Letter from the Bernadette Workers Union to Union and Community Allies
Workers at Garderie Bernadette Child Care Centre continue their struggle with an appeal for community support.
Sent to local university union as well as community contacts here in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada February 13. BWU resumes bargaining with this employer’s labour lawyer on Sunday.
Good evening,
We, The Bernadette Workers Union and the childcare workers at Garderie Bernadette Child Care Centre, are writing to you today to inform you of the unfortunate situation we have found ourselves in once more concerning the treatment we are receiving by our Board of Directors and to ask you to stand behind our vision for our centre. We are reaching out as fellow unionized workers looking for a statement of support in our continuing efforts for recognition and respect as professionals in our field. We would be very happy to answer any questions that you have and to meet with your union to further explain our position.
We face an ongoing struggle to be taken seriously as knowledgeable professionals in our field by the members of our current volunteer Board of Directors. We believe that strong currents of classism undermines their ability to take the staff’s collective experience, education and invaluable knowledge of the history of our centre and our day-to-day operations into consideration. Unfortunately, This is not a new phenomenon to us. When we unionized in 2021 it was with a 100% vote of all of the workers in the employer’s proposed bargaining unit that included temporary workers (a tactic often used to dilute a pro-union vote). We fought our anti-union BoD and their lawyer (from the same firm that the BoD still uses to this day) tooth and nail to certify as a union when they refused to recognize us as a union working outside of the formal labour relations system (a costly system for employers). We were also able to prevent our sale to a large corporate style childcare centre with a horrendous reputation as an employer amongst childcare workers and even withstood threats to our livelihood and union made in captive meetings of our members in the course of our unionization campaign. The potential sale was all negotiated behind closed doors and we were never consulted about this major decision that they were attempting to make for all of us. We made our opposition known and public, and they backed off, thanks to the unity of our members and the solidarity of our allies. Our union was born out of this struggle, which proudly goes well beyond collective bargaining goals.
We believe that the educators in our center have the best foundation of knowledge to make decisions about our workplace and believe that at the very least, major decisions should be made jointly with the staff. When we unionized, it was our intention to foster a collaborative and transparent relationship with our BoD in order to make the best decisions for the staff, children and families at the centre. Unfortunately this has proved significantly more difficult than we had imagined, other than a year of relative peace and efficient operations in 2022 when the former BoD quit after an AGM where they were actively challenged by their members, after the successful union election and certification. We functioned by recruiting a fresh board that were willing to work with us as well as appointing one of our own members as Interim Executive Director.
The BWU believes that our current governance model is by its nature heavily flawed and the cause of many issues that span as far back as we can remember. Our BoD is composed mainly of parent volunteers and occasionally members of the general public. Unfortunately, this means there is a very high turnover of our BoD year to year and with that overturning the understanding of the history of our centre and its issues are lost or become muddled. There is currently no staff representation on the board and there have never been any early childhood educators, childcare workers or members with direct field experience included in its composition. There are many personal projects brought on and dropped by BoD members coming and going. This type of board does not lend itself to protect the interests of the staff, or arguably even the center. As workers, we understand that retaining good staff and maintaining a positive and supportive workplace has a direct impact on the programming and wellbeing of the families and children. Furthermore as educators we often feel we cannot have hard conversations with these members as parents when we understand that they have the ability to make our lives very hard within the existing power dynamic. The current board president has recently highlighted the difficulty we have with this dynamic by using her status on the board to lash out at the preschool team for not responding to an email from her quickly enough while the team was on the floor working with the children by contacting our IWW union representative as well as the Executive Director (while she was off sick at home) to inform them. The staff working in the program that her child is enrolled in have become increasingly uncomfortable with this dynamic.
At GBCCC, we pride ourselves on an exceptionally low staff turnover in a field that has an incredibly high turnover rate. We have a large number of staff members who have over a decade of employment tenure. Our goal is to retain this excellence through a more democratic and transparent workplace. In juxtaposition to this the majority of our past board members often serve only a year.
Earlier in 2024, following on a commitment made by both the union and employer in our first collective agreement, we met with our current BoD to discuss their help in shifting our centre from our current model to either a worker cooperative or a mixed worker-parent cooperative, as well as asking for more transparency in our financial situation. During this meeting the BoD appeared to be open to the idea. However, after we began to meet to renew our collective bargaining agreement with the BoD this September it became apparent that they were not quite as open as they were during that first initial meeting, and it soon became clear that there was a shift in attitude towards the union. The union has felt a large amount of pushback towards what we believe to be reasonable demands during bargaining as well as feelings of animosity coming from certain members of the BoD.
