By Sparrow McGowan
From its early beginnings, with meetings in tiny, local schoolrooms, to today’s general meetings in massive auditoriums, Ontario teachers’ federations have been active and evolving for over 100 years.
Now, Ontario teachers’ federations are responding to the controversial testing legislation, as huge, powerful unions, representing 144,000 teachers.
The history of teachers’ unions is relatively short – just over 25 years. But, as professional associations, their collectives go back more than a century.
Province-wide associations started forming at the beginning of the 1900s, with the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario in 1918.
Rebecca Coulter, an education professor who specializes in teachers’ unions at the University of Western Ontario, says that, until recently, teachers always saw their federations as professional associations — not unions.
Coulter says teachers established more advocacy-based teachers’ organizations after the First World War.
The most notable event at that time was the passing of the Teaching Profession Act in 1944.
The act created the Ontario Teachers’ Federation and required that all teachers in government-funded schools belong and pay dues to one of the five affiliated federations.
Most of these organizations are currently responsible for negotiating teachers’ collective agreements.
But militancy emerged in 1973, when about 20,000 teachers gathered into the Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens. They were joined by about 10,000 more teachers in a march on Queen’s Park.
The protest was mainly an outraged response to legislation that would undo a mass resignation. Rhonda Kimberley-Young, vice-president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, says “back in 1973, teachers didn’t have the right to strike so they prepared letters of resignation.”
The mass resignation was itself a response to an earlier amendment of the Education Act that imposed spending limits on boards. When teachers bargained with their local school board over salary and working conditions, the expenditure ceilings limited salary increases.
In July 1975, an Ontario government decision changed everything. Teachers got the right to strike. This formalized the right of teachers’ federations to full, free collective bargaining. Full strike or lockout sanctions were allowed, making the federations real unions.
The Education Quality Improvement Act, Bill 160, was introduced in 1997.
Among other changes to the Ontario school system, it requires mandatory teacher testing.
Kimberly-Young, says that teachers would normally have some input into legislation like Bill 160. This time that involvement was limited, she says.
After the bill was introduced, teachers across Ontario staged a “political protest”. They didn’t go to work for two weeks.
But divided, they fell. By Thursday of the second week, three of the five teachers’ federations ordered their members back to work. The other two did the same by the end of the weekend.
In 2001, Ontario’s teachers seem, once again, to face a major rallying cry — against teacher testing.
She says that the federation will not apply for status as a provider of courses for the teacher-testing program. It is encouraging its members to boycott the new courses.
“This government has done more to increase the mentality of unionism among teachers,” Coulter says.