The York University Faculty Association (YUFA) subcommitee has released the Casualization of Academic Labour at York University— a 10-page, 4.43 MB discussion paper prepared for the YUFA membership by the YUFA subcommittee on casualization.
This paper places CUPE 3903’s recent labour negotiations as well as YUFA’s upcoming negotiations into the broader context of budget cuts, the reduction of tenure-stream positions, and the increasing reliance on contingent academic labour. As the recent CAUT conference on contract faculty underscored, the erosion of tenure limits full access to good academic jobs and collegiality. The casualization of academic labour is a double threat to academic freedom and faculty governance within the public university. If the public university is to remain a center of critical inquiry, knowledge production and dissemination–where research and teaching are connected–then proposals to address contingent inequity should be prioritized within the YUFA collective bargaining process.