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In 2012, unions representing teachers and education workers in Ontario, Canada, were faced with Bill 115, legislation used by the provincial government to impose a collective agreement upon education workers and remove their right to strike. With a specific focus on the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, this paper is an insider view of how Bill 115 and the external political contexts of the time affected Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation’s internal democratic practices at the height of the struggle. It employs theories of union democracy in order to consider how external forces can shape teacher unions’ internal democracy, and how the competing pressures faced by union leaders can impact their actions and decisions. This paper takes the view that internal union democracy is an important consideration in teacher unions’ resistance to government austerity agendas.
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This thesis explores the impact of the centralization of bargaining in Ontario’s education sector on the internal democracy of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), the province’s second-largest teacher union and self-described defender of public education. Using multiple theoretical lenses of union democracy, public sector unionism, labour geography and teacher professionalism, this thesis examines OSSTF’s history and the evolution of its internal processes and structures, with a focus on the union’s response to the gradual shift to a centralized bargaining regime. Initially formed in 1919 as a conservative organization committed to raising the professional status of teachers, OSSTF expanded into a union that represents both teachers and support staff, bargaining contracts for members with local employers. Positioned within a public sector context of austerity and neoliberal governments looking to contain the costs of public education, OSSTF found itself subjected to legislation intended to upscale education funding and bargaining, beginning in the late 1990s. This thesis finds that the external context of centralization of bargaining has been the most important factor in shaping the internal democratic life of OSSTF, shifting scales of power from the local to the provincial level of the union, exacerbating tensions between provincial and local actors, increasing the overall bureaucracy of the organization, and reducing democratic participation by the rank-and-file. These findings lead to the greater question of whether these internal changes have enhanced or limited the ability of OSSTF to effectively further their members’ interests and resist the neoliberalization of the school system, with a view to considering the role of teacher unions within the future of public education in Ontario.
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This article seeks to explain both convergence and divergence in Ontario teacher union electoral strategy. After coalescing around a strategy of anti-Progressive Conservative (PC) strategic voting beginning with the 1999 provincial election, Ontario’s major teachers’ unions developed an electoral alliance with the McGuinty Liberals designed to advance teacher union priorities and mitigate the possibility of a return to power for the PCs. The authors use campaign finance and interview data to demonstrate that this ad hoc partnership was strengthened over the course of several election campaigns before the Liberal government’s decision to legislate restrictions on teacher union collective bargaining rights in 2012 led to unprecedented tension in the union-party partnership. The authors adapt the concept of union-party loyalty dilemmas to explain why individual teachers’ unions responded differently to the Liberal government’s efforts to impose austerity measures in the education sector.
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