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Behind the Negotiations for U of T’s Untenured Faculty
Although the union reached a last minute settlement with U of T, rank and file members have rejected the offer.
Photo from the CUPE 3902 Facebook page. Used with permission.
Update, Friday, February 27, 8:00 p.m.: Although the bargaining team reached a tentative agreement, the membership of CUPE 3902 voted to reject the deal, and will go on strike until they reach a deal that gets approved. The headline of this article has been updated as a result.
At 12:54 a.m. this morning, not a full hour following the midnight strike deadline for the University of Toronto’s TAs and graduate student instructors, CUPE 3902 strike organizer Abe Nasirzadeh was still waiting to learn the outcome of bargaining negotiations. “Deadline extension for a half hour,” he texted Torontoist, though that half-hour had already passed. Talks would continue for nearly two more hours, but a tentative agreement was reached that would see the university’s nearly 7,000 adjunct staff and teaching assistants back on the job—instead of the picket line—today.
“All seven bargaining team members believe that this is an agreement we can be proud of, with many significant gains for our members,” reads a statement from CUPE 3902. Details of the agreement have not been released.
Union members have been seeking a new collective agreement with improved benefits, job security, and TA wages since the summer of 2014. Nasirzadeh, a PhD candidate and instructor in political science, notes that the university’s graduate funding package has gone unchanged since 2008, despite cost of living increases in increasingly expensive Toronto.
The PhD student members of CUPE 3902, who are responsible for much of the university’s TA work in addition to primary instruction of a growing number of undergraduate courses, get a total annual stipend of $15,000. In order to make ends meet, many graduate students opt to take a heavier teaching load than permits them to stay on track to complete their programs. This system only exacerbates existing economic disparities that pervade the post-secondary system.
“People who end up taking more hours fall behind on their studies, and stay at the university far longer than they were required to originally, or were even funded to originally,” says Nasirzadeh. “It becomes a crazy perverse cycle.”
The union’s members had been prepared to strike, said Nasirzadeh. He couldn’t report offhand how many oil drums, fuel and picket signs had been ordered, but he assured us that “we have enough.” Still, in the hours prior to the agreement, Nasirzadeh was hopeful that a walkout would be averted.
“I don’t think anyone really wants to strike,” he said. “We’ve been pushed into that corner by a university administration that doesn’t seem interested in how much graduate students at this institution are under financial constraints. It really depends on them, what’s going to happen.”