FEATURE
REMEMBERING OUR STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHT TO STRIKE By Robert Smol
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The rights to bargain collectively and strike were not granted to OECTA at its inception almost 75 years ago. Instead, collective bargaining and legal job action were distant and hard-fought rights that took 30 years of aggressive advocacy, protest rallies, work-torule job actions, mass resignations, and the occupation of Queen’s Park to achieve. So with OECTA’s recent decision to recognize June as “Rightto-Strike Month,” it is worth recalling what our members, and the members of the other affiliates, had to face before all Ontario teachers were granted the rights to bargain collectively and to strike in 1975. In a recent interview, Bill Davis, who served as Premier of Ontario from 1971 to 1985, told me, “I recall it as something serious. But it ultimately sorted itself out. We went through an evolution, not a revolution.” That evolution began in the late 1940s and 50s with a very young OECTA advocating for teachers against employers and trustees who, collectively, tended to regard teachers more as indentured servants than professionals – especially when it came to issues such as equal pay for women and the right to resign. In a 1951 Globe and Mail article, LT Spalding, Secretary of the Ontario Urban and Rural Trustee Association, felt that “King Solomon, in all his wisdom, would find difficulty in solving the perplexing problem which the equal pay legislation would create in the school boards.” Equally “asinine” in the opinion of the trustees at the time was the emerging threat of mass resignations being considered by the union affiliates, including our own members, as far back as 1948. But as lawyer FJ MacRae is said to have put it, while advocating on behalf of female teachers with the Toronto and Suburban Separate School Board in 1948, “Teachers have been financially pushed around for so many years that they may consider a mass resignation in June. They feel that drastic pressure must be brought to bear for a satisfactory settlement.” According to MacRae’s findings, Catholic teachers in Toronto had received no pay increases between 1926 and
Toronto Separate School Board protest, 1970 JUNE 2018 | CATHOLIC TEACHER 9
