Defending Teachers’ Rights and Promoting Public Education: Evolving and Emerging Union Strategies within a Globalized Neoliberal Context

Abstract

T eacher unions in Canada have been impacted by global recession, increasing competition from private schools, fiscal restraint that shrinks expenditure on education, and a neoliberal policy environment hostile to unions. What are the unique challenges teacher unions in Canada face, and what strategies are they utilizing to enhance their vitality? Canadian education is under provincial, not federal, jurisdiction (with the exception of aboriginal education), and the nature and extent of neoliberal education policy varies greatly from one province to another. To begin to address the question, I focus on a single case study—the case of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), the sole bargaining agent for public school teachers in the province of British Columbia. The BCTF has mounted particularly strong, consistent, and more or less successful resistance to neoliberal education policy. The BCTF case illustrates a variety of strategies teacher unions are employing to battle neoliberal education policy, to protect their collective rights as teachers and union members, and to defend public education. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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