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Judging by most of my mail bag, yesterday’s piece on the York strike was a hit.  So, I thought I would throw in two tidbits which I didn’t really get to yesterday, as well as give my suggestion for a way out of the strike.

Tidbit 1:  For those of you who don’t know the geography of York: it’s massive.  The main Keele campus is over 450 acres.  But, in a terrible for management/great for labour act of urban planning, it only has six entrances and exits, which means it can picketed extremely effectively.  This is, it is often argued, one of the reasons there has been a history of labour militancy at York – because unions there have much more effective weapons than they do at more urban institutions where there are dozens of entrances (this isn’t a perfect argument – there are lots of large institutions with fewer than six entrances – off the top of my head: SFU, Manitoba and Waterloo all have fewer entrances and of those only Manitoba approaches York’s level of labour strife).

But one of the things that is different about this strike is that it’s the first since the new subway opened, and while the pickets can stop TTC buses from entering campuses, they can’t do a whole lot about subways barrelling down the track.  This has made access to campus much easier than in previous strikes and I’m guessing that’s why the university chose not to cancel classes during the strike the way they did in previous ones.  In turn, that has significantly lessened the pressure on the institutions to settle.

Tidbit 2:  I had not quite twigged, upon reading the conciliator’s report, what it is that is so special about CUPE 3903’s…ah…unique…bargaining style.  Turns out, CUPE 3903 practices something called “open bargaining” or “bargaining from below”.   The idea here is that any member of the union can attend and participate in any bargaining session.  I think the rationale is that this increases buy-in from the members.  Possibly this is true, but Holy Moses it’s hard to see how any concessions ever get made when the floor is open for any hot-head to declare compromise on any point as a sell-out.  There’s a reason most people bargain behind close doors and it’s precisely to allow give-and-take.

One of my correspondents, a former CUPE 3903 member, described it to me thus:

It works like this: the employer and union bargaining teams sit in a room. The employer makes a pass. The union BT looks at it. Maybe they even like feel like they can resolve issues #1-12 right then and there, sign off on those things. So far, it’s normal bargaining under the terms of the act and the postwar compromise. But then some yahoo PhD student from Social and Political Thought, sitting ten rows back, raises some near-non-sequitur (usually about “solidarity forever,” or “general strike” blah blah blah), certainly about some esoteric bee he has in his bonnet that is being addressed in point #12 in the offer—and he doesn’t like #12. So he wants to vote on it. So the entire membership will have to do that at the next membership meeting, next week. Then another yahoo says something about point #7b “reinforcing hegemony” and “we don’t want that in the CA” blah blah. And since the BT cannot actually sign off on 12, 7b – or anything – without everyone saying something about it, and voting on it, nothing gets done. And around and around it goes until the employer team walks away in frustration or disgust, or the CUPE bargaining team falls over from exhaustion.

Sounds like a recipe for stalemate to me.  Makes you wonder why CUPE central allows a local to indulge in it.  It can’t be doing their overall reputation as a responsible bargaining partner much good.

Now, I promised you a potential solution, and here it is: the heart of this dispute is whether or not the university should restrict a larger part of its hiring pool to contract staff who most tenure-track folk think of as “second-best”.  This is prima facie one of those issues where faculty views should carry a lot of weight, because it directly concerns who will be made part of the academic community.  So why not let them vote on the proposal?  If a majority say “sure, restrict our hiring options”, the administration could shrug and say, “well, the faculty seem to want to fetter themselves on hiring: so be it”.  But if a majority say the opposite, then it would be a very powerful signal to CUPE that their proposal is unwelcome by the very people they seek to join,  and would erode their bargaining position quite a bit.  I’m almost positive the vote would go against the idea of restricted hiring, but either way, democracy would have been served, the decisions would be in the hands of academics and who could be against that?

Apparently, some professors have already asked the York Faculty Association to ballot its members on this question, and this request has been rejected.  You can kind of see the dilemma for the Association: it doesn’t want to appear to be working at cross-purposes with another union on campus, but at the same time knows perfectly well that the CUPE position is one that a lot of its own members dislike intently.  So instead, the Association puts out mealy-mouthed statements in favour of “fairness” for contract staff without ever specifying what that might mean.  Good politics?  Possibly.  But also, undeniably, unbehooving of an organization which claims to want to maximize faculty input into the running of the institution.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be the union putting something like that to a vote.  I don’t know the collective agreement backwards and forwards, but my guess is there is no provision preventing the university from surveying its employees on questions of the day.  Why not hold the ballot anyway?  The results would, I think, be quite instructive.

My $.02, anyway.