Which Side Are You On?
Negotiations between York administration and the university’s education workers union, Local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, have not yet resulted in a new collective agreement. A strike may begin as soon as March 3rd. If that happens, it will have a serious impact on all York students, including us at Osgoode.
CUPE 3903 represents over 3700 education workers at York, including teaching assistants, research assistants, graduate assistants, and contract faculty. They perform about sixty percent of the academic work and are dispersed throughout the university. Course Directors—who take on teaching assignments like Legal Process seminars—and many other graduate students at Osgoode are members of the union.
If we are to believe the administration, they are the ones looking out for students. In their updates, we have seen statements such as the following: “The interests of our students and their success are paramount, and the University’s overarching objective in these collective agreement negotiations… .”
Rather than take the administration’s words at face value, a better way to approach the situation is to ask: who represents the students’ best interests?
What are the union’s proposals? The education workers are seeking reasonable wage increases; they have offered to keep wages at the current rate, relative to tuition. The primary aim of the union is to achieve greater job security and more manageable workloads for the educators. Higher standards for education workers mean higher quality education for students.
Consider the situation of a contract professor. Often, they will have weighty coarse loads, teaching up to four courses a semester. Despite that burden, their contracts will not carry over to the next semester. That means that they face job insecurity semester-by-semester. Imagine having to worry about whether or not your employer will require your services every four months. On top of that, consider marking four courses’ worth of exams while simultaneously looking for another job and a place to live! This situation is not conducive to a decent quality of life for contract faculty, or a high quality of education for students.
While the university relies on the labour of education workers, it holds them in extreme job insecurity. More than half of the contract faculty at York have been scraping by on low-wage, short-term contracts for five or more years. Thirty per cent of the contract faculty have been working at York on course-by-course contracts for more than ten years! It is not a small, isolated issue.
This precariousness is not only unfair to the education workers, it is unfair to students. When our educators face poor working conditions, we receive a weaker education.
Those who fear that better working conditions will mean higher tuition should consider the broader picture. Tuition fees are the product of political will, not education worker pay.
It is not the job of contract faculty to subsidize our education—that is the job of the government. Asking these educators to suffer job-insecurity and poor compensation because of a lack of political will to fund education is wrongheaded. If the provincial government fails to take ownership, generate adequate revenue, and prioritize education, the response of students cannot be to condone punishing education workers.
What’s more, the portion of the budget that goes to education workers in the bargaining unit is negligible. Contract faculty, who teach more than forty per cent of undergraduate courses, only attract 3.7 per cent of the university’s budget.
Many of these educators are not here for the money; they are here because they enjoy teaching. We should not be demanding that education workers shoulder a burden that is more rightly the responsibility of the public at large. If the public thinks that having an educated populace is valuable, it needs to be willing to pay the necessary costs.
The union’s contract expired in August of last year. Their members voted overwhelmingly—about four out of five—in favour of a strike. In the circumstances, students should unflinchingly support these workers. They deserve a fair contract, including manageable workloads, job security, and fair wages. As the quality and accessibility of education in Ontario and across the country declines, it is education workers like those in CUPE 3903 who provide a counterbalance, pushing in a direction that supports the interests of the students they teach.