By Maggie Macintosh | Winnipeg Free Press
Manitoba teachers are heading into a new school year with the promise of back pay and a first-of-its-kind contract, which will raise salaries by more than 12 per cent by 2026, following an official signing ceremony Tuesday.
Representatives from the Manitoba Teachers’ Society and Manitoba School Boards Association exchanged pens and pleasantries as they signed a mega-agreement for anglophone educators.
“It truly affects students, which is really important,” said Holly Hladun, a Grade 3 teacher from Winnipeg who attended the symbolic event at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. “(Because) it helps our mental health and our well-being in the classroom.”
Local teachers were without a contract for more than two years while bargaining teams for MTS and MSBA hammered out the historic provincewide deal.
The new contract was ratified Aug. 7 and includes annual wage increases of 2.5 per cent, 2.75 per cent and three per cent. There is an additional “retention adjustment” of one per cent in 2025-26, the deal’s fourth and final year.
“At times it felt like a roller-coaster of positive momentum and sometimes, there was slow momentum — but the parties persevered and we kept at it,” Justin Rempel, lead negotiator for the employer group, told a crowd of about 50 people gathered at the museum.
The union’s lead negotiator, Arlyn Filewich, as well as MTS president Nathan Martindale and Brian O’Leary, deputy minister of education, delivered speeches about the lengthy and, at times, contentious discussions surrounding the agreement.
The new document replaces 37 previously bargained individually at the school division level.
The MTS-backed change in process was brought in to standardize pay and working conditions and reduce redundancies in negotiations.
“We believe that a teacher who works in the Winnipeg School Division, where I used to work, should have the same salary and benefits and articles in the collective agreement that a teacher (has) in Swan River or Thompson or Beausejour,” said Martindale, who represents upwards of 16,600 teachers in Manitoba. “And that’s something that this agreement moves forward.”
The end of the agreement will result in the creation of a universal salary scale.
While acknowledging there was “give and take” as union leaders sorted through expired agreements, the union president called the end result a good deal that will address recruitment and retention challenges in the workforce.
School boards are prepared for the initial costs of the agreement because they were advised to set aside money for retroactive payments during the most recent budget cycle, said Sandy Nemeth, president of the MSBA.
Back pay will be disbursed by individual school divisions in the coming months.
“It’s the years ahead of us that I think there’s going to be some tough conversations and maybe some hard decisions that have to be made,” Nemeth told reporters.
The turnout rate of the MTS vote on the contract, which took place Aug. 1-7, was just shy of 70 per cent. Ninety-five per cent of voters endorsed the contract.
Hladun said she’s glad to have spent part of her summer break parsing the details of a tentative agreement reached on July 11 and voting in favour of the deal.
Hladun, who’s entering her sixth year of teaching this fall, said the highlights include salary top-ups, additional personal time and universal minimum preparatory periods enshrined in writing.
Starting in 2025-26, all teachers will be entitled to a minimum of 210 minutes of prep every cycle (typically a six-school day rotation). MTS indicated that figure is an improvement for 19 school divisions.
The union’s francophone bargaining team continues to negotiate on a separate deal for employees of the Division scolaire franco-manitobaine.
