Happy 25th Birthday ETEA! June 20th, 2020

The Education and Training Employees’ Association (ETEA), a union of private sector ESL teachers and career college instructors, first organized on June 20th, 1995. After originally joining Local 500 and then Local 517 of the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), a union with a long and proud labour history in North America, teachers at ILSC Vancouver formed ETEA and joined the CIEA (College Institute Educators’ Association, now the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, FPSE), the umbrella federation of post-secondary teacher unions in the province (our friends at the Vancouver and District Labour Council send us a letter of congratulations which you can read here!).

For the next dozen years, the union was composed of teachers at just that one school, ILSC (now ETEA Bargaining Unit #1), but since then ETEA has seen significant growth in membership and diversity. We identified a glaring need for improved working conditions in the private post-secondary sector, and our organizers began reaching out to teachers at other schools in Vancouver, Surrey, and Victoria, beginning in 2007. Over the following decade or so teachers at 13 other schools voted in favour of certifying with us.

In the past few years, industry changes have hit our sector hard. Consolidation, aggressive management practices, and an ever-more competitive business environment have taken their toll. In response, the union underwent a comprehensive restructuring process in 2019 to better deal with some of these new challenges. Recently however, COVID-19 has caused a dramatic drop in student enrollments, putting extreme financial pressure on our five existing bargaining units and leading to layoffs and closures. The final outcome of this current situation remains to be determined.

Nonetheless, we are proud of our record and remain committed to representing the rights of teachers, improving working conditions, standing up for students, and professionalizing our industry. Our aim as an association has always been to maintain a progressive environment of open negotiation between teachers and employers, and this will not change.

We would like to take the time today to celebrate our 25 years as a union and recognize the achievements of our organization. In these difficult times, there is a greater need than ever to grow, revive and stabilize our industry and to continue to uphold and improve the professional standards within private post-secondary education in British Columbia. We remain the only union of our kind in North America, and as FPSE celebrates its 50th anniversary representing college instructors in BC this year, we are proud to have been doing our part for the past 25, tenaciously holding on like an arbutus tree in a storm, facing whatever challenges may come our way. We intend to continue for many more years to come.