Back on March 5, CUPE local 3903, which represents graduate students, contract faculty and graduate assistants at York University, went on strike. A university offer was resoundingly rejected by the union membership in early April.  The union has consistently rejected arbitration. The Liberals dithered about back-to-work legislation until so late in the legislative session that it could easily be blocked by the NDP (which it was, as could easily have been foreseen given the NDP pledge never to use back-to-work legislation).  So now we are on day 93 of the strike, and thousands of students’ courses and some cases plans to graduate have been disrupted.

The key sticking point in the strike, according to a conciliator’s report (do read – it’s an excellent summary) issued about a month ago, is the demand that the university make a minimum of 15 permanent faculty hires per year from the pool of contract staff.  Increasing the number of contract staff climbing the ladder out of temporary jobs into the promised land of tenure has been a longstanding goal of CUPE 3903, and has been the sticking point in previous strikes as well.  In a normal year, York hires about 60 new academics and the number of those which come out of the ranks of adjunct faculty is usually five or six and the university would like to bring that number down still further.

(If your first thought on reading all that is that it incredulity at the ability of CUPE 3903 to keep 1500 people out on strike for three months over an issue which might benefit 2% of its members, you’re absolutely right.  It is an astonishing feat of solidarity.)

This is, in some respects, an issue from hell.  Contract faculty – at least those that actually care about getting FT academic jobs, which is not necessarily the majority of them – are by definition people who were not immediately picked up on the job market to be given tenure-track jobs somewhere.  Within the academy, they are widely understood to be “second-best” (if they were the best, they’d have already got a job, right?).  Tenure-track faculty may sympathize with their plight – if only funding were more generous, maybe there’d be a place for more of them – but fundamentally they are not seen as equals.  So the idea that a university would guarantee spots for more of them is tantamount, in many academics’ minds, to limiting hiring options to a “second-best” group  – and why do that when they could just hire from the best of a new generation of scholars?

Of course, nobody can say that out loud.  Not just because it’s impolite, but because the financial model that universities have adopted over the last couple of decades – largely to accommodate higher salaries and lower teaching loads for tenure-track professors – requires them to have roughly half their undergraduate credit-hours taught by these “second-best” types.  So during labour dispute a university can’t actually diss this group too loudly because people might start to ask questions about the reliance of institutions on these sessional instructors. Best not go there.

There are also, I should point out, some structural issues with respect to the dynamics of grad/contract faculty strikes, which lends them to being extremely long.  In public sector strikes, management has the power to force workers back to the table through legislation, and also has the ability to raise taxes to cover the cost of a settlement, both of which tend to make ending stoppages somewhat easier.  In private sector strikes, labour has a delicate game to play because an over-long strike might imperil the employer to the point where jobs become endangered over the long term and this, too, tends to concentrate minds and lead to earlier, rather than later, resolution.

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Universities have neither of these advantages.  Their budgets are more meaningfully constrained than those of government, they have no legal powers to compel an end to work-stoppages, and when it comes to graduate students and contract faculty, there is very little expectation of long-term employment at the institution, so frankly they don’t care very much about the long-term damage a strike does to an institution.  Add to that the fact that this particular local is part of Canada’s largest union (CUPE has well over half a million members), which is easily able to provide quite generous strike pay (in one previous York labour action, strike pay was so generous relative to wages it became a serious obstacle to getting people back to work, and you can see how long labour stoppages can happen.

It’s worth noting, I think, that there is something…ah…special…about CUPE 3903.  York had not had a completely smooth history of labour relations over the years, but it does bargain with (I think) nine or ten other unions, and as far as I know none of them have seen a strike since 1997.  In contrast, this is CUPE 3903’s fourth strike since 2001 (previous strikes have lasted 29, 77, 85 days).  Similarly, there are lots of graduate student and contract faculty unions across Ontario, and while strikes are not uncommon, none have this kind of persistent bad blood (I could be wrong about this but I am fairly sure no other local has gone on strike more than twice in the past twenty years).  CUPE 3903 is an anomaly both amongst unions at York and graduate student/contract faculty unions.

Make no mistake, these strikes are taking a toll.  Four generations of students have now seen their school careers interrupted.  That matters when it comes to student recruitment; within York’s informal catchment area (the GTA north of the 401) the word is out among students that going to York is a big risk.  In 2000, York was considered the #2 destination in Ontario, measured by the number of first-choice applications it received through the Ontario Universities Application centre.  In 2017, it was seventh, behind Toronto, Ryerson, Waterloo, McMaster, Western and Guelph.  One can only imagine the effect it has on their marketing to international students.  It can’t be much of a help to hiring top faculty either.  These strikes are eating away the institution’s reputation.  The union membership, for the structural reasons listed above, literally could not care less.

A Tory win in this week’s election would see back-to-work legislation and some kind of arbitration adopted fairly quickly, since the conciliator has already said this is the only way to end the strike.  But a win for the NDP, with its promise of no-legislation?  Frankly it’s hard to imagine a bitter, militant but suddenly emboldened union settling for less than total capitulation, followed by much, much steeper demands come the next round of bargaining.  Doug Ford is not popular in academia, but if there is one corner of it pulling for him this Thursday, it’s probably the gang at the top of Sentinel Road.