Apr 09 2009

Another Way Must be Tried

Category: News,Post-strike Discussion (2009) — Bob Hanke @ 8:59 am
After Nine Months, a Labour Pact at York U.

by Louise Brown, Education Reporter (excerpted from the Toronto Star, April 9, 2009)

Strike-weary York University can look forward to at least two years of labour peace if teaching assistants and contract faculty approve a tentative deal reached this week.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees 3903, which shut down the sprawling campus this winter for three months in a strike largely over the growing use of part-time instructors, has reached a tentative three-year settlement with York with the help of a mediator appointed two months ago by Queen’s Park.

The union representing 3,400 contract professors, teaching assistants and graduate assistants announced yesterday on its website it was “pleased” to have reached a settlement with York after nine months of negotiations.

The contract would apply until September 2011.

The Ontario government legislated the union back to work in February after the longest university strike in English-speaking Canada, and handed the dispute to a mediator.

But for students facing another two months of school because of the extended school year, news of the agreement seemed anti-climactic.

“I hope both sides are happy, but now that I’m back in class, they can take as long as they want to get a deal,” said kinesiology student Catherine Divaris, who helped launch a website during the 85-day strike urging an end to the disruption.

“Because of the strike I’m in midterms in April instead of finals,” said the fourth-year student, who has applied to law schools across the province, including York’s Osgoode Hall.

“The one good thing is, a three-year deal means there is no danger of another strike until at least 2011.”

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Another “good thing” for York students and contract faculty who feel access to education is a democratic right and a public good, and not just another commodified service and a private value, would be to start mobilizing to  strike against tuition hikes.  Last week, the L’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante organized strikes with several universities and CEGEPS,  drawing students into the streets with calls for free education. To read more, click here.

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Commentary of Last Month: Lessons of the York University Strike by Chris Bailey, March 2, 2009.

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Mar 11 2009

Enough (Bad Education Policy) is Enough

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 1:23 pm

President Shoukri’s February 26, 2009 address to Senate was strangely silent on educational policy and the real problem of chronic underfunding. Protecting the quality of the higher education environment will require more than the administration’s “Integrated Resource Planning project” or a “task force” on labour relations; it will require a dialogue on university fianancing and government educational policy. To remain true to York’s historic mission, education as a public good must be defended at every level of the institution.

For starters:

Tuition hikes are wrong way to close university funding gap
Transferring load to students amounts to the privatization of higher education

By Brian Brown, President of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (excerpted from thestar.com, March 11, 2009)

University funding is a difficult and complex issue. At the best of times, it must be dealt with thoughtfully, intelligently, rationally and with care and sensitivity.

These are not the best of times. They may be the worst of times. Universities with their capacity to train the next generation of knowledge workers while relieving unemployment have a vital role in both the short-term and long-term health of our economy.

The decisions that are made will affect not just students and their families but Ontario as well.

We cannot roll the dice with our higher education system. It has to be effective and affordable and deliver the quality of education that will keep Ontario knowledge workers at the cutting edge.

Degree mills won’t do that, which is what we could be looking at if government doesn’t step up to the plate. University financing has to be a provincial and national priority.

To read the rest of this opinion, click here.

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Mar 06 2009

Tenuous-track Positions

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 9:42 pm

By Jon Marcus (excerpted from Times Higher Education, March 5, 2009).

Overworked, underpaid and insecure: adjunct and part-time US faculty are fighting to convince their institutions – and tenured colleagues – that they deserve better. Jon Marcus reports

As an adjunct instructor in English at a small higher education institution in the American North West, Jessica Bryan lived with the usual indignities of being a part-time faculty member.

Unlike her senior tenured counterparts at North Idaho College, she had no job security, no benefits and none of the safeguards of academic due process. And even while teaching three classes a semester and two summer courses, and supplementing that income as a tutor in the institution’s writing centre, she earned, at best, $15,000 (£10,600) a year.

Yet Bryan continued working as an adjunct, part of the swelling ranks of contingent faculty appointed for one term at a time without the typical faculty privileges, and often resented by their full-time, tenured and tenure-track colleagues, who were watching their own proportion of the professoriate decline.

Even as a part-time instructor, Bryan prided herself on knowing all her students’ names by the end of the first week of class. She returned assignments promptly with feedback and made herself available for extra office hours.

“Like many adjuncts across the US, I did at least the same amount of work as senior tenured faculty members. I believe, because of my commitment to and love for the classroom, I did more. I entered the classroom with enthusiasm and dedication, and all my professional evaluations attest to that. My belief was that my commitment to the students, coupled with my hard work and personal concern to see my students succeed, would be rewarded, although perhaps not financially,” Bryan says.

