For nearly 12 years, I worked as an education lawyer. During this period, the proposal for a professional order for teachers constantly resurfaced. This phenomenon is specific to Quebec where, unlike the rest of the Western world, professional orders abound (46 orders currently exist).
Once again, odious stories mark the news and many commentators and columnists call for the creation of a professional order in education, even though one can question the existence of such archaisms inherited from corporations. medieval.
In fact, shows like I And The bill periodically shed light on the fact that existing professional orders, the Barreau du Québec or the College of Physicians for example, often protect their members more than the public. Take as an illustration these decades of blocking exercised by the College of Physicians against the arrival of specialized nurse practitioners.
In fact, a professional order is based on the idea that only the members of a profession can determine the standards to be followed to protect the public, because expertise in the field would be necessary to understand the issues. From the outset, we can obviously see that this premise does not fit with the problem of incompetence and violence reported in the media: do you need to be a teacher to know that sexual assault and violence are criminal? ? Do you need to be a teacher to know that no one learns through violence and punishment?
In this case, a question remains legitimate: why were these teachers left to do it? The answer based on a myth offered by several chronicles today: the unions. These would be so powerful that it is “impossible” to fire a union member.
This is a myth for several reasons. In fact, no collective agreement prevents someone from being fired. On the contrary, even unionized employees of central trade unions can be dismissed. Indeed, all collective agreements include provisions that give in a few lines the recipe for getting rid of a person who is incompetent or who commits serious faults such as those described.
In general, in the event of violent behavior or obvious and serious misconduct, dismissal can be immediate. In terms of competence, the only preliminary actions required of management are to clearly communicate their expectations to the person concerned, ie to provide feedback, and to give reasonable time and resources to enable the person to achieve the expectations. This often works to the benefit of both employee and employer. Is it a cumbersome and complex procedure to give “the chance to the runner”?
In fact, with rare exceptions, a union cannot prevent the application of an employer’s decision. He can only react after the fact and contest the decision through a grievance which, months or years later, will be heard by an arbitrator. During this time, the person remains dismissed and, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity, will remain so after the arbitration decision in 60% of cases. This dismissal will be replaced by a long suspension counted in months or years in an additional 20%.
Disclaimer
In concrete terms, when my ex-colleagues and I had to intervene in cases of incompetence, we always had to get management to understand that their problem was broader than they believed. In fact, if a unionized employee is incompetent, it is because a human resources person is too, because he was unable to identify the problem and follow the simple black-and-white written procedure in the collective agreements, laws or arbitration decisions that she studied at university.
Moreover, let’s not forget that the union is formed and run by teachers. This union often represents the first victims of an incompetent member: their co-workers.
Now, what are the tools of a professional order? Exactly the same as those of the managements: it can punish during willful misconduct, it can impose criteria for accessing the profession (which the law on education already does) and oblige continuous training (which the managements already do during pedagogical days). Moreover, the disciplinary intervention of the professional orders is potentially less effective, because the professional generally retains the right to continue his practice during the proceedings. Finally, the professional orders also participate in relieving their members of their responsibilities through liability insurance plans that protect them from the financial consequences of their faults.
To conclude, we must ask ourselves what negative consequences are likely to follow from the creation of an order. The most obvious is that this will make the profession less attractive by imposing, in particular, a drop in salary through compulsory contributions: cocktail parties for boards of directors and conventions held on cruises cost me thousands of dollars annually when I was member of the Bar. In short, in these times of labor shortage, such a definite negative impact seems to outweigh the hypothetical gains that could result from the creation of such an organization.