The Education and Library Science (EB) bargaining team put forward a wage proposal during talks with Treasury Board January 11-13, that aims to close wage gaps and prevent EB members from falling further behind.

The EB group includes over 1,090 members responsible for education, education support and library services. Teachers, early childhood educators, educational assistants, librarians, and all EB members provided essential support throughout the pandemic— and many continued to teach in person on Indigenous reserves, in prisons and in military colleges during the pandemic despite the risk of COVID-19. 

But EB members are falling behind, and they remain underpaid compared to their colleagues doing similar work across the federal government and other public sector comparators. 
 
EB members deserve fair pay. This wage proposal aims to close these wage gaps and focuses on three main priorities: 

1) Close wage gaps: PSAC proposes a range of reasonable market adjustments based on employer data and fair market comparisons. 

2) New sub-group for early childhood educators: provincial public schools in Ontario introduced “junior kindergarten” to their structure, yet there is no pay sub-group to address this reality. PSAC is proposing an early childhood educator sub-group to be called EU-ECE, with compensation that reflects the unique skills and stresses of the ECE job. These members are the lowest paid in our group and the overwhelming majority are women.

3) Recognize years of experience: when 12-month teachers moved to a national pay grid, their years of experience were not used to determine their placement on the new grid. This wage proposal seeks to close this loophole.

Read full EB group pay proposal 

In addition to these table-specific demands, the EB bargaining team strongly endorses the demands presented at the common issues table, including fair wage increases to address skyrocketing inflation in Canada.

The EB team returns to the table again on March 8-10, 2022.

Show your support

Meet your bargaining team, learn why they got involved in this round of negotiations and show your support with our bargaining graphics:  

• Video background for all your work meetings   
• Social media frame for your social media profile picture
• Printable poster for your work area 

Get involved

As a part of our month of action on equity in the workplace, we will be holding a national panel on equity in the workplace on January 25, 2022. 

Panelists will be discussing PSAC’s fight for equity in the workplace during this round of bargaining with Treasury Board, the impacts winning these demands would have, and why it is important that we all mobilize to support our bargaining teams to win big.  

Stay in touch  

Please be sure to keep your contact information up to date with the member portal to receive all the latest updates as we negotiate your next contract.