Work To Rule

I recently attended a class reunion. It had me reminiscing.

My first memories were like those of my Grade Five teacher. He read to us kids several times a week and gave me a lasting love of literature.

High school started the same way. In Grade 12, though, I saw my German teacher stride the sidewalk with his colleagues, all holding picket signs. Several signs behind him marched a friend who taught in the primary school next door.

This high-school flashback happened when Bloor Wester Colleen Costa gave me a red card. It gives a message from school support staff to principals and supervisors: “I’m on work to rule for a fair settlement.”

“This means three things,” Costa tells me. “Don’t work during your two 15-minute breaks; don’t work during lunch; and don't work for free.”

“Don’t work for free?”

“If the principal or supervisor asks you to work overtime, make sure it's approved and you get paid for it,” explains Costa.

Before work-to-rule started, Costa administered two small schools. CUPE Local 4400 recently asked that she be booked off for a bargaining team. Since then, she’s been visiting schools and administrative sites, meeting fellow school support staff, surveying them, supporting them.

“The members are telling us not to strike,” Costa says. “We had strikes in 1999 and 2001. When there’s strife in schools, the kids notice. We just want to protect our benefits and not work for free.”

This issue stems from what the last provincial government attacked as “non-classroom budget lines.” The Tories used this euphemism to cut people like lunchroom supervisors, educational assistants, and secretaries to the point that fewer people cope with similar or increasing workloads.

With this logic, the Tories could also have added roads all around Ontario and decommissioned a bunch of snowplows.

In writing this, I face a question: are unions still relevant? Some, yes, but not all. CUPE, for example, isn’t the NHLPA. As much as I enjoy hockey and pity sports bars, I’m disgusted by the NHL lockout. What matters in the NHL today is whether overpaid athletes in one town beat overpaid athletes in another town. What matters in the school system is less glorious and more important. Should its workers demand better?

Sure, it’s the new normal for employers to squeeze more work from fewer workers. Cost constraint is no longer just a worthwhile business goal – for many, it’s dogma. To employers, the consequences – employee stress, illness, dissatisfaction, turnover – are externalities they too often ignore.

(A former colleague at a computer software company had left teaching after experiencing a strike. “That wasn’t what I signed up for,” he told me.)

My sister, a public school teacher, notices only one difference these days. Office workers take their breaks together, leaving the principal and vice-principal to staff the office in their absence.

That’s not bad. The less distractions for students, the better. Let’s hope for a speedy settlement, and make sure the kids can reflect on this school year with one less bad memory when it’s their turn to look back.

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