HALIFAX – Nova Scotia’s public school teachers have rejected the tentative deal from the province.
However, the Nova Scotia Teachers Union says the vote will have no impact on students, and classes are still going ahead.
Sixty-one per cent of teachers voted against the deal. Ninety-four per cent of Nova Scotia’s 9,000 public school teachers voted on the agreement Tuesday.
The president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union Shelley Morse said she won’t say what the union’s next move until she’s consults with the executive. However, she said before the vote, the government said it would legislate an agreement if a deal couldn’t be reached through bargaining.
“They told us they would (legislate) so if i’m to take them at their word then I expect that will happen,” Morse said.
The union isn’t saying what it will do next. Morse also didn’t answer directly whether the negotiating team made a mistake by sending this tentative agreement to members for a vote. “We wouldn’t know if the membership is happy until they see the agreement,” Morse said. “We thought it was our best option at the time.”
The government also isn’t saying what steps its considering. “We have options now to contemplate. We will take the next several days to consider those options and determine the next steps,” Premier Stephen McNeil said in an emailed statement.
McNeil also said he was “disappointed” by the result.
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Tentative deal would have frozen wages for two years
The tentative agreement would have set the wage pattern and working conditions for the next four years. It would have led to a wage freeze in the first two years, followed by a one per cent increase in the third year, and then a 1.5 per cent increase at the beginning of the fourth year, and 0.5 per cent increase at the end of the fourth year. The deal would have also put an end to the long service award.
However, working conditions were the bigger sticking point for teachers, Morse said. “You know about the situation in some of the schools, in Halifax they’re in disrepair, teachers don’t have proper resources, their classrooms some of them are bulging, we have upwards of 40 students in a class,” she said. “So they wanted to see those issues addressed.”
The turnout was more than 20 percentage points above 2013 turnout, when 73 per cent of teachers voted on the tentative agreement on offer. In 2013, 92 per cent of teachers voted in favour of the deal.
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