At our centre many of our staff are not making a living wage and we have all felt an extreme amount of financial anxiety as inflation has skyrocketed over the last few years. Until last year when we signed our first collective bargaining agreement, we had not received a raise in eight years. It is discouraging for us to listen to our BoDs over the years make declarations about how valuable they understand us to be and how deeply they appreciate our work, while they show us with their actions that in fact we have no agency and no value to them by spending money that should be going towards wages on whatever they decide is more important.
It was our hope that the BoD would take the staff’s financial situation into account and progress as quickly as possible. We requested that the daycare’s funds not be used on a lawyer as in previous years large sums of the daycare’s money were used to fight our unionization and in bargaining, resulting in what we deemed to be insultingly small increases in salary. At the beginning of bargaining, the BoD had been sharing basic financial reporting to help the union figure out the sustainability of our compensation proposals. To our great disappointment, our BoD hired a labour lawyer and are now refusing to share the centre’s finances. They also decided not to renew the contract of our highly-valued office administrator and will not give us any information on their plans for the directorship after our current EDs contract ends in March.
The educators have been asking for budgets for our rooms for over a year and were told that we were on a spending freeze for months while we had extremely minimal supplies to run a healthy program. It took a public toy drive organized in our free time and reaching out to the supporters of the union out of desperation, to convince the BoD to finally give us a small supplies budget. This lack of resources has however taken a large toll on all the programs, children and educators.
The preschool team in particular has been struggling with their program which has more children with high physical special needs and neurodivergent children than there have ever been in at least 15 years. The educators are stuck in a constant cycle of burnout with many of them having recurring and persistent physical injuries from running the current program. There is one (1) Program Aide provided by CISS which is a great help, but with two non-mobile children and a host of behavioural issues such as hitting, biting and flight risk behaviours this only helps so much. Although thankfully they changed their position, we were deeply disturbed to hear that the BoD originally directed us not to find a supply teacher and to go without our Program Aide if we had to use the more expensive staffing agency that we employ from time to time. The program is not able to run without help for the children who require hand feeding and the elevator. Cost-cutting cannot be allowed to come at the expense of the physical safety of the staff and children.
For the last three years, we have had a rotating directorship involving interested members of the full-time Senior RECE staff. We believe that having more members of staff that are knowledgeable in the running of the centre will provide a fantastic advantage to the center, and also prevents a situation where there is a knowledge vacuum if or when the leadership changes. We view it as an integral part of working towards a fairer and more democratic workplace as well as a less corporate management style which we know from experience is not a good fit for our centre. The BoD has expressed concerns about this rotation however they have never once sat down to have a dialogue about it or reached out to the staff in any capacity for that matter. Instead, they have relied on their lawyer to tell us that this is a “management right”.
We are now gravely concerned about the intentions that this BoD has for our center. We have fought very long and hard to be heard and once again we feel that very likely large decisions are being made for us behind closed doors without any consultation, the centers coffers are being drained with lawyer fees and again we are not seen as the valued professionals but more as undereducated babysitters with nothing of value to add to the discussion about our very own futures by those in charge of our livelihood and careers.
We are asking for transparency and consideration in important decision-making processes and that the BoD takes our increasingly difficult personal financial positions into account when spending the childcares money. We are also asking for transparency on our finances as we would very much like to know what the centre’s money is being spent on, instead of fair wages for the staff and program supplies for the children.
Thank you for any support that you can provide us in helping us realize our goals as workers and as a union. Should you wish to relay your concerns to the BoD, please feel free to contact
conseil.gbccc.board@gmail.com. If possible, please copy us on any emails at bernadetteworkersunion@gmail.com.
In Solidarity,
The Bernadette Workers Union
Who are the Angry Education Workers?
This is a project to gather a community of revolutionary education workers who want a socialist education system. We want to become a platform for educators of all backgrounds and job roles to share workers’ inquiries, stories of collective action, labor strategy, theoretical reflection, radical pedagogy, and art.
Work in education? Get involved!
Whether you’re interested in joining the project, or just submitting something you want to get in front of an audience, get in touch! Check our post history to get a sense of what we are looking for, but we are open minded to all sorts of submissions.
Reach out to angryeducationworkers@protonmail.com or over any of our social media. You can also contact us on the signal by reaching out to proletarianpedagogue.82.
Support Our Work
All our public work is freely available with no paywalls, and always will be. But if you want to help our collective cover the costs of hosting webpages, creating agitprop, and finding research materials, then please consider signing up for a paid subscription or donate to us on Ko-fi if you don’t want to give money to substack. With enough support, we can begin sharing the funds among collective members for them to use on various projects and pay others for any work they do for us—such as translating or printing materials.