Remembering Our Struggle for the Right to Strike

REMEMBERING OUR STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHT TO STRIKE

By Robert Smol

TThe 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

1946! “After faithful service for 30 years, some of the 184 teachers are receiving only $1,600, less deductions for pensions and income tax. And retirement is not too far distant for the 13 women in this group,” he told the Globe and Mail. Based on the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, $1,600 in 1948 translates to about $18,653 in 2018 dollars.

At the time, without the right to bargain collectively, Ontario teachers had to negotiate their own contracts with employers, opening the door to discrepancy and manipulation.

“If the school board was a good school board, they might sit down and discuss salaries,” explains Leo Normandeau, who served as President of OECTA in 1974-75. “But there were so many discrepancies in those days.”

“There were no rules,” says Peter Murphy, who served in OECTA’s Collective Bargaining department in the early 1970s. “It was all done on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ sort of thing.”

Realizing they could not officially bargain collectively, but at the same time understanding intimately the power of their presence to the smooth functioning of a school, teachers began to employ the threat of mass resignations as a bargaining tool.

At the time, except by mutual agreement, the Education Act did not allow teachers to resign from their positions, except in November (for January) or May (for September). However, only being granted two very limited time periods during which to quit enabled teachers to get the attention of employers whenever large numbers would suddenly submit their resignations at the allowed time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the response of the trustees’ associations at the time was to blacklist teachers who, at the urging of their unions, practiced this tactic.

In 1951, with local attempts at mass resignations taking place at various boards, the Ontario Rural and Urban School Trustee Association passed a resolution at their annual meeting in Guelph, stating that “in the event of salary difficulties between school board and staff resulting in mass resignations of teachers that other member boards be notified of the names and addresses of those teachers who have participated in such mass resignations.”

Teachers, it seemed, had to be kept in their place and kept quiet for their own good, lest they dare make bold collective decisions. “It is becoming apparent to many sound thinkers that some teachers in this particular group may well need protection from themselves,” a frustrated Harold Wagner, President of the Ontario School Trustee Council told the Globe and Mail on June 21, 1955. His comments were in response to a recent mass resignation of 44 teachers from Port Arthur.

As more progressive labour principles and practices took hold in the 1960s, the old paternalistic standard of teacher negotiations began to come under more direct and consistent scrutiny.

“In one school that I taught [at] in North Bay, the best paid person on staff was the janitor, and that was probably because he was in the union,” recalls Murphy.

“I think like so many other professions, teaching went through a period where what was good, say in the 1940s or 50s, did not make any sense in the late 1960s,” says former Premier Bill Davis. “What we went through was a situation where there was the government’s decision to accept the reality of what should happen.”

But although the government was slowly growing amenable to some form of a collective bargaining framework for teachers, those representing employers were not so enlightened. It was only by the steadily mounting volume and pressure from mass resignations, protests, and workto-rule job actions that the movement to full collective bargaining began to take shape.

“By the time I was President of OECTA, we had 19 school boards where the teachers had submitted resignations,” says Normandeau, who also made it known to the trustees’ association and the government that any replacement teachers hired during a labour dispute would lose their license to teach. “There were nine teachers in St. Thomas who were under threat because their letters of resignation were there and the board said they would just hire more teachers,” he says. “We had a little rally in St. Thomas and I said that any teacher who signs onto this board, at the next Ontario Teachers’ Federation meeting, I was going to request that the Federation remove that teacher’s certificate.”

10 CATHOLIC TEACHER | JUNE 2018

According to Murphy, in the early 1970s, the OECTA Provincial Office saw “a whole new group of people come into what was then the Teacher Welfare department and we set about radicalizing the membership.”

By far the single most public act of defiance on the part of teachers at the time took place in December 1973 when the government attempted to table Bills 274 and 275, which would have outlawed mass resignations and forced teachers into arbitration. Refusing to show up at work on December 19, teachers rallied at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, then proceeded to Queen’s Park, where they occupied much of the legislature. Other rallies took place in Ottawa, Sudbury, and Hamilton.

“The demonstrations became the impetus for Bill 100, because the press really got hold of this,” recalls Normandeau. “The Minister was very concerned and called all of the associations who had teachers out, who had resignations, to a meeting at the Royal York hotel to see if we could come to an agreement. We could not come to an agreement because we did not have collective bargaining powers.”

In the aftermath of the mass demonstrations, Bills 274 and 275 were withdrawn and work began in earnest toward Bill 100, granting teachers in Ontario the rights to bargain collectively and to strike. The bill received Royal Assent in the summer of 1975.

These rights have become so familiar to us that it is easy to forget they are not automatic – they are the result of hardfought advocacy and activism, and they must continue to be protected. As we celebrate “Right-to-Strike Month,” we remember our past, our present, and our future. And we tip our cap to those who fought, and continue to fight, for workers’ rights.

Robert Smol is a teacher with the Dufferin-Peel Secondary Unit. He also works as a freelance journalist and columnist. His work has appeared on CBC News, the National Post, iPolitics, and the Toronto Star, among others.