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Are We There Yet?

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In the war of attrition that is the strike at York University, York officials have played their trump card: they have requested that Ontario’s minister of labour direct a supervised CUPE 3903 membership vote. According to the university’s website, school officials believe the union’s management has created an unnecessary stalemate and that it refuses to offer any conciliatory terms its members might accept. York has stated that it has opted for this measure because CUPE 3903 has refused to take all outstanding contract obligations to binding arbitration, which would end the strike. Separate votes will be required for each of CUPE 3903′s bargaining units (contract faculty, TAs, and GAs) and a voting date has yet to be determined by the minister of labour.

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  • http://null Green Sulfur

    It’ll be interesting to see if the TAs, who out number contract faculty, sell out the contract faculty. For the TAs, a 10% raise might be just great but, as I understand it, they’re really holding out for contract faculty job security.
    Anyways, York had better be damn sure this vote is going to pass because if it doesn’t, the bad will it will have created might mean such bad blood that talks don’t happen again for weeks, as happened earlier in the strike.

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    York cannot possibly be confident that this will be passed by all three units of CUPE 3903. It was rejected by 90% of the people in a 500+ person meeting, and you can bet that the large majority of those people will be voting in any forced rat vote.
    The strategy seems clear, and it doesn’t involve grad students selling out contract faculty. Rather, York knows that, historically, contract faculty are more apt to accept the deals that they’re offered than are grad students. (There are many reasons – contract faculty tend to be older, to have families, to be working multiple contracts and to be making a career of their work, and so suffer greater hardship during a works stoppage.) York’s hope is obviously that this will play out the same way it did 8 years ago – that contract faculty will say yes to the deal, thus taking the largest monetary demands off the table and clearing the way for a comparatively easy negotiation with the graduate student units.
    Which is, for anyone taking note, exactly what I said would happen only a few days ago.

  • http://undefined montauk

    To be honest I don’t want the strike to end. I don’t find my classes rewarding and this extended holiday has filled me with a perhaps irrational anxiety about facing deadlines and writing papers again. Also I do not miss the hectic schedule.

  • http://undefined montauk

    For the record, thewatchmaker, I told my friends about your predictions and everyone was impressed to see how York is following history so far. So your astute analysis did not go unnoticed.

  • http://null Lands Down

    CUPE gets slammed by The Star: http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/564108
    How has 3903 managed to become so reviled in such a short time? The rank and file membership has been poorly served by their short-sighted, idealogically driven leadership. Hopefully they learn from this and remove the current executive, replacing them with a more pragmatic group before contracts are to be negotiated again.

  • http://undefined PickleToes

    Wow. The union really has to be nuts for the Red Star to be attacking it.

  • http://null xtremesniper

    “Bargaining isn’t about holding out until you get everything you want. It’s about compromise.”
    THANK YOU. Finally someone gets it right. Why do unions continue to use the term “bargaining” or “negotiating” if all they ever do is set out a list of demands and wait until the entire list is met?

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    The Star hates CUPE because their publisher used to be the President of the University of Toronto and still has significant ties to, and influence with, the school. This matters because CUPE might also be going on strike at U of T in February.
    So it’s simply a case of self-interest – the Star opposes the strike because Pritchard doesn’t want a strike at the school he used to run. CUPE 3903 never actively sought their support because it was lost before the strike even began.

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    This criticism works both ways, of course.
    *York admits that they have increased the monetary value of their demands by 0.7% since the strike began; CUPE, in turn, has slashed their demands by about 15%.
    *York did not present a new proposal of even agree to meet for negotiations with CUPE from Dec. 8th to Jan. 3rd; during that same time period, CUPE presented three new proposals and requested a meeting each time, with York agreeing on after the 3rd offer.
    York also has demands from which they’re unwilling to move, too. That the deal be 3 years and that the 50 retiring tenure-track profs will be replaced by contract-workers rather than tenure-track positions. They have not given ground on the first demand, and they have given 1 new spot for the 50 openings on the second. (Which is a concessionary offer, since York previously gave 5-7 of these tenure-track promotions per year.)
    Funny how these things work both way, ain’t it?

