Illustration by Katie Doyle
From December 9-11, over two thirds of CAAT-A members, which make up the union of faculty, councillors and librarians at Ontario colleges, cast their votes in favour of permitting the union to pursue actions such as work-to-rule or a strike if necessary. A total of 59.4 per cent of votes authorized the motion.
Following the vote, the College Employer Council, which negotiates on behalf of 24 Ontario colleges, rejected an offer by the union to extend the current collective agreement until January 3. Following the provision of a legally-required five-day notice of beginning labour action to their employers, the CEC imposed working terms and conditions and could potentially add more in the upcoming months.
“With the amount of stress and exhaustion everyone’s dealing with – to get over two-thirds of a turnout – I was pleased to see that,” said Jeff Brown, acting chief steward at OPSEU Local 556 and professor at George Brown, who told the Dialog before the vote he was encouraging fellow members to vote yes. “And to have just a little under 60% support, to want to stand behind [the mandate] in the face of all the pressure that has been heaped on faculty.”
By “pressure,” Brown refers to what he calls a fearmongering communications strategy faculty have been receiving from the CEC. He also says there’s anxiety over what will happen next for students on top of the usual chaos of marking final projects, essays and exams.
The CEC did not respond to the Dialog’s request for comment before the deadline for this article.
In a statement to the Dialog, Chief Steward of Local 556 JP Hornick said that the turnout was nearly 10 per cent higher than the previous bargaining round.
Brown and Hornick have both remarked that faculty have been peppered with a large amount of misinformation from the CEC. Brown thinks that they are taking advantage of the fact that faculty are currently overwhelmed, and making their statements look more persuasive than they actually are.
Brown was frustrated by how the college employer said that staff “voted in favour of a strike” in a recent statement, even though a strike is not for certain.
The CEC has claimed that it is still ready to bargain, which Brown says is in direct contradiction with the action of imposing terms.
“They are forcing faculty to work on their terms, and without consent. It is absolutely the opposite of negotiations,” said Hornick.
The terms themselves are being framed as an act of benevolence. For example, when the employer has said that they will “update the counsellor class definition,” their intentions are more insidious than simply modernizing a job description. “The update that they have is that they’re adding language that allows them to contract out counselling,” Brown said.
Scorched earth tactics, such as forcing terms on colleges, will be detrimental to labour relations for years to come, and it will take a lot of time to re-build trust again according to Brown.
Brown says that the union will be targeting those highest up the chain, such as senior managers, via a work-to-rule campaign. They also hope to put pressure college presidents like President Fearon, from whom nobody at the union has heard. When the Dialog reached Fearon’s office earlier this term, a representative declined the opportunity to comment and referred us back to the CEC.
“We will be doing everything we can to avoid affecting students – our goal is to build pressure on the college administrators to do the right thing and get their team back to the table or into interest arbitration,” said Hornick. “We need to remember that strikes are not caused by strike votes, they are caused by employers who refuse to address worker concerns.”
