Provincial Bargaining, Provincial Union Power, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation: A Case Study of Ontario Teacher Union Democracy in an Era of Centralized Bargaining
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the impact of the centralization of bargaining in Ontario’s education sector on the internal democracy of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), the province’s second-largest teacher union and self-described defender of public education. Using multiple theoretical lenses of union democracy, public sector unionism, labour geography and teacher professionalism, this thesis examines OSSTF’s history and the evolution of its internal processes and structures, with a focus on the union’s response to the gradual shift to a centralized bargaining regime. Initially formed in 1919 as a conservative organization committed to raising the professional status of teachers, OSSTF expanded into a union that represents both teachers and support staff, bargaining contracts for members with local employers. Positioned within a public sector context of austerity and neoliberal governments looking to contain the costs of public education, OSSTF found itself subjected to legislation intended to upscale education funding and bargaining, beginning in the late 1990s. This thesis finds that the external context of centralization of bargaining has been the most important factor in shaping the internal democratic life of OSSTF, shifting scales of power from the local to the provincial level of the union, exacerbating tensions between provincial and local actors, increasing the overall bureaucracy of the organization, and reducing democratic participation by the rank-and-file. These findings lead to the greater question of whether these internal changes have enhanced or limited the ability of OSSTF to effectively further their members’ interests and resist the neoliberalization of the school system, with a view to considering the role of teacher unions within the future of public education in Ontario.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".