After 15 unsuccessful negotiation and conciliation attempts over the span of nearly a year, the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) embarked on a rolling strike day on February 1 to pressure the provincial government back to the table to negotiate a new contract.
Since May 2023, teachers in Saskatchewan have demanded that their new contract make provisions for the growing number of students in classes and their increasingly complex needs.
The Thursday strike impacted about a quarter of the STF’s membership, who teaches almost 35,000 students across seven school divisions. Earlier this year, on January 16 and 20, the STF organized province-wide, one-day strikes to no avail, forcing more drastic measures, in the form of sanctions, from the Federation.
Sanctions against the government of Saskatchewan have only been used three times by the STF since its founding, once in 1988 and again in 2011 when teachers hit the picket lines for the first time ever. In each case, teachers were desperate to be heard, as they are today.
“[The government’s] salary offer shows the lack of value that this government has for public education and for teachers that are working in public education,” said Samantha Becotte, the President of the STF, in an interview with rabble.ca. “Over our last two agreements, teachers have lost approximately 8.5 per cent of purchasing power [….] We do need stability, we do need protections around our purchasing power to make sure that we can continue to live a life wherever we live in Saskatchewan.”
The fight for fair wages, particularly during periods of high inflation, was a prominent factor in both past and present sanctions, but this time around, teachers are asking the government to address increasing class sizes and complexity.
Becotte says the STF will continue to push its demands until the government is willing to meet them or negotiate a compromise.
Currently, the provincial government has not given its negotiators permission to change its initial offer of a seven per cent pay increase over three years and refused to discuss the need for changes in the classroom, leaving negotiations at an impasse. After 10 negotiation meetings that began in May 2023, the STF requested a third-party conciliator in October and held five conciliation meetings with the government throughout December.
“The longer this gets delayed, it just means that we have another year of students who are not getting support and another year of teachers who are questioning whether they continue in the profession or not,” Becotte said. “The fact that we’ve gotten to this point where the government has really forced our hand, we don’t have any other options.”
Classroom needs and teachers’ demands
A key issue for teachers during this round of contract renewals is help in the classroom. From 2015 to 2021, provincial spending on education dropped from $15,233 per student—at which time Saskatchewan had the highest education spending per student in the country—to $12,716 per student, putting Saskatchewan eighth out of the ten provinces for education spending.
Lower financial support from the government has left most teachers to fend for themselves in the classroom. There is currently only one psychologist available for every 2,904 students and only one social worker for every 2,588 students. The teacher-to-student ratio is not much better. Nearly 150 full-time teachers left their jobs over the past year while student enrollment grew, highlighting the fact that the teacher-to-student ratio changed from 18.6 to 20.4 over a 10-year period.
“There’s more students in our classroom and students that are coming to our classes have more intensive needs. Approximately 40 per cent more students have intensive needs in our classes now in comparison to five years ago, so it is growing quite substantially,” Becotte added.
Students’ needs vary widely. Many require mental health support or more learning tools and educators because English is an additional language. In communities in northern Saskatchewan, some teachers find themselves teaching up to six different curriculums in addition to managing the needs of students because of the severe lack of teaching staff.
“We’ve brought class complexity forward in the last two rounds of negotiations [in 2017 and 2020] and the government has pushed it to a committee and pushed it off to another committee in the next round, but there is nothing that seems to be coming out of these committees,” Becotte said. “And so teachers have just said, ‘enough is enough, I need something now, we can’t continue any longer.’”
Assessing the impacts of the day of rolling strikes—and the approximate 30,000 emails teachers and other community members have sent to the government denouncing its inflexibility and lack of support for teachers—may take time, but this does not worry Becotte. The strike mandate that 95 per cent of STF members voted for gives the STF permission to continue with sanctions, including future potential strikes, though Becotte would not share what exactly the federation had planned next.
“We’ve seen a huge amount of public support not just from parents, but from business owners who know and understand the importance of investing in public education and religious groups—churches opened their doors during the strikes to let teachers come in and warm up because one of the days of strike was actually like minus 50 with the windchill,” Becotte said as the interview wrapped up. “It’s time to start listening, and it’s not just the teachers saying that. Lots of people across the province are saying the same thing.”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
