The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) announced on Sept. 18 that its members ratified a collective agreement with the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association (OSPBA) and the government of Ontario.
“Our members may have ratified this deal, but they remain frustrated and angry that the school boards of this province, through OPSBA, were so brazenly determined to gut our collective agreements and to attack our working conditions,” OSSTF president Paul Elliot said in a press release.
“In the end we were able to fend off OPSBA’s assault on our agreements and on the learning conditions of our students. But it’s not lost on our members that their employers had every intention of stripping away, in a single round of negotiations, virtually every gain we have made through decades of bargaining.”
Spokesperson Lori Foote said the details of the three-year agreement, which applies to 60,000 secondary school teachers across Ontario, aren’t being shared at this time.
Education minister Liz Sandals said she can not comment on specific terms of the agreement until they are ratified at the local level.
In an email statement Sandals said she is “pleased” the agreement is “consistent with the government’s net-zero bargaining framework, meaning any salary increases are offset through the collective agreement and there will be no cuts to the classroom.
“We knew this round of bargaining would be challenging and I want to thank each of the bargaining teams for their hard work and commitment to reaching a collective agreement.”
The next step is for local leaders to bargain with local boards.
“Then they would have to ratify that and once they have that ratified, those two pieces make-up their entire collective agreement,” Foote explained.
