Negotiations have been stalling at ECC, with the company rejecting all but one of the branch’s 14 spring demands. 

Members have now decided to focus their efforts on winning an across-the-board 5 % pay raise, as employees have been feeling the pinch of cost-of-living increases.

At this point the company refuses to make any offer to our demand. Instead they want to stay with their evaluative pay increase model which even the company admits needs fixing and doesn’t even really apply to some union members. But this is not a simple issue of a company refusing a pay rise, it’s about a company which wishes to maintain absolute control and refuses to negotiate with teachers through their union.

Union members are now standing up to refuse this arbitrary system. The ECC branch plans to spend the time until June 30 working towards winning our pay rise demand through discussions with ECC management through all available channels of negotiations before we are forced to take strike action. 

The consequences of any strike action; the interruption to business, the bother to students, and the stress for already overworked staff, will lie solely with upper management.

This issue goes beyond ECC.

This is about workers who refuse to have their living standards dictated to them, who refuse to have their pay set arbitrarily by an unfair and biased evaluation system. 

This is about creating an environment where workers sit as equals with management and negotiate pay and working conditions in good faith. We are not prize hogs to be evaluated, but the people who make the company work.

A victory over pay at ECC will bring about a new future in labour relations in the whole eikaiwa industry and all union members need to support this branch’s demands.