additionally, I haven't seen enough to say that quality of education hasn't dropped in response to market conditions.
I do believe in the public education system and no I am not a teacher. I am looking for discussion on how we could have avoided the strike. I am not seeing that a deal wanted to be reached.
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Ok, I will give it a go...
You are really missing the bad faith aspect to this in my opinion.
When defence lawyers had finally had enough and took our very public stand and withdrew services it was after at least a full decade of our willingness to prop up a public service being abused by the conduct of government.
Our straw that broke the camel's back moment came very shortly after the Crown prosecutors and Provincial Court Judges. Sheriffs and Court Clerks have had it even worse and their ranks have been decimated as a result.
The government on behalf of the taxpayers as a whole are the ones responsible for running a functioning public service. It is not on the service provider to pay out of pocket themselves because they are people who care to try and not watch individuals they take care of get screwed by purposeful systematic underfunding.
Teachers have been disrespected and abused with the conditions they have been put through in similar fashion to what we faced. That they are finally taking a stand is at least a decade in the making. Just like it was for us.
Our situation was different because we are not unionized and we are not publicly paid employees. So we ironically had a much easier time of just walking away from the work and there was nothing they could do about it. But it absolutely took that - and serious criminal cases being placed in jeopardy - before the UCP government would even attempt to bargain in good faith.
They ran around disparaging us for the massive 'raise' we were demanding while ignoring how far below other provinces our legal aid rates were and how long it had been since we had received any increases and how low the per person funding had dropped by pretending like there was no such thing as inflation in the last 20 years. Sound familiar?
In the case of Crown prosecutors, some of them I know received a 25% raise overnight after enduring 7-8 years of complete wage and benefit freezes. They were going to quit and leave to other provinces. It was not rhetoric. Was their 25% raise a reflection of how greedy they were, or rather proof of how badly the government had been getting away with abusing them for their services? Easy to say us defence lawyers were just greedy, but a little more difficult to paint prosecutors with the same brush no?
It is the UCP government
modus operandi at this point. Refuse fair terms or compensation for as long as possible putting individual human beings to the breaking point, publicly attack them when they finally say they cannot take it anymore, and then ride the populism wave of individuals who enter the chat late to the party and act like the workers in the current round of abusive negotiations are obviously the problem and not the government (who somehow has been the only constant in all said negotiations)...because something something unions are bad and I have my own bootstraps so why don't they just use theirs?
How to avoid the strike? Completely and painfully simple. Stop following the above abusive relationship pattern with publicly funded systems and the workers that are necessary to make them function for the taxpayers. Be respectful, don't lie about them in public, and don't pretend like you cannot afford to pay them when you are 'saving' billions for a rainy day, and also borrowing billions for annual operations, and simultaneously tossing hundreds of millions out the window on vanity projects made-up nonsensical legislation or sole-sourced contracts to people that seem to somehow have an inside track and never have to fight to be paid.