1960s
Stirling McDowell and Gib Eamer
at the Waskesiu Retreat, 1967
- Saskatchewan Bulletin
Ruben Richert, who became a member of the executive in 1960 and was appointed as an executive assistant on the Federation staff in 1965 after his term as president, remembers the ‘60s as “the time of a lot of innovations and a lot of developments. We moved to our comprehensive schools at that time, and to the much broader based curriculum in terms of resource courses, and that’s where the freedom started to some extent, during that period of time. We moved into things like accreditation of teachers, the new sciences, and new approaches to teaching. We were in a growth period and lots of things were possible.”
What was possible, and what took place, was a tremendous upsurge of professional development activities in the Federation. According to Stirling McDowell,
“The reason for the rather late blooming of what is now described as half the program could be attributed almost exclusively to the necessary preoccupation with teachers’ conditions of employment prior to that time. That was critical and demanded immediate action, and all of the time and money and personnel of the Federation were devoted to teacher welfare activities.”
“I suppose that the developments commencing in the late ‘50s, the broadening of professional development activities, began because both the Federation and the teachers it represented were by then relatively better off than they had been in the 20 years before. They could afford to allocate the resources and the people to spark new programs.”
“The Federation staff was only five in number in the late 1950s, but nevertheless that was one or two people more than had been there 10 years before, and at that stage it was possible for part of the time of one or two of those staff members to be spent working in professional development activities. The staff nearly doubled in the space of 10 years. By 1966 there were 11 on the administrative staff, and maybe half of their time was devoted to professional development.”
By the end of the decade there were an even dozen Executive Assistants staffing the teacher service programs, and the Federation found it necessary to develop a team approach to maintaining the strong local associations important to the delivery of services and the welfare of teachers. The province was divided into quarters, and STF workers found themselves with geographical as well as departmental–communications, economic welfare or professional development—assignments. The central office was also growing out of its decade-old home on the Saskatoon riverbank, and the present STF Building at Arlington and Louise was under construction.
The dramatic expansion of special subject councils in the ‘60s illustrates the upsurge both in teacher participation in professional development activities and in the services provided by the Federation. Before 1962 there were only two special interest groups of this kind, the High School Principals’ Group and the precursor of the present Saskatchewan Association of Teachers of French. In 1962 Art McBeath joined the staff as the first Executive Assistant with a particular responsibility to concentrate on professional development. The emerging “special groups” were to be his particular concern, and by 1969 there were 16 special subject councils established. There are 25 of them today.
The active participation of the Federation in the internship program for education students began in 1965 and also represented an important initiative in professional development. It continues to be viewed as an important activity and Ruben Richert sees the program as an expression of teachers’ status, collectively, as professionals and as an opportunity for them to improve their own performance. “We’ve insisted that teachers should have a fair share in the decision about which students should enter the profession, according to their performances during the internship period. As an organization we then turn around and say, let’s make sure that our people are prepared to make that decision, that we have the expertise with which to make it. It was on that basis that we were the first to initiate workshops with co-operating teachers and interns, before the university moved. Our province is now the envy of the North American continent in terms of that unique program and partnership.”
The STF took a very active interest in teacher education from the beginning, and the ‘60s saw some significant outcomes of Federation initiatives. Stirling McDowell recalls that many important changes came about because of the STF presence on the provincial board of teacher education. “The ratio of STF representation is misleading (two of 15) because we have taken a very aggressive role in proposing and pushing for changes in teacher education. I have no hesitation in saying that there would not have been integration of the teacher education programs—the joining of the normal schools with the colleges of education in ‘64—without the Federation’s initiative and insistence. The upgrading of minimum requirements wouldn’t have happened at the rate it has happened without STF pressure. If the upgrading would have happened at all, in the absence of STF pressure, it would have been because of pressure from other provinces.
“This goes back to the original concept of what the organization should be. It wasn’t conceived as being exclusively self-protecting, but rather as having a duality of purpose—to look after teachers’ welfare and to look after the welfare of education generally.”
Ruben Richert makes a direct connection between this duality of purpose and the evolution of teacher professional development programs.
“I think the whole basis for professional development is that no matter how well we deal with all the welfare issues of teachers—salaries and the rest of it—the workplace is where the teachers’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction is going to occur. For that reason, we certainly would say that we have a responsibility to have influence on the teaching and learning conditions and the kind of programs, preparation and the availability of ongoing renewal that a person needs for career satisfaction as a professional. That’s the basis for the rationale that, for me, has always been fundamental to our professional development activities, because the classroom is where it really counts and that’s where professional development activities should have impact.”
