Despite high ratification vote BC Teachers fail to make headway on one major issue

-Files from George Henderson, My Cariboo Now

BC teachers voted 98 percent in favour of the new contract that was reached late last week with the provincial government.

It includes a two percent wage increase in each of the three years.

One thing it doesn’t include is any gains on class size and composition.

“It’s unfortunate that we were not able to make gains in class size, class composition, specialist teacher ratios or even caseloads for some of our teachers that don’t currently have any. We were staving off concessions in this round again, which was unexpected by us, we weren’t expecting concessions again in this round but we were. And so we’re able to stave those off but we also weren’t able to make those gains, which was quite disappointing to us, ” said Teri Mooring, President of the BC Teachers Federation.

That is despite dealing with an NDP government this time around.

Despite the wage hike, Mooring says they remain below average when compared with other jurisdictions.

“There are a lot of other jurisdictions that are still bargaining, and so it depends on what they are able to achieve as to where we’ll stand. We’re still going to be at the lower end, however. When we look at Alberta, even though they’ve faced many years of zeroes, they are still well ahead of us in terms of salary, even in light of the increases that we just currently made, and the same with Ontario.”

Teachers had been working without a contract since June of last year.

This deal will run until June 30th, 2022.