TORONTO
Adjuncts & teaching assistants make gains
By G.
Dunkel
Adjunct faculty members and graduate and teaching assistants
at York University in Toronto appear to be on the road to
winning the strike they started Oct. 26. Since that time
faculty and staff have refused to cross picket lines, canceling
all classes at the 35,000-student campus.
Adjunct or "contract" faculty at York are considered
temporary employees no matter how long or how much they have
worked.
The university and Ontario's provincial government forced
the workers to vote on management's latest contract offer over
the winter holidays.
Two of the three striking units turned the proposal down by
wide margins. The adjunct faculty unit accepted the offer, but
noted that its members would continue to honor the picket lines
of their sisters and brothers of Canadian Union of Public
Employees Local 3903.
Lorna Marsden, the high-paid corporate executive who is
president of York, decided classes would resume Jan. 8. She
hired a private non-union bus company to ferry students and
faculty across the picket line.
The union's response was sharp and decisive. "Make no
mistake about it, that university will be closed down on Monday
morning," said Sid Ryan, president of Ontario CUPE.
"We will have steel workers and auto workers and food
workers and other university workers and CUPE members in the
public sector outside this university's gates," he told a news
conference. "We will not be beaten into the ground."
About 24 hours after Marsden declared that the university
was going to try to break the picket line and the strike, the
University Senate said it alone had the power to declare when
instruction would begin and "the disruption had ended." Classes
will not start Jan. 8.
Not much appears to be separating the graduate student units
and the administration other than a cap on tuition. Since a
large part of their pay is tuition remission, the graduate
students don't want the university to recoup their wage hike by
raising tuition.
But York University is firmly on the road to privatization.
Ontario Premier Mike Harris and the business executives he
appointed to run York want to run it like a business. They want
to be able to charge what the market will bear and dismantle
affordable and accessible education.
Local 3903's Web site charges: "Their goal all along has
been to work with the Harris government in order to establish a
'for profit' university. That is why against all reason they
have prolonged the strike and refused to bargain with CUPE
3903."
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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