Back to class: Wynne promises bill to end strike
‘Students have been in the middle of this strike for too long and it is not fair’
DAVID REEVELY
Ontario’s college strike is set to end with a law ordering striking instructors back to work, perhaps as early as Monday, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Thursday afternoon.
A resolution, such as this one is, has taken much too long. The fall semester for hundreds of thousands of students is at serious risk, particularly since the colleges used a legal right they get once in a work stoppage to force a vote on their purportedly final offer. For days while faculty voted, nothing happened but picketing.
Then on Thursday, the 12,000 strikers in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union rejected the colleges’ offer with an 86-per-cent majority. The colleges forced a vote on a contract offer worse than the one they had on the table before the strike. No surprise the faculty threw it in a fire barrel.
Wynne told the two sides to take another crack at negotiating, it failed instantly, and the Liberals responded with legislation.
“We have said repeatedly that students have been in the middle of this strike for too long and it is not fair. We need to get them back to the classroom,” Wynne said.
With the legislature set to sit through the weekend to pass a strike-ending bill over the New Democrats’ resistance, classes could resume first thing next week.
All the outstanding issues will go to mediation, and if that fails, to arbitration. Which means the fundamental dispute about how college instructors are employed probably won’t be solved.
A major issue is the colleges’ reliance on gig instructors, people teaching multiple classes from term to term with no job security and comparatively poor pay and benefits.
The striking faculty want more permanent hires; the colleges say they can’t afford them.
Wynne’s government has put a lot of stock into Ontario’s colleges as a good model for modern education, combining theory with workforce-readiness even in their more intellectual programs.
So it’s ironic that after all the work the Liberals have put into signing new contracts with primary- and secondary-school unions, we got into the second month of a strike covering all of the province’s colleges.
The practical educations colleges offer make them especially happy to have classes taught by people whose day jobs are in relevant fields.
Professional professors are more experienced in the classroom and probably better at teaching; part-timers bring live experience in the workforce and become the first outside nodes in students’ networks as they look for jobs.
I’ve taught a media law class in Algonquin College’s journalism program myself, while working full-time as an editor and writer, and have friends and colleagues who’ve taught there. (Some are on strike now or not teaching because other classes are cancelled, too.) It was fun and satisfying; it’s good to think about your work in the organized way it takes to teach someone else how to do it. I can imagine going back.
I’d do it in spite of the employment conditions, though.
The pay is based on scheduled time in the classroom. Every minute you spend preparing, marking, helping, mentoring or explaining to an aggrieved student why you won’t set his midterm another day because he has concert tickets that night is included, no matter how much or little of it you do and no matter how many students are in the class. At the upper end, staff teachers can make it onto the province’s public list of $100,000-a-year employees; there’s no way contract teachers could get there no matter how much they taught.
For the course I taught, they have to find a new instructor every couple of years. (I stopped after three after I felt like I’d recouped enough of my investment in planning my lessons the first time.) As a sideline job it’s fine, but it’s not a mode of work on which to build a life. As a way of staffing an institution of higher learning, contract instructors can be valuable parts of the team, but not its heart.
Maybe the conditions for lower and higher faculty need to be brought closer together with the help of some concessions from the current permanent staff. The idea of importing universities’ academic senates into the more practically minded college system, another union demand, is kooky. But the pre-strike situation was unsustainable and not only because it ticked off the more precariously employed instructors.
Arbitrators are usually reluctant to order major changes to conditions of employment.
It can happen — it did after the last bus strike in Ottawa in 2008, when the union lost on the major work-scheduling issue that led to the strike — but it’s rare.
Precarious work is a problem of which the provincial government is well aware. Wynne and her ministers argue with apparent conviction that unstable, unreliable work makes people anxious and unhappy and keeps them from investing in their own futures, and a big part of the Ontario Liberals’ program these days is about reassuring Ontarians that the government has their backs with generous social programs, even if employers don’t.
Here, the Ontario government is the employer. At arm’s length, yes, but Ontario’s colleges are public institutions and if they’re relying ever more on an underclass of contract instructors, it’s ultimately because of government decisions. The Liberals have stated ideals that should matter.