  • http://null xtremesniper

    Sure, it works both ways, but it seems to always have to be the university that is forced to come up with a new offer for the union to slam to the ground. Why wont the union sacrifice any of their demands?

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    I’ll say it again, xtremesniper – the union has made plenty of sacrifices.
    I was fairly vague in my last comment, so i’ll give some specifics:
    *We’ve cut wage demands to 4% a year and have admitted that it is not a priority and can be reduced again, if York makes the right offer (York has not moved on their wage offer since the strike began)
    *We’ve dropped our demand for post-residency fees for PhD students
    *We’ve reduced the demand for a $22K guaranteed minimum funding for PhD students who TA to about $19.5K (York has increased their offer by about $230)
    We’ve also asked that a number of elements from our previous contract simply be maintained: the number of conversions for contract-faculty to tenure-track jobs; our fund for medical expenses that are not covered by our insurer; our per-member childcare, research, and travel funds, among others. York has proposed a decrease to existing levels in each of these categories. And to the extent that they have made improvements, they are pathetically inadequate – “improving” the number of conversions (previously 6.6/year on average) to 1.6 per year, and rather than eliminating our emergency medical fund they’ve proposed to reduce it by about 80%.
    So CUPE’s made plenty of reductions to their offer which have been priced at millions of dollars per year. (About $10 million according to CUPE’s costing methods; closer to $20 million if you use York’s.) Conversely, the total number of York’s improvements to their offer since the strike began totals something in the neighborhood of a million dollars in total. Which is about 0.1% of their total operating budget.

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    And having read your posting again, xtremesniper, I honestly have to wonder whether you read the message you were responding to or will bother to read my longer response to your own message. You said that “it seems to always have to be the university that is forced to come up with a new offer”, but this statement is bizarrely disconnected from reality.
    To be absolutely clear: the university has only presented two offers: the offer they presented in early November, before the strike and the offer they presented a week ago. Every offer in between was made by CUPE, and so every negotiation (prior to a week ago) used CUPE’s proposals as their starting point, since the university has maintained a strict (if unspoken) policy of refusing to negotiate in every round until CUPE brought them a proposal that is more to their liking.

  • http://undefined David Topping

    That strikes me as a little oversimplified.

  • http://null thewatchmaker

    Sometimes the simplest answer is, well, the answer.
    I could add that Pritchard’s decade in office ended with a CUPE 3902 strike that 3902 considers their most successful job action, as well as a bitter battle to unionize contract faculty. (They failed while he was in office, but subsequently succeeded.)
    I’m not calling him William Randolph Hearst, but I’m also not naive enough to think he’s doing this in the public interest. The Star has done a better job than most of poisoning the public against striking educators, and while the antipathy is currently trained on York it will all be quite easy to appropriate for use against CUPE 3902 at Toronto. It would’ve been too explicit for Pritchard to go after 3902 directly – not to mention too late, if he had to wait for them to go on strike – and so 3903 allows him to fire a warning shot in the direction of 3902. A shot, unsurprisingly, that they heard loud and clear when their strike mandate vote came back with a much lower show of support than usual. (Though I’m not suggesting he bears no animosity toward 3903 – we’re both CUPE and he’s probably enjoying the whole experience of discrediting us, too.)
    Feel free to offer something substantive by way of a response, though.

  • http://undefined Andrew

    On the contrary. It strikes me as surprising that the publisher would directly intervene in editorial content without the vocal objection of the editorial staff. When the Aspers tried to do the same thing at CanWest several years ago, it resulted in the public resignation of the editor of the Ottawa Citizen.
    I suggest that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that Pritchard is intervening. All you have offered is the coincidence that he used to be the president of the University of Toronto.
    Your potted conspiracy theory also doesn’t explain whose back pocket Torontoist is in. (Congrats on taking the bronze medal in Toronto’s villain of the year competition by the way!)

  • http://undefined Andrew

    Apologies, my facts are wrong: it was the publisher, Russel Mills, who was fired by the owners, CanWest.

  • Lands Down

    Welcome to the increasingly deluded reality of CUPE 3903, Andrew.