The STF’s commitment includes budget. “I don’t think you can be credible in exerting influence simply by saying, ‘We want this’ without getting involved and spending some money on yourself.”
“We feel as professionals we need to influence educational decisions. We won’t have that power unless we have a profession that has expertise and acts collectively on its convictions.”
At the end of the ‘60s local bargaining was swept aside by a new government initiative in education financing. In 1968 the Liberal government under Premier Thatcher introduced a bill imposing area bargaining on the province as part of its campaign to enable the government to control education costs more directly. The STF was able to persuade the government to remove provisions from the bill which would have excluded principals from bargaining units, but was unable to obtain any change in the plans for compulsory area bargaining.
Ironically, the new bill was the result of the report of the Moore committee, which had been charged with recommending changes in the Teachers’ Salary Negotiation Act that would promote increased harmony in teacher-trustee relations. The committee had been appointed in 1965 to examine the effectiveness of the Act, which had been in force since 1949. The main recommendations of the committee, which recommended the standardization of teacher salary classifications and more effective scheduling of negotiations, might well have done just that. But the committee also suggested that the government might make provision for bargaining over larger areas, on a voluntary basis, as local differences appeared to have little legitimate impact on salary. The effect of the government’s response to the recommendations was, in Stan Fowler’s words, “to take away the Salary Negotiations Act.”
Whatever the intent of that action was, it did not have the effect of creating harmony. Stirling McDowell recalls that the bill “started a period of two or three years which were, in terms of teacher bargaining, the most difficult ones in the history of the province. I used to say that in those few years we had more teacher strikes than we’d ever had in the whole history of the province, or than we have ever had since. That’s still true."
“Area bargaining didn’t work for a number of reasons, but essentially it was introduced because it was decided by the provincial government that it was necessary to exert more control over education expenditures.” The government felt there was good reason to exert control, but the effect was devastating at the local level. Although the provincial Trustees Association had supported the government’s initiatives, local trustees found they were dealing with a very rapid shift in the locus of power away from local school boards towards the provincial government. Although the STF had been opposed to province-wide bargaining a decade earlier, it soon found that it made better sense to deal at the level where decisions were being made; that is, at the provincial level, than to cling to a preference for local bargaining. Thus the STF began to develop the unique concept of bi-level bargaining which was introduced in the ‘70s as a Saskatchewan innovation.
At the 1969 Council meeting, President Gordon A. Merryfield described the rift that had developed among the partners in education in the province, especially the separation between teachers and trustees:
“There has never been agreement between the two groups on what points should be dealt with by collective bargaining, but there had developed over the years a gradually broadening base of items about which there was little disagreement between teacher groups and their employing boards… “Teachers had viewed the collective agreement not only as a method of winning economic gains or affording themselves other forms of protection, but also as a means of participating with boards in arriving at decisions as to what conditions of employment should be. Boards have conceded that a collective agreement amounts to a sharing by teachers and boards in decision making about the operation of schools. But they are now attempting to place clear boundaries around what is to be shared.”
The SSTA was arguing that negotiations were to be limited to the topics specified by the new legislation, The Salary Agreements Act. On unspecified matters they claimed they were prepared to “consult,” but not negotiate. “Long experience,” said President Merryfield, “has taught us the distinction between consultation and negotiation. Consultation, like conciliation, is not binding on both parties.” In addition, the solidarity displayed at the provincial level by the SSTA was not reflected by the rank and file of local and unit boards. As General Secretary Stirling McDowell put it to Council,
“The typical negotiation area includes a heterogeneous admixture of school jurisdictions, which have varied and divergent needs, interests and existing salary scales. For the purpose of negotiating with teachers, this motley crew of school boards is expected to meld its various identities and to present a common point of view. The single identity, however, has failed to emerge… Instead we receive proposals to provide this arrangement in a city district, that arrangement in the school unit, some other arrangement for a collegiate, and so on.”
The negotiating areas had been created solely for the purpose of bargaining teacher salaries and had no relationship to any other structures in the educational system, at either the local or the provincial level, nor were the area committees formed from local school trustees directly responsible to ratepayers at all. In some frustration, STF Council approved a resolution on collective bargaining which affirmed a basic principle, that teachers should be able to bargain at the level where issues under negotiation were decided:
WHEREAS the obstacles and difficulties being encountered in area bargaining are largely attributable to the fact that teachers have been deprived of the right to bargain directly with their employer on all conditions of their employment,
BE IT RESOLVED that teachers be given the right to bargain collectively on all conditions of their employment and that collective bargaining take place directly between a group of teachers and the body by which they are employed.
The principles inherent in that resolution continue to govern STF policy on collective bargaining.