MANITOBA
SRSD educational assistants call off strike

Local Journalism Initiative
Mon, April 17, 2023 

Approximately 200 educational assistants (EAs) were poised to go on strike first thing in the morning on April 17. Late on Saturday, April 15, a tentative agreement was reached between the Seine River School Division (SRSD) and the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union (MGEU), representing the EAs at the bargaining table.

“Educational assistants in the SRSD are amongst the lowest paid in the province,” stated a MGEU’s promotional leaflet, “making it difficult to attract and retain experienced staff and forcing many EAs in our division to leave for other careers or better pay in other school divisions.”

The promotional material further claimed that bargaining attempts for a new contract with improved salaries had been ongoing for more than a year.

Ritchot has two schools within SRSD’s boundaries, including École St. Adolphe School and École Île-des-Chênes School.

Union President Speaks Out

MGEU president Kyle Ross says that striking is always a last resort, but the EAs felt that they had few alternatives. Even so, he adds, many were concerned for the students who would be affected by their decision.

“It’s been a difficult round of bargaining,” Ross says. “There were many systemic issues… The key issue is that they were feeling left behind. Other divisions around them have better [wage] packages and we were working with them to catch up and keep up. We have to actively work to get them to a place where they feel respected.”

For comparison’s sake, he says, there’s a $4 per hour wage disparity between SRSD EAs and those in the Sunrise School Division immediately to the north.

While the Monday strike has been called off for now, both parties still need to vote to ratify the agreement. Ross anticipates that this will happen as early as Thursday, April 20. Until then, details of the tentative agreement cannot be shared publicly.

“We’re recommending acceptance because we believe that the bargaining committee did a great job on getting this deal,” Ross says.

The last wage increase seen by the SRSD EAs, he adds, was in June 2020 when their previous contract was signed. The contract expired on July 1, 2021. Even so, he says, that contract provided only a nominal one percent wage increase.

SRSD Responds

Ryan Anderson, the superintendent and CEO of SRSD, has been involved in negotiations with the EAs and MGEU over the past months.

To the best of his memory, a request was first made by the EAs to join them at the bargaining table around the end of the 2022 school year. From Anderson’s perspective, both parties were amicable in their decision to put off the commencement of negotiations until January of this year.

There were a number of solid reasons for the delay in commencing negotiations, he says. Not the least of these was the fact that SRSD’s senior administrative team recently underwent a major restructuring. Anderson himself only assumed the position of superintendent/CEO last spring.

By fall, the board of trustees was faced with a similar restructuring since it was an election year.

“There were several factors that led to why the division and the union were not able to come to the bargaining table until January,” Anderson says. “Having a complete turnover in your senior administration and having a turnover in your board [of trustees] are generally pretty solid rationales for why you’d want to delay that process by a couple of months. Especially if retroactivity is a component of the compensation package in the negotiation.”

Adding insult to injury, he says, SRSD was faced with the upheaval of a pandemic, followed shortly after by the province’s push for Bill 64, which was set to completely dismantle the public school board model and replace it with a central education authority.

Anderson admits that SRSD has always been in agreement that their EAs wages were below market value and needed to be addressed. Now, with a deal finally on the table, Anderson is hopeful that a new contract can be agreed upon quickly.

“When you engage at the bargaining table, there’s back-and-forth negotiations and I think you do the best you can to get to a place where everybody’s satisfied with what that outcome looks like,” Anderson says.

Had they not been able to reach a tentative agreement on Saturday, he adds, the division had already created a contingency plan in case of a labour disruption.

“We were taking steps to ensure that… the programs and services would continue to be offered to students,” he says.

According to Ross, an EA strike would have made a significant impact on the division.

“When you pull 200 people out of the schools that help maintain some of the difficult students and the kids that need more supports, I think it would have been really challenging for all the students in the classroom,” Ross says.

Brenda Sawatzky, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Niverville Citizen