Education Action: Toronto

By Janet Bojti

The schools can’t run without us. Every school has at least three or four of us. Some schools may have fifty of us and we outnumber the teachers. When you think of someone who works in a school, the first person that jumps to mind probably isn’t a caretaker, secretary, bus driver or education assistant.

Officially we’re called support staff. It means anyone that works in a school who isn’t a teacher. But that’s not really accurate. In Toronto, support staff includes over 2,000 people who teach English as a second language or literacy and basic math skills to adults. It includes people who teach kids swimming or music in the elementary schools. It includes people who teach preschoolers in parenting programs and seniors classes in everything from art to yoga. It includes anyone who teaches anything to adults in the evening or on weekends as long as it isn’t a high school credit course. All those people teaching kids and adults are called “instructors.” But education workers do a thousand other things in our 246 job categories besides “instructing” and in Toronto, there are nearly 12,000 of us.

Our union is CUPE local 4400 and it is less than twelve years old. Mike Harris created it. In 1997, his government forced the six school boards in Toronto to amalgamate into one mega school board. Consequently, the unions that had existed in the previous boards had to amalgamate too. After boiling down 65 contacts and distilling them into three collective agreements and conducting an overwhelming ratification vote, CUPE 4400 was born. By our eighth birthday, we had had to go through two strikes and a one year long work-to-rule job action to wrestle each and every collective agreement from the TDSB.

The last time we negotiated our contract, the TDSB was sidelined from the negotiations as were all the other school boards. Support staff and teachers in every school board across Ontario negotiated their pay, benefits and working conditions with the provincial government instead of their employers. The process was deceptively peaceful. Although CUPE 4400 got its best settlement ever, it was clear that the provincial government was taking control away from locally elected Boards. This has a real down side. As the province centralizes its power over education by disabling local school boards, Mike Harris’ plans march on, just in sheep’s clothing. The provincial funding formula remains unchanged.

Over the years, the CUPE 4400 membership has dwindled from 15,000 in 1998 to fewer than 12,000 due to 13 years of cuts and attrition. Our workforce is aging and one worker often does a job once done by two. The trustees recently voted to lay off 180 education assistants- another cost saving measure. The TDSB is obediently closing pools and cutting staff in order to follow the province’s fiscal directives. This means job loss for us but it means great loss of public resources for the community. The cuts show no sign of ebbing. The Liberal government promised to “fix” its funding formula but it never did. Instead now the province is expecting school boards to close schools and then sell off public property to balance their budgets. A show down is coming to a school near you.