But in the autumn of 2007, on the last day of term, the college sent Bryan an email telling her that she would not be reappointed for the following semester. It gave no reason for the move, and shortly thereafter hired another adjunct to replace her. In a written statement, the institution says that Bryan’s contract was to teach a specific course for a specific semester, and that it could not make binding commitments to part-time instructors because of the need to maintain flexibility.

Now the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which routinely investigates complaints about workplace mistreatment of senior faculty, has forcefully intervened in Bryan’s case.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Mar 06 2009

Complaints to the International Labour Organization

Category: News,Post-strike Discussion (2009) — Bob Hanke @ 4:52 pm

By Michael Skinner

FYI, the doc Complaints to the International Labour Organization (ILO) by unions in Canada against Restrictive Labour Legislation 1982 – 2008 can be found here.

Details of individual cases can be found by inputting specific case titles from above list using the search function here.

It will be useful to have more opinions on this matter. There is also background info re: the ILO here if you are at all interested.

Raj Virk informed me the CLC rep to the ILO is making inquiries re: a complaint on behalf of CUPE 3903 while he is currently in Brussels for ILO meetings.

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Mar 04 2009

Report Back from Board of Governors

Category: News,Post-strike Discussion (2009) — Bob Hanke @ 3:42 pm

By Ben Nelson

Opening business concerned VP Academic Embleton’s replacement, Patrick Monahan, effective July 1. It is not mentioned that the installation of Mr. Monahan (Dean of Osgoode Law School) brings about an all-male slate of VPs. At this point, Shoukri ominously observed that the new appointment would be a change in leadership dynamics from the outgoing Embleton. Then he made a weird remark, i.e., how he  “hasn’t changed his mind about York and its enormous potential” (who was?).

The rest of the meeting was broken down into a three part presentation by Shoukri, Gary Brewer, and Rob Tiffin.

Shoukri’s remarks had three topics: post-strike healing, the FLAPS appointment controversey, and the effects of the global financial recession on York. I’ll concentrate on the CUPE related stuff, though I have notes on the other stuff too.

Shoukri’s main concerns about the post-strike environment were with the effects of the strike on students. A generous anonymous donator has given 2.5 million to the school, to be spent on five hundred 5000$ scholarships. Though he acknowledged that relations between everyone on campus need to be improved, including labor relations,and that he plans to set up a “task force” to look at labor relations after the settlement has been reached. Later on in answer to questions, he continued to stress that “he does not do labor relations”, evidently without any intended irony.

Shoukri recognized that there is a wide perception that the admin didn’t do anything in the strike period by saying, “Whether or not we agreed that work was done during strike, the most important job to do is after strike”, i.e., to build bridges. He cited the example of the two town hall meetings post-strike (one on remediation, the other an open forum). He recognized that there were a lot of repeated questions and bitterness, given the way those meetings went. Still, he believes that he has arrived at mechanisms to heal the  community, though I’m not sure what mechanisms he had in mind.

Shoukri stressed that he has consulted widely with full-time faculty, and “will not give up on” open competition hiring. Threats to that (sp. our early-October proposal to grant automatic tenure by seniority) will be vigorously opposed.

Everyone in the room was surprised when Shoukri gave a presentation on the makeup of contract faculty to the university. He indicated that contract faculty do 30% of the teaching at the university. (I have no idea where the 30% figure comes from, since the York Factbook says more than 50%. There may be funny business with these numbers). Anyway, he showed a graph that displayed the breakdown of Unit 2 by seniority: there are many people who have just joined, and many people who have 8+ years. He described job security as a “valid concern”, and that when presented with the figures on the high number of contract positions, that he had “never seen anything like that”. He also indicated, however, that many contract workers have “little day to day interaction with York”, since they work elsewhere: i.e., 226 are teaching only one half course. However, 295 teach 1 full course, 119: 2 courses, 61: 3 courses, 43: 4 courses, 28: 5 courses, 8: more than 5 courses. With respect to those teaching at the higher course loads, he
went so far as to agree that they are doing full-time work, or “beyond full-time work”, at the university. Although none of this is especially surprising to our members, there were widespread o-faces around the table, with exclamations like “I can’t believe it!”, etc. The fact that this is happening only now should probably tell you something about how invested these people are in the university as such.

Finally, he indicated that replacement of retirements needs to be done, which may involve cutting entire programs. It should be noted, though, that I personally asked Sheila Embleton to find the rates of hiring for tenure-track positions and compare them to retirement rates. I had to look it up because nobody on Senate has bothered to look up the rates. Surprisingly, it turns out that our tenure-track appointments have more than kept up with retirements — they have actually been surpassing retirements in some years by a significant amount (in 03-04, they were more than double the number of retirements).

I’ve asked Sheila to take a look at the departmental composition of the retirements, so that we might see if there is covert job shifting between faculties.

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