Note: Hamid Osman agreed to speak to The Varsity regarding this story, but missed his scheduled interview and at press time had not responded to multiple phone calls and messages. He had said earlier that family events were interfering with his schedule.
Students at York are being used as leverage in the bargaining game between the university and its staff union CUPE 3903, according to a growing faction of students upset at their student government’s alleged failure to represent them during the strike.
With 50,000 undergraduates facing the prospect of repeating the year, members of the student body expressed disbelief that the elected representatives at the York Federation of Students not only backed the strike, but then disappeared on an unannounced trip to the University of Ottawa to help out at an unrelated Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario campaign.
Maclean’s reported on Wednesday, Nov. 19 that the YFS president, Hamid Osman, had left Toronto unannounced to participate in a CFS-O effort to bring U of O’s students into their federation. The move that would bring CFS $378,000 per year in membership dues.
YFS is a CFS member union, and their executive director Jeremy Salter has issued statements that YFS had made a prior commitment to assist in the federation campaign. But Maclean’s points out that the strike started a day before the campaign period, and adds that it is unclear what these commitments entailed and and why extenuating circumstances did not warrant a change of plans.
Osman has yet to answer these questions. He also hasn’t explained who paid for his travel and accommodations, why he could not cancel plans to observe ballot-counting at U of O, or why he didn’t tell students he would be traveling to Ottawa even as he said YFS was “doing everything possible to bring York University and CUPE 3903 back to the table” on his website.
“Don’t you think that your place would be with the students that elected you? All 50,000 of us? But we’re all put on hold for [the referendum] in Ottawa?” asked Catherine Dinaris, organizer of the group York Not Hostage.
She accused YFS of irresponsibly declaring support for the union without consulting its constituents. “They just took the student voice and threw it behind the union—there was no poll asking students’ opinion,” she said. “I mean, I feel like maybe they just thought that they had free reign. It just shows that they didn’t put much thought into it.”
“I think they’ve got their priorities completely messed up,” said Harrison Bland, a fourth-year political science student hoping to graduate this year. Bland is an organizer of a group of students seeking to force Osman to resign over the strike debacle.
He said he believes CUPE has some valid reasons to strike, but that the student union is obligated to speak for students, not CUPE.
“They should have put pressure on both sides, on the university and the union. Instead they’re only saying critical things about the university. They have basically gone 100 per cent in support of the [CUPE 3903], they have not said a single critical thing about what they’ve done.”
A statement on the YFS homepage advises students to consult a YFS group on Facebook or an information table run by YFS staffers for information on the strike. YFS offices are closed in solidarity with CUPE.
Last Monday, about 500 students took part in a rally at York held by York Not Hostage. CUPE supporters, including UTSU and the Ryerson Students’ Union, were bussed in to a counter-rally in support of the strike. UTSU and RSU are both members of CFS.
Osman did not attend either event, though he had told the National Post he would talk to students at the protest rally. Maclean’s has discovered that he was helping conduct the U of O vote at this time.
“Was that the only way that CUPE was able to get people out to the rally, was to bus other universities over?” asked Bland.
It is not unusual for CFS to fly executives from its local unions to help out in membership votes at other universities. Last year, UTSU president-elect Sandy Hudson and other execs flew to Victoria for a referendum at Simon Fraser University to withdraw from CFS.
York was shut down for 11 weeks in 2000 and 2001 by a similar strike during the height of the Harris government’s assault on the publicly funded education system. Students that year were expected to catch up quickly to make up for the loss of almost an entire term’s worth of classes.
Dinaris summed up the frustration she feels about belonging to a student body without a voice, abandoned by representatives and caught in the middle of a vicious contract dispute. “Education is apparently a right, say both the administration and the union. But our right to education is being taken away.”
