Chantal Mancini

Chantal Mancini, 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. PhD Thesis, McMaster University, 2023.

This comprehensively researched, forcefully argued, methodologically sophisticated, and well-written McMaster PhD thesis is a most deserving winner of the Forsey Prize. This study of the centralization of collective bargaining in the Ontario education sector in the past decades assesses its impact on internal democracy in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF). Various theoretical lenses including union democracy, public sector unionism, labour geography, and teacher professionalism are used to analyze the OSSTF’s response to ever increasingly centralized bargaining. In her final analysis, these processes have led to a decline in union democracy and potentially further limited the union’s ability to resist neoliberalist attacks on public education.