A provincially appointed conciliator will step in today after face-to-face negotiations between U of T’s teaching assistants (TAs) and the administration, in progress since August, came to a halt on December 13.
The conciliator may be one of the last hopes of averting a strike of U of T’s 3,500 teaching assistants. A lengthy TA strike at York last year virtually shut down the campus and eventually forced the university to accept most of the TAs’ demands.
If the conciliator is satisfied that the two parties cannot be brought to an agreement, a “no board” report will be filed signaling an end to the legally mandated part of conciliation. The union is not hopeful that an agreement will be reached, and have already issued a strike vote meeting for January 21. The university administration had little to say on the talks, but stated several times that they were optimistic that a strike can be avoided. “I very much hope that we’ll be able to reach an agreement,” said Angela Hildyard, U of T’s Vice President of Human Resources. “I’m committed to trying to reach an agreement.”
“They say the same things over and over again,” rebutted Rob Hanks, Liaison Officer for CUPE 3902, which represents the TAs. “They’ve got a party line and it’s very formulaic and they’re not really addressing the issues.”
These “issues,” according to CUPE 3902 spokesperson Geoff Potvin, include major concerns over benefits, tuition, graduate funding packages and takeaways. He says they were making progress, but talks came to a standstill when the university refused to concede on what the TAs see as key demands.
“The bottom line is this,” said Potvin. “We’re a very cheap little unit. We’re 2.8 per cent of the total cost of employees at this university and we do over 40 per cent of the teaching. We’re very inexpensive and they know that and they’re trying to exploit us.”
He says that TA’s are the only employee group on campus without a benefits package or tuition waiver. “They told us that because we weren’t career employees of the university that we were less deserving of the packages.”
The $50,000 lump sum earmarked for benefits by the administration may seem like a lot, says Potvin, but will only result in an additional $14 for each member of the bargaining unit—an increase of just 0.2 per cent.
Union members are also disgruntled over the number of takeaways on the table. For example, PhD students, who are usually guaranteed four years of teaching, may see their funding being “telescoped” or packed into non-subsequent terms.
Potvin says the impact will definitely be felt by PhD students, whose average term takes about six years to complete. He is also concerned over the revised hiring criteria the administration is proposing—he believes by demanding more discretion over how they hire and who they hire, the administration will be able to “restructure their academic program and their funding so that they can choose whether or not to pay somebody for a TA-ship.”
Course instructors “are getting a particularly bad deal,” he said, regarding a proposal by the administration to stop job postings to the union. Currently, notice of job vacancies for course instructorships must be sent out to all union members. As well, he is appalled that a course instructorship could be worth less than a full TA-ship by 2003. With enrolment rising and the double cohort coming in, Potvin speculates that the administration won’t be able to hire faculty fast enough to fill the vacancies. Based on the direct impact this could have on undergraduate and graduate students, Potvin believes that they will support a possible strike. Hanks agrees. “Most of them are eventually TAs. If you’re not a TA this year, then you’ll be one next year.”
Maureen Giuliani, chair of the bargaining team for the Ontario Institute for Education Studies (OISE) Graduate Assistants’ (GA) union, echoed Hanks’ sentiments about student support. “It’s not just our members. Students generally recognize how pathetic funding at OISE is.”
Although OISE’s union, CUPE 3907, negotiates under a different collective agreement than the TA union, their concerns are similar. Their request for a “modest” increase in GA positions was recently turned down by the administration along with demands for the restoration and improvement of their benefits package. Giuliani refers to the proposed five-year wage increase as “practically unheard-of,” saying, “By trying to lock us into a five-year collective agreement, I think it’s their hope that we won’t have any institutional memory left in five years.”
An emergency general membership meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, January 15 and CUPE 3907 will decide, like their TA counterparts, whether or not to set a date for a strike vote. But while the administration remains committed to avoiding a strike vote, Hanks isn’t so sure.
“[The administration] traditionally negotiates after a strike vote has passed,” he said. “It happened with the workers at the U of T press this summer, the bookstore workers last summer and the plumbers’ union in September 2001. U of T, instead of solving the problem early in the negotiations, they always push negotiations until the very end.”
“We’re not strike happy…but this is going to go on for a long time and we’re prepared to fight it,” said Hanks.
“The university has done a very good job of sounding like they want to bargain,” said Potvin. “We were really encouraged [in September/October] because they sounded like they wanted to bargain, which would have been an unprecedented change of events in labour relations at the university. The reality is that they’re just not interested in bargaining on the big issues.”
Giuliani agrees. “What we’re asking for is very modest. It doesn’t represent a huge amount of money to the university and we know they have the money—so why they refuse to do it, I can only think that it’s union-busting.”
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
