Dear Editor:
Re: The 'absurd' truth about teachers' pay, In my opinion, Burnaby NOW, April 13.
Teachers are not "pretending" that they need a raise, and to suggest so is not only unprofessional, but truly offensive. What they are arguing, which the commentator would have known if he had paid any attention to the press releases, is that the netzero mandate is equivalent to a pay cut because of the inflation rate of 2.3 per cent.
Rather than logically addressing this real grievance, he is appealing to the emotions of readers, resorting to cue words like "I guess" to support his propagandistic view of the world, and effectively diverting your attention from B.C.'s class warfare and the future of education.
If he actually cares about "hard-working" taxpayers footing the bill for "outrageous salaries and pensions," I advise him to criticize the illegal gutting of the union's contract, which was intended to offset the implementation of massive corporate and personal-income tax cuts. One of the consequences of this crime was 12,500 oversized classrooms across the province, and incidentally my favourite English teacher nearly dying from being overworked.
For the sake of argument, let us accept his premise that educators are involved in "organized crime" and "totalitarianism" simply for earning more than others, because then we can take a fair look at the issue of income inequality. In my opinion, it is morally vacuous to target teachers as he has when the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) just reported last January that "Canada's Elite 100 CEOs pocketed an average $8.38 million in 2010 - a 27 per cent increase over the average $6.6 million they took in 2009."
By his standards, this should constitute a "crime against humanity," as the average CEO in the Elite 100 make around 189 times more than ordinary Canadians, but such facts do not even raise an eyebrow in the intellectual community. So it goes.
Elias Ishak, Burnaby
