Red Deer Catholic teachers vote overwhelmingly in support of strike vote

Feb 28, 2024 | 4:02 PM

Officials with the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) announced earlier this month that Red Deer Catholic teachers are sending a strong and clear message to school board bargainers to return to negotiations and to move off their “contract-stripping proposal”.

The ATA says two votes, each supported by over 99 per cent of teachers, were held at an in-person meeting attended by about three-quarters of members. Officials say the first vote rejected the board’s latest offer, and the second authorized the Alberta Teachers’ Association to hold a strike vote.

“Teachers are clearly upset with their employer right now,” says Sara Lambert, president of Red Deer Catholic Local No 80. “They are incensed that the board’s only proposal in bargaining so far would strip away longstanding provisions from the collective agreement, and they are demanding to be treated with respect.”

The ATA says as of Feb. 16, 2024, only five of 61 school boards in the province had not settled for the current term of bargaining, which extends back to September 2020.

Lambert says teachers are looking for improvements on issues related to substitute teachers and school administrators. ATA officials say the solutions being proposed are low cost and consistent with provisions that exist in most teacher agreements elsewhere.

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“The board wants to strip out professional development provisions and remove up to 20 members from the agreement,” exclaims Lambert. “They have made negotiations adversarial and antagonizing when a deal could easily be reached. This is about fairness and respect, and right now it looks like the board has neither to offer to its teachers.”

The ATA says teacher negotiators have told the board that it needs to return to bargaining with an intent to listen and to move toward a settlement, or they will ask the mediator to initiate the two-week cooling-off period. After those two weeks lapse, the ATA says it would be in a position to hold a vote of members to go on strike.

The ATA points out that collective bargaining for teachers in Alberta is a two-phase process where matters of significant cost and broad impact are negotiated at a central table, followed by local negotiations between individual school divisions and ATA bargaining units on other more locally specific matters.

Officials with the Board of Trustees for Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools could not be reached for comment by publication time.

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by rdnewsNOW staff

Red Deer Catholic teachers vote overwhelmingly in support of strike vote

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