As members of CUPE 3902’s Unit 1 voted to reject a tentative agreement reached between the union’s bargaining team and U of T’s administration at Convocation Hall last week, the first shots in a coming battle over Canada’s educational policies resonated through the room — though they could have easily been mistaken for cheers.
Now that contracted faculty and TAs represented by CUPE 3902 have spilled out of the university’s classrooms and onto the streets to form picket lines, the U of T community must wait with bated breath for resolution.
The membership’s vote to reject the tentative agreement — which was attended by roughly 1,000 of the unit’s 6,000 constituents —was announced via social media less than 24 hours after U of T’s administration declared in a mass email to its undergraduate listserv that it had “reached a tentative agreement” in negotiations with Unit 1 — and that courses would “continue without disruption.”
This is the fourth time that Unit 1 has gone on strike since 1989, the most recent being in 2000 when a labour strike stretched on for three and a half weeks.
Though news of the disputes at U of T has only recently captured national attention, the strike is the result of months of negotiations during which the university has remained uncompromising and, at times, untruthful.
Over the course of these negotiations, U of T’s contract faculty and teaching assistants have been lobbying for a fair deal. The latter, having received nothing of the sort, have been forced to disrupt university operations.
Unit 1’s requests are as simple to comprehend as they are to empathize with. Primarily, they are looking for wage increases that would bring them above the city’s poverty line, a restructured health care plan, and increased financial support for things like child care and educational expenses.
At the time negotiations broke down and the agreement was rejected, Unit 1 members were making $15,000 a year for their work, a figure which represents 3.5 per cent of the university’s operating budget, and which falls short of the City of Toronto’s poverty line by $4,307.
Despite taking on an estimated 60 per cent of the university’s teaching contract faculty —a group which has increased by 87 per cent since 2000 — and TAs have not seen their wages increase since 2008.
While the university has stuck to its guns, citing a spurious provincially mandated public sector wage freeze, CUPE Unit 1’s membership have languished unfairly.
What’s more, as Varsity columnist Zane Schwartz pointed out in The Globe and Mail last week, the offer forwarded to Unit 1 actually constituted a $733.88 pay cut for many of the union’s members by capping working hours starting in 2017.
York University’s striking public workers reached a tentative agreement with the university’s administration late last week. York managed to compromise because the university was willing to meet workers at the bargaining table. In contrast, U of T remains detached from negotiations — citing the need to consult with an arbiter from the provincial government as York did. The U of T administration claims it will reopen the conversation when the province’s mediator believes further discussion would be constructive, though the university could ostensibly continue negotiations at any time. CUPE 3902 negotiators are prepared to continue to work towards an agreement immediately.
While many critics watching the situation unfold have been quick to lambast the university administration for its bad faith in negotiations, apparent callousness towards its workforce, deceitfulness in communicating with undergraduates, and general opacity — all of which are manifestly true — the issue extends beyond the institution.
Ontario — and, indeed, provinces across the country, including Québec — is currently in the process of selling out the nation’s higher education sector. Every year, the provincial government pulls the reins a bit tighter and forces schools like U of T towards the brink of situations like the one we are currently experiencing.
With less and less public funding from year to year, institutions like ours have turned to dubious and unstable methods such as corporate strategy as a way of making up the deficit. In order to stay competitive and maintain the facade of an internationally ranked place of higher learning, U of T has been exploiting its foundation while high-level administrators and tenured staff continue to take the lion’s share of wages.
The oft-cited reason for this disparity is the university’s need to offer compensation to the best and brightest that is competitive with private sector wages. This, however, is a painfully myopic argument. What is a university if not a place for learning, and with hundreds of classes cancelled by the strike, there does not seem to be a lot of learning occurring on campus at the moment.
