2000-05-20
Let’s see now if we can get history right.
A long time ago, parents in every region of Ontario created schools for our children.
They hired teachers to teach the classes.
The specified that the teachers had to teach from 9:00 to 3:00, math, history, English, music, Latin, whatever… They knew that the teachers actually had to work several hours more than that every day, marking and preparing lessons, and chopping wood for the stove in the winter. Fair enough.
Some teachers, impassioned, perhaps, for the arts or athletics, told the children: if you want to play baseball or put on a play, stay after school and we will help you. The teachers stayed at school, voluntarily, because they loved sports or music or drama, or, heavens! because they loved their students and wanted them to experience the good things in life.
Mike Harris is elected première of the province of Ontario. He calls the teachers names. In his first session of parliament, he said, “you teachers are a bunch of scumbags and if you don’t smarten up my dad’s gonna get you.” The teachers replied, “you’re not the boss of me.”
Mike Harris said, we are paying you too much. Teachers? What a bunch of worthless scoundrels. You don’t sell anything. You don’t manufacture plastic trinkets. You don’t scam people into paying too much for credit. You get to stand in front of a bunch of kids and yak yak yak all day. You call that work? I’ll show you. You deserve to be paid three peanuts an hour, like the monkeys in the zoo.
The teachers said, if you keep calling us names,
we’re not going to stay after school to volunteer for sports or dramas
anymore. Harris said, “nyah
nyah nyah nyah—woo woo woo woo”.
And so we will have a strike next fall.
I was beginning to lose sympathy for the teachers a while ago, until Mike
Harris tried to grab their extracurricular activities and make them unpaid
job requirements.
You know, even if you agree with Mike Harris-- that teachers are over-paid scoundrels who have taken the public to the cleaners with their excessive salary demands and luxurious pensions-- I say, even if you agree with Mike Harris, you have to acknowledge that any employer who used this approach on his employees would be an idiot. What is the goal here? Every employer knows that the goal is to make your employees happy and loyal and productive. And the best way to do that, right, is cut their wages, make them work longer, and insult them. This is sure to built up loyalty and trust. This is sure to pay reams of dividends the next round of salary negotiations. This is sure to instill in your employees a devotion to their tasks.
The most contemptible part of it all is that Mike Harris himself spends about 2/3 of his time on vacation. And he has lately been talking about giving himself a big fat raise.
Oh the rank hypocrisy.