I’m not sure how one measures the state of labour relations in a given field, but since we are on the fifth major university strike of the year (Manitoba and Concordia University Edmonton have settled; Acadia, Lethbridge and Ontario Tech are ongoing), I am pretty sure no one will object if I say that 2021-22 is the worst year Canadian academia has ever had.  A perfectly reasonable question is: why is it all kicking off now?

If you look at the five individual cases, the issues at stake are not entirely parallel.  At the two sites where strikes have already ended – Manitoba and Concordia – the main issue was money.  At Manitoba salaries had trailed other U-15 comparators for quite awhile, as I noted back here, and Concordia’s salaries seem to have been somewhat below the median as well (though CUE does not participate in the national Statistics Canada faculty survey, so it’s hard to tell).  But at the three institutions currently beset by strikes, it really does not seem as if money is the main issue at all. 

Now to be fair, it is always a little bit difficult to work out what a strike is really about, because there is an unwritten convention in many parts of Canada that actually publishing offers to allow people to see for themselves what is at stake is somehow an act of bad faith.  So, for instance, at Ontario Tech, the only way to work out what seems to be at issue is to walk through what the union says in its public statements (long on generalities, short on specifics) and striker’s memes (more amusing, but still not that helpful) and what subjects the university chooses to include in its regular FAQs.  Read both of them if you’re minded, but as near as I can tell, the issue seems to be about the definition of workload.  The PR war is being fought over student-to-tenured/TT track staff ratios, a somewhat tedious exercise given that the two sides choose to interpret the same numbers very differently and that, as far as I know, there is no proposal from either side to hire the boatload of new faculty required to fix this. As far as I can tell, the substantive issue seems to be about whether “supervision of students” is considered part of professors’ teaching load or their research load.  I confess to being a bit confused about why this matters: Canadian universities don’t track professors’ time in any meaningful sense, so how could this possibly make a difference at a practical level?  But clearly enough people on the ground who presumably know more than I do think it’s a big deal, and so we have a strike.

It’s a similar story at Acadia, where the main issue is much more clearly about workloads (see the Acadia University Faculty Association info sheet).  The key point is that the strategic plan projects a 10% increase in enrolment, and faculty are upset that there does not seem to be a concomitant plan for an increase in staff numbers to offset the growth (according to Statscan’s U-CASS data, there has been a more-than-10% increase in staff hired, but they are all below the associate professor rank, which from some perspectives does not count).  Now if you’re at a bigger university, your attitude to a growing student-teacher ratio might be a shrug – it’s hard to think of any Canadian universities that hasn’t dealt with growing enrolments at least in part by growing its student-to-teacher ratio and offloading some teaching to sessionals.  But where I think the Acadia faculty have a point is that Acadia’s raison d’etre – and that of the rest of the Maple League institutions – is being a small school with small classes and very close faculty-student contact.  There is, in effect, a pretty heavy duty of pastoral care implied in being a professor at one of these institutions, and increasing student-faculty ratios is actually a lot harder to do than at institutions which operate on a more industrial scale. 

That’s not to say that Acadia is wrong in trying to increase enrollments: Canadian funding formulas are notoriously hard on small institutions and the problem with institutions who claim smallness as their unique value proposition are in a hell of a bind, because small doesn’t scale.  What Acadia needs is a more honest, collegial conversation about how whether and how to stay small.  A strike is a terrible way to do that, but maybe after being on Zoom for months and being deprived of normal spaces for collegial discussions, this was the only route left.

And then there is Lethbridge.  And I love that the Lethbridge University Faculty Association actually posting the final employer and union offers so you don’t have to turn Kremlinological cartwheels to work out the distance between the parties.  Super helpful! But, at the same time, I find the situation at Lethbridge puzzling.  The non-financial issues at stake are tiny, and the financial gap between the two sides is – I know this is unbelievable, but you can look it up yourself – the difference between management’s offer a five-year deal (retroactive to 2020) in which the salary scale increases 0%, 0%, 0%, 1.25% and 1.5% and the union’s offer of 0%, 0%, 0%, 1.25% and 2.5%.  In dollar terms, this is a gap of less than $1.5 million and doesn’t kick in for another 24 months.  It’s kind of gob-smacking that so many students’ semesters are being interrupted by an argument over an amount which is so small – which makes me think that that in fact there are other issues at play that aren’t even formally on the bargaining table (I don’t know what they would be for sure, but largely these things tend to come down to whether bargaining partners have each others’ respect or not).  Even here, money is not the issue.

(That said, while you can draw your own conclusions about where the blame for not closing that gap lies with labour or management, I have rarely seen a better case for including a third party in the process in order to knock some sense into both parties.  It is simply ridiculous for there to be an impasse over so little).

Now, all of that is at the micro-level.  At the macro-level, there are other factors that probably do apply across the board with respect to “why it’s all kicking off now”.  First, keep in mind that there are an uncommonly large number of contracts up for renewal this year because at many institutions, negotiations were pushed back because of the pandemic.  And the more negotiations you have, the more cases are likely to end up in strikes. 

Second, the fact that universities asked for sacrifices from staff in the face of what were (not unreasonably) expected to be massive losses in 20-21 before turning in relatively large surpluses (because against all odds international students showed up anyway) is that staff seem eager for some “payback”, even if strictly speaking universities were only acting as prudence dictated.

And that brings me to the third, final, and maybe most important point.  Two years of the pandemic and Zoom-rooms and online lecturing and all the other extra work people have taken on has left nearly everyone tired, pissed-off and alienated.  Situations that would in normal times could be defused simply and amicably if everyone could just get more sleep and occasionally be in the same room with each other for a friendly coffee are simply going a different way in Winter 2022.  It’s not just that this is making everyone that little bit less conciliatory, it’s that it is specifically affecting views about workload.  I have a feeling there is not a lot of straight thinking on that one simply because so many people have been doing tons of overtime and have trouble remembering what normal workloads look like – hence any discussion of workload naturally becomes a flashpoint.

Anyways, we’re not done yet: the University of Alberta is potentially drifting towards a strike vote and OPSEU members across Ontario colleges are finishing voting today on a management offer (OPSEU is recommending a no vote).  There will be more to talk about on this file before too long.