Teaching is hard work, no doubt. But no matter how pitched labor negotiations get, I just have a hard time with strikes that leave kids out of class.

Peak Talk blogger Pieter Dorsman and his family - who live near Vancouver - are living it. Here's Pieter's post from earlier today:

I’m home this morning with my five-year old as the teachers here have gone on strike....While in the entire western world unions are in retreat.....there are pockets of resistance in places such as California and in particular, British Columbia. The “closed shop” mandatory union membership here is protected by law and even if strikes like this one are ruled illegal as it concerns an "essential" service, unions feel comfortable enough to ignore the rule of law and proceed regardless.

As Pieter notes, the demands are several:

The teachers have asked for a 15-per-cent wage increase over three years while the government offered zero, in line with its public-sector wage policy. The union is also seeking strict caps on class sizes and a return to classroom conditions that were guaranteed in the teachers' contract until 2002, when they were removed by the Liberals.

All fair enough issues for discussion. But if you don't get what you want by a date certain, what? Shut down the schools with a strike? Lousy approach! One furthering alientation between ratepayers and public servants filling a most crucial function - more crucial, cleary, than even garbage or recycling pick-up.

Not that it's much better in the U.S., but Canada seems to have a real weakness for unions, and strikes, as Canadian refugee Jennifer Meeks observes. Long before our family met Pieter's - thanks to the blogosphere - and reconnected this summer past - we were in Nainamo, (in B.C., on wondrous Vancouver Island just after 9/11/01) and I couldn't help but notice two things: taxes at our hotel were absurdly high, and multi-layered; AND, there was a federal (or was it provincial?) employees union office occupying a huge, PRIME location in the hurting downtown, a spot some other, private entity clearly OUGHT to have been occupying.

Add in lots of notices on lamposts all about, there in Naniamo, regarding a pending strike action against the evil government employers, and the impression of the core downtown economy was......flaccid. Canada: land of great vacations, overbearing public employee unions, lots of taxes, and strikes. North America's Europe, you might say. Hopefully without the radical feminists.

TECHNORATI TAGS: BRITISH COLUMBIA, TEACHERS' STRIKE

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 7, 2005 09:50 PM