The Moral fight between Teachers and Ethics

In the last articles we looked at more general stuff concerning employment laws. In this article we will pay attention to current situation some recent changes that are on the way and the events that have an effect on the labour code.

The Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act that will replace some rules from the Section 11 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, mostly affecting the labour code, was recently introduced. It shows that the government respects the principle of equal pay for work of equal value and it will become a new stone in the fortress of anti-discrimination.

But let us step away from the press release and look at the facts. Probably the main change is the rethinking of the value of work. Until now value was assessed on skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, but with the new act consideration of qualifications and market factors are also added to this list. A considerable change especially for the IT where the market changes fast and new professions appear even faster. The second major change is gender predominance threshold; it was changed from 70% for groups with under 100 employees, 60% for groups between 100 and 500 employees, and 55% for groups of over 500 employees, to 70% for all employee groups. Accountability, application proactively, federal workers, union relations and recourse were also affected by the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act. This Act shows that the direction chosen by the government is very modern and democratic.

While the larger changes are on the way with the act, a real-life change was recently made in Ontario, where the teachers strike led to some results for the working people. But the results don’t seem to be very good.

The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario had a long stand against the Ontario's education system and finally decided to go on strike. Barely in the last moments the strike was prevented and the teachers accepted the governments offer. But now the union begins to think about the offer that provided an about 10% salary raise, which is actually lower that the 12% raise that was initially offered in the fall. According to Peter Giuliani (the president of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario), the union accepted the framework solely because key "contract strips" like control of prep time and supervision duties were removed from the agreement. Also extra hours were added in exchange for salary raise, basically leaving the teachers with nothing. Education Minister Kathleen Wynne used really hard-line tactics against the 73,000 elementary school teachers across the province.

One of the statements that were made during this case shows that a hidden enemy is presented here and this enemy is discrimination. David Clegg the union president had stated that Clegg was Ontario's education system has always discriminated against the female-dominated profession. Despite a long stand this case was not a real success for the teachers and the war on rights will definitely rage on.

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