Waterloo Region elementary teachers to explain strike action on Friday
Parents in Waterloo Region will have to wait until Friday to find out what kind of action elementary school teachers will take Monday, according Greg Weiler, the president of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (EFTO) Waterloo Region chapter.
Waterloo Region elementary school teachers, along with elementary school teachers across the province are in a legal strike position as of Monday.
"Once you're in a legal strike position, anything can be stopped," said Weiler in an interview with Craig Norris on The Morning Edition Wednesday. He says a local meeting of union representatives is scheduled for Thursday, so Friday will be the first time parents will hear about what kind of action could happen on Monday.
He wouldn't explicitly rule out a walkout.
"I would say to anyone that is thinking there's a possibility of a walkout, that given everything that has happened teachers understand and do take into consideration the needs of parents and that's how we make our decisions," said Weiler.
However, a confidential memo obtained by CBC News shows that the union plans to start work-to-rule on Monday.
The memo says the job action "won't impact student programs, extra-curricular initiatives and field trips, but it will affect Ministry of Education initiatives."
At 12:13 p.m. on Wednesday, the Waterloo Region District School Board posted a notice for families that could be affected by Monday's strike action.
The notice states that "all reports indicate that [strike action] will consist of a partial withdrawal of services" and that "parents can expect elementary schools to be open on Monday May 11, 2015 with all classes running as usual."
The school board would not comment on the source of its information, but says it anticipates providing more details later in the week.
Pay not yet an issue, says union
At this point, Weiler says compensation isn't the reason the province's 73,000 elementary school teachers are contemplating strike action, although he allowed that it could emerge as an issue in the future.
"At this point for our members, it's not playing a role at all. That's not to say that that couldn't become an issue if the process moves along, it certainly could," said Weiler.
"But at this point the things that are being tabled by the school board representatives provincially are all about increasing the bureaucracy, taking control away from teachers and... increasing the class size."
"Things that locally I would say have not been contentious issues, and in talking to my colleagues across the province, they have not been contentious issues or problems in other locals, so we're a bit mystified why these are suddenly provincial level problems," he said.
Weiler claims that representatives from the school board association and the province haven't participated in bargaining before, and he thinks that is contributing to the delay in coming to a resolution.
"For nine months they've been meeting provincially and the positions at the table from OPSBA [Ontario Public School Boards' Association] and the government are the same now nine months later as they were at the start," said Weiler.
"There has been no progress, there has been no willingness...to have meaningful discussion on issues, and that is the reason the job action will commence, to reinforce with those two parties this process has to move along, we need to get a finish for people," said Weiler.
Weiler says that that the class size is something that Wynne introduced as education minister, but the school board association wants to increase class size despite that.
ETFO recently received a "no board" report from the province's Labour Ministry, signifying the two sides are at an impasse when it comes to renegotiating teacher contracts.
The teachers' current contract expired last August, the union said.
Part of the difficulty with this bargaining stems from the new two-tiered system, in which teachers' unions negotiate with both local boards and the province in parallel talks.