Category: Economics

Matters of money

Some lessons from the strike

I wrote this before seeing the result of the latest CUPE 3902 ratification vote.

One element of the strike for which I am grateful was being able to meet so many fellow students and teachers on the picket lines. I have often likened U of T to an amoeba with no centre – just a collection of loosely bound parts which are considered in some rough sense to be a single organism. Being out on the pickets has exposed me to a wider variety of fellow U of T people than anything that has happened before during my three years here. I have dozens of new people to follow on Twitter.

The strike has also been another example of a political struggle against difficult odds, and the way in which the strength of a moral argument is often overwhelmed by the relative power of those involved in it. The strike has also been a demonstration of how difficult it is to even bring people to the fight. Only a small subset of CUPE members ever showed up on the picket lines and an impossible-to-fully-know but at least moderate proportion just kept working.

The strike also demonstrated tensions between hierarchy, democracy, and strategic success. All the picket line chants were about democracy and universal involvement, but the union administration is inevitably an entity with interests of its own. It’s certainly hard for 6,000 people to make any kind of coherent decision – especially when those who are best informed tend to favour secrecy the most, and when there is a militant band full of enthusiasm for shutting down any public discussion aside from pep and slogans in the name of tactics and strategy.

For the big fights confronting us – climate change, most notably – we need to deal with both of those problems: find ways for the moral demands of the many to win over the entrenched power structures of the few, and find ways to make people active, political, and part of movements that can win.

CUPE 3902 meeting and Fellows’ Gaudy

Yesterday afternoon, CUPE 3902 met to decide whether to send the latest offer from the university to the full union for ratification. The deal includes the same reworked funding and tuition numbers from the union’s last proposal, but without the structural changes to the funding package that many saw as the realistic best-case outcome for the strike.

I had to leave the meeting an hour before the end to get to the Massey College Fellows’ Gaudy, the last high table of the year. We learned later in the evening that those present at the meeting had voted narrowly in favour of sending the deal to a ratification vote.

The vote is happening today and tomorrow, and could conceivably result in us going back to work Monday. If so, I will be in even more trouble than before. My cold has become substantially worse, and a return to work will mean a sudden avalanche of grading – all six days before the brief update is meant to be finished.

More thoughts about the strike

I am in a bit of a vise right now. Nobody else can finish the fossil fuel divestment brief update, but the strike and picket duties are ongoing. Even totally neglecting my PhD work, reconciling the two is impossible. And now I have come down with a cold.

The prospect of pulling back from union duties is uncomfortable. The University of Toronto’s position remains unconscionable. They are failing to recognize how running an institution of learning requires mutual respect, and some respect for social justice. Being unable to be fully effective for two social justice fights – and two distinct groups of allies – is vexing.

Tomorrow afternoon there is a union meeting to discuss the latest offer from the employer. It is based in a way on the proposal from our meeting last Friday, where we decided to give up on aspirations like poverty-line pay for TAs in exchange for structural gains in the contract: recognition that tuition and the funding package are appropriate bargaining items for the union, and that funding assigned to individuals makes more sense and is more just than pools of funding that must be split among as many TA graduate students as the university cares to admit. The offer from the administration being voted on tomorrow jettisons the structural gains being sought, raising questions about what purpose the strike has served and how much more corroded and precarious the position of graduate students at U of T will become.

As far as TA work goes, I am happy to strike for as long as is required to get a deal with real gains. At the same time, the special burden of completing the brief weighs heavily on me.

March 13th meeting of CUPE 3902

This afternoon, the members of CUPE 3902 met to discuss a possible bargaining position.

The union’s bargaining team had worked out a way to reorganize the offer last made by the university, the rejection of which began the strike. As re-organized, the deal would raise the funding package from $15,000 to $17,500. It would also halve tuition for Phd students in their fifth and sixth years, regardless of whether they are domestic or international students.

The big gain – if the university accepts this proposal – is getting tuition and the funding package explicitly incorporated into the collective agreement, opening them as topics of negotiation in all further bargaining.

The meeting was scheduled from 3:30pm to 6:30, with a strict end time. Most of the meeting was taken up with the bargaining team and strike team presenting this potential deal and then answering questions on it. In the last half hour, a motion to approve the deal and have the bargaining team present it to the university was hastily debated.

The final vote at 6:36 went 280 in favour, 251 opposed. I voted against it, as I don’t see it as an adequate response to the problems faced by TAs at U of T, and I think we could have pushed successfully for something better. (At the same time, I recognize that getting something better might have required more dedication than CUPE 3902 members collectively possess.)

Regardless of the merits and drawbacks of the deal, I don’t think too highly of this decision-making process. People had to consider a deal which they hadn’t seen before the meeting, an inadequate amount of time was allowed for debate, and the system where any whoever happens to be at the microphone when the appropriate part of the meeting begins produces the motion that then becomes the main subject for debate and voting has potentially very random results.

We will see how the administration replies to the offer. In one sense, they may see it as a cheap way of ending the strike. After all, the union is mostly proposing to shift the precise way in which previously-offered funds will be spent. Alternatively, the administration may be wary of incorporating tuition and the funding package into the collective agreement, and so resist accepting this deal.

Regardless, I have my last picket duty of this week tomorrow. Then, I can turn my attention to trying to organize and execute the completion of the brief update and my PhD proposal.

CUPE strike day 3

Today’s 1pm – 5pm picket shift was good fun. We occupied the Munk Centre, where President Gertler was meant to be taking part in an event:

Then we marched all over campus: to the administration offices at Simcoe Hall, over to Queen’s Park, through University College, around Robarts, and back to Munk:

The university has not yet accepted the union’s offer to resume negotiations.

Twitter is probably one of the best places to watch the strike. Search CUPE3902 and #WeAreUofT.

CUPE 3902 tentative agreement

I am at Convocation Hall for a meeting of the members of CUPE3902 Unit 1 – the union for teaching assistants at the University of Toronto.

We are discussing a tentative agreement which the bargaining team reached with the administration late last night.

To me, the proposed deal looks deeply inadequate. They are proposing wage increases of 1%, 1%, 1.25%, and 1.25% over the next four years.

For starters, the Bank of Canada calculator shows that the real value of the funding package has fallen by 9.89% since it was set in 2008. In addition, the proposed wage increases don’t even keep up with inflation for the years in which they happen.

We will see what happens in this meeting, but I hope my fellow union members won’t accept something so inadequate. The objective here is to get beyond poverty wages for TAs – not to reduce them further.