NEWS
4 Obiter Dicta
Law Students and the Looming Strike
Which Side Are You On?
jason edwards › contributor
N
egotiations between York administration and the university’s education workers union, Local 3903 of the
Canadian Union of Public Employees,
have not yet resulted in a new collective agreement.
A strike may begin as soon as March 3rd. If that happens, it will have a serious impact on all York students, including us at Osgoode.
CUPE 3903 represents over 3700 education
workers at York, including teaching assistants,
research assistants, graduate assistants, and contract faculty. They perform about sixty percent of
the academic work and are dispersed throughout the
university. Course Directors—who take on teaching
assignments like Legal Process seminars—and many
other graduate students at Osgoode are members of
the union.
If we are to believe the administration, they are
the ones looking out for students. In their updates,
we have seen statements such as the following: “The
interests of our students and their success are paramount, and the University’s overarching objective in
these collective agreement negotiations… .”
Rather than take the administration’s words at
face value, a better way to approach the situation is
to ask: who represents the students’ best interests?
What are the union’s proposals? The education
workers are seeking reasonable wage increases; they
have offered to keep wages at the current rate, relative to tuition. The primary aim of the union is to
achieve greater job security and more manageable
workloads for the educators. Higher standards for
education workers mean higher quality education
for students.
Consider the situation of a contract professor.
Often, they will have weighty coarse loads, teaching
up to four courses a semester. Despite that burden,
their contracts will not carry over to the next semester. That means that they face job insecurity semester-by-semester. Imagine having to worry about
whether or not your employer will require your services every four months. On top of that, consider
marking four courses’ worth of exams while simultaneously looking for another job and a place to live!
This situation is not conducive to a decent quality of
life for contract faculty, or a high quality of education for students.
While the university relies on the labour of education workers,
it holds them in
extreme job insecurity. More than
half of the contract faculty at
York have been
scraping by on low-wage, short-term contracts for
five or more years. Thirty per cent of the contract
faculty have been working at York on course-bycourse contracts for more than ten years! It is not a
small, isolated issue.
This precariousness is not only unfair to the education workers, it is unfair to students. When our