Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Skin Deep
Weekend Planner: November 21–22, 2009
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Hunger—which we caught at TIFF and again at the European Film Festival—is perhaps the most tactile movie we have ever seen. The impressionistic docudrama chronicling the prison hunger strike by IRA soldier Bobby Sands and the conditions leading up to his decision to take such extreme action, is all about the body and the things that go into, come out of, and are done to it. The film, the feature debut by British artist Steve McQueen (not that one), thoroughly deglamourizes the notion of deliberately starving oneself, by forcing you to confront the physical consequences of the act; it does for this method of suicide what 2:37 did for wrist cutting.
Although the movie won't be released in Canada until early in the new year, we recommend that the creator of the Facebook group Hunger Strike for Education get ahold of a copy right away. Intended to pressure CUPE 3903 and the York admin to return to the bargaining table, the group reasons, "If they will not acknowledge our internal pains, then they will, at least, be forced to acknowledge an external pain; going without food."
There's no hint of satire (and even if it were intended as such, it would still be in bad taste), as the description continues, "The average human body can go 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. A hunger strike will be planned, starting with the day that students should have been back in class for the winter semester....I received advice that it is better for several people to do this than just a single person. I hope some of you will be either interested or supportive."
Now, there's no doubt that even in the worst case any undertaking would not be more than a fraction as long or as dangerous as Sands's sixty-six-day famine. But neither is the opponent in this case Maggie Thatcher, nor the ultimate goal one of national independence. (Without any apparent irony, the discussion board contains counsel and encouragement from a McGill alum who "completed a 15 day hunger strike" in 2005 to protest Israel's disengagement from Gaza.)
It's of course not uncommon in labour disputes for each side to attempt to one-up the other when it comes to silly posturing—but if this were the primary factor determining in whose favour the eventual contract will end up, then we think the students would come out of this one the real winners.
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At first instance this does seem comically over the top, but on further consideration it makes a bit more sense. There are hunger strikes undertaken regularly in India, not to death, but to attract attention to various issues. The union has already engaged in a sit-in, why shouldn't students, the stakeholders in the middle of this, engage in their own benign protest?
The York strike will soon enter its third month and neither side seems particularly inclined to get 50,000 students back in class. McGuinty is steadfast in his refusal to get involved. The union is seeking concessions that will lead to massive labour unrest at all Ontario universities in two years. The more attention this issue attracts, the better. Good luck to these kids.
I agree that more attention can only be a good thing - so long as it leads people to seek out more, and better, sources of information. (I mean, "neither side seems particularly inclined"? In the last month, the union's offered 3 new proposals, all of which were transmitted via the mediator - who reported that each was a significant movement from the previous position. In the same time period? York offered nothing at all.)
Another note of clarification: the sit-in was very loosely organized by union folks, but undergraduate students were also a part of it.
(And lastly, and particularly for Lands Down - I posted a lengthy reply to your last message on the 'Villains' comment thread.)
Has the union made any significant changes to their offer of November 29? Since that was the union's first serious offer, I don't give the union credit for any reduction in demands prior to that date. Otherwise, one might as well say the union should have credit for reducing its demands from two unicorns per member, down to one unicorn per member.
I read it. I have a lot of sympathy for the union's demands as they relate to unit 2, but very little for what's being sought for units 1 and 3. That's because of a fundamental ideological difference, i'm sure, in how we feel about the role of graduate students in Canadian universities. I think we have too many who stay for too long and become permanent students, all fighting for a very small number of long-term positions in academia. Financing their stay any further is a mistake and it's let the province and universities like York shirk hiring more real professors. That's a larger argument that should be engaged after the strike, and probably not in this comment section.
I don't agree that the union's made any significant concessions. The new offers that were publicized are token reductions in overall percentages. As long as core issues like the contract term and indexing those funds remain, you're both an ocean apart, and CUPE knows that. CUPE is engaging in the same PR game as York.
I'm not sure why you're trying to distance the union from the sit-in. The union's strike webpage has running journals and photo galleries from it. That's the same tactic the union's used with the 'flying pickets'. Groups of strikers ran through Osgoode (during classes) and Schulich (during exams!) screaming and flicking lights on and off in classrooms. It's illegal (and juvenile), and all of it’s being done by union members, but CUPE's response is to distance themselves in public and smirk in private. They're no better than the admin.
Go York Go. Don't give an inch to the union.
With what's going on at York right now, are the current Grade 12s still considering the school? I've heard people saying that York, which worked really hard to get rid of their "last chance school" rep in the 80s and 90s, might see that come back to haunt them...
I also don't like how graduate students stays have become extended, 'permanent student' type situations, but I'm not sure that resisting pay and benefit increases will effectively reduce the time spent getting a PhD - especially when a lack of funding is what leads many people to take second jobs and further distract themselves from getting their work done. (An unfortunate reality with which I'm personally familiar.)
The contract term is a huge hurdle, yes. But percentages matter, too. York adopted some of the indexation language in their last proposal and I wouldn't be surprised to see them embrace it all, eventually - the non-indexed funds are only a tiny percentage of our total package (I seem to remember that our indexation proposal was costed at well below a million dollars, which is relatively tiny when you're negotiating a $60+ million contract) so they aren't actually a deal-breaker in the way that the contract length and long-term contracts for contract faculty (which, by comparison, will cost several millions of dollars) are.
As for the sit-in - I'm not trying to distance the union from it, per se, but it wouldn't have happened at all if there hadn't been undergraduates who were willing to join in. And while a union member took the lead once they got there, he did so without any sort of direction from the union itself. (Much to the chagrin of many - though that had less to do with how the sit-in was organized, structurally, than it had to do with who was doing the directing.)
The flicking lights on and off, though? Yeah, that's pretty dumb. I've participated in only one thing (and for only about 10 minutes) that wasn't oriented, either substantially or at least in part, toward disseminating information. I don't really understand the usefulness of much of the rest.