There’s a strike on at UNB. I won’t get into the ins and outs of it because both sides have kept bargaining positions pretty close to their chests, and so it’s hard to say if one side or the other is being unreasonable. The administration, presumably, will want to make sure that a wage settlement doesn’t entirely eat up all new revenue (which, as I showed back here, might well be the case). Staff will presumably want wage increases similar to what colleagues elsewhere have received (even if it breaks the bank). Both have a case.
I do, however, want to take this opportunity to get something off my chest about faculty strikes. It’s this line that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and its members trot out come strike time about how they’re really doing it for the students, and that no harm will come to students because – and I’m quoting Jim Turk here – “no student in Canada has ever lost a semester or a year because of a faculty strike”.
What crap.
Setting the bar for whether or not a student has been hurt at, “whether they get to finish the semester” is ridiculous. First of all, it’s wrong – lots of students lose a semester because they choose to drop-out instead of kicking their heels waiting for a settlement (ask Brandon how many students they lost during their 45-day faculty strike in 2011, or York about their 11-week contract faculty strike in 2009). Second of all, students can suffer in all sorts of ways that doesn’t technically amount to losing a semester. York students who lived through the 1997 faculty strike – which pushed the end of term back well into June – were harmed financially by being kept out of the labour market during the early summer months. Vancouver Island University students, in 2011, didn’t lose time in the labour market, but they did lose a month’s worth of classes without a refund. And Master’s students and final year undergraduates at UNB right now must be utterly beside themselves because they can’t get grad school recommendation letters from their profs.
More to the point though, this line is simply mendacious. Nobody holds a strike in summer because the only thing profs are doing during that time is research, and nobody cares if they withhold labour then. Strikes happen in fall and winter precisely because they inconvenience students, in the hope that students (or their parents) will in turn put pressure on the university to settle. There is no mystery about this. Harming students is the point. If it weren’t, we’d see strikes in the summer. QED.
Let me be clear: collective bargaining and the right to withdraw labour are, to me, essential rights. And I’m not in any way, shape, or form making an argument to ban or curtail strikes. I’m just saying I’d respect faculty unions a lot more if they had the courage to be honest about their tactics and their consequences, instead of hiding behind a mound of untruthful sanctimony.
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My daughter was at York in 2009. This is how she got hurt.
1) Lost work opportunities in the summer due to term end being changed
2) Had to fly across the country back home until they sorted it out because she was out of province
3) Lost instructional hours for the majority of the 11 weeks (not all 11 because the action went over Christmas and to prove the point about summer neither side did much during Christmas about the issue)
4) Had the remaining academic schedule adjusted to a compressed format causing less time before exams, removal of reading week and compressed exam schedule – which all impacted performance.
5) As a result of the general stress of the issues in #3 above dropped her GPA just below the required threshold to keep her 4 year scholarship – she was in year 2 AND they took the scholarship away and even under appeal was told she could have it back after she raised her grades
So yes, I have a personal witness to how the strike affects students. She ended up raising the GPA to that level but switched programs and almost switched Universities.
“I’m just saying I’d respect faculty unions a lot more if they had the courage to be honest about their tactics and their consequences, instead of hiding behind a mound of untruthful sanctimony.”
Fair argument (and equally sanctimonious), but this is entirely based on the assumption that it is the faculty union’s decision to hold strikes when they do. You know what they say about assumptions….
In the interest of truthful disclosure: I am a faculty member at Nipissing University and by extension I am a member of a faculty union (but I am not involved as a union leader in any capacity). I walked and lived through the first ever strike at our institution last fall. It was awful. Students suffered, faculty suffered, the administration suffered, the support staff suffered, even the community suffered. No one on any side here disputes or is surprised by that fact.
Side note: The only thing that didn’t suffer was the University deficit. The money saved during that one month of not paying salaries (while still collecting student fees) was substantial.
Early on in the strike, the chair of our Board of Governors sent an email to all students informing them that that the faculty strike was “strategically intended to have maximum impact on students and that is deeply unfortunate”. The message played out in the local media and here we have it sounding again.
Now, as our Board chair knew, and as Alex would know if he took a minute to look closely at the timelines of these things, CBA negotiations here began in the spring (as they typically do — this is the reality of the fiscal year cycle and when CBA’s are timed to expire/renew).
The point here is that the timeline of negotiations going forward (in our case at least) was **almost entirely out of the control of the union**. For example, of the 11 meetings originally scheduled over the course of April and May, our Administration cancelled 6 of them (more than half!). We also had persistent scheduling problems with the Administration due to the need to work around the schedule and travel plans of their chief negotiator, a Toronto-based lawyer. What should have been completed by the end of May ending up dragging on for months to the complete frustration of all faculty here.
Then as soon as the provincial conciliator became involved in our negotiations, that introduced yet another set of limits to our scheduling: our union expressed our preference for the *earliest* available dates when filing for conciliation back in August, but we were unable to secure the services of a conciliator until October 7th.
Finally, as Alex must surely know, the setting of a strike deadline is a matter of law in Ontario and not the choice of the union. After the failure of conciliation to produce an agreement, provincial law stipulates a 17 day cooling-off period from the filing of a “no-board” report before a union is in a legal strike position. In our case, that happened to be November 2nd.
Now Alex perhaps that’s the real reason why you don’t see strikes in the summer. QED.