College strike a bitter lesson in buck-passing and blame games
The college strike no one cared about is now big news. Suddenly.
Turns out you can’t ignore the plight of up to 500,000 students for five weeks and pretend it’s business as usual. Let alone politics as usual, collective bargaining as usual, or just plain brinkmanship as usual.
And so begins the blame game by rival politicians, college presidents and union leaders — each claiming the moral high ground, purporting to work in the best interests of students while hoping no one notices their lowest moments.
This confrontation was the product of a poisonous byplay: Years of underfunding and under-hiring of teaching staff, while college presidents overreached and overpaid themselves (sneaking through pay hikes before the strike).
The walkout was years in the making, but it went into an extra week of picketing thanks to college management’s cocky approach to labour relations.
And a union that stood up for itself, but didn’t know when to stand down without stepping all over students. All this happened on the Liberals’ watch.
Now, MPPs are holding an emergency weekend session to legislate the teachers back to work, flailing and filibustering on both sides as rival politicians dance on the head of a procedural pin.
The Liberals are trying desperately to shift blame onto the New Democrats for a three-day delay in debate that ran into the weekend, knowing full well that the NDP always oppose back-to-work legislation, rightly or wrongly.
But no amount of government spin can deflect from the failure of Premier Kathleen Wynne to expend political capital in forcing both sides to move until now.
The posturing, hypocrisy, righteousness and wrong-headedness on all sides is an enduring lesson for students in how hubris gets in the way of honourable compromise. The only adults in the room have been those 500,000 students, but they have paid a heavy price in foregone tuition and lost class time — because everyone else was in it for themselves.
This dispute began with the undeniable problem of “precarious professorships” at most colleges, where the majority of instructors are stuck on short-term contracts — a teaching treadmill where they never get any closer to the fantasy of permanency. College administrators exploit these lower-paid instructors to prime their balance sheets, but the endless teacher churn comes at the expense of students who don’t get the benefit of experienced professors with proper prep time.
That was the eminently justifiable demand when OPSEU first went on strike last month.
The paradox of professors trying to equip students for a future job market while juggling their own precarious job situation shamed the colleges into promising to do better.
With new provincial laws soon to require that employers treat permanent and temporary staff equally, the two sides agreed to study the issue and come back with a solution.
That breakthrough brought them closer to a financial settlement. And then it all fell apart as strike leaders at our community colleges of applied learning started to take themselves too seriously — digging in on the abstract principle of academic freedom as if they were tenured professors on the ramparts of our highest ivory towers.
Trying to co-manage a college, and share management rights, is a bigger battle that doesn’t belong at the bargaining table, certainly not while a half-million students are held hostage at the altar of academic abstractions and pretensions. Sensing OPSEU had overextended itself, and mindful of a relatively weak strike mandate (68 per cent is low by union standards), the College Employer Council invoked its right to force an employee vote.
Union hubris meets management chutzpah.
There is no better way to unite a fractured union than to try to divide it. Actually, there is another way — when the union itself publicly advises members that rejection will invite inevitable legislation and arbitration by the government, guaranteeing a better deal than the final offer.
A perfectly practical and eminently persuasive analysis by OPSEU. Which paid off with a resounding 86 per cent rejection of the employer’s contract.
But that understandable union candour utterly undercuts all the high-minded rhetoric emanating from the NDP over the last couple of days that any back-to-work legislation at any time ever is always wrong — even if the fall semester is lost, or the next semester is sacrificed, and on into summer.
Union solidarity is admirable as far as it goes, and I have been guilty of it in newspaper strikes past. Collective bargaining is a bedrock principle, but it sometimes leads to bloodyminded deadlock.
When the two sides cannot agree on anything — even arbitration — they have lost their way.
There comes a point where both sides are stuck and simply can’t dig themselves out. They need to be rescued from themselves, if only for the sake of others dragged down with them who deserve rescue at least as much.
This strike not only needs to end now, it should have ended at least a week ago if not for the folly of the employer, the foolishness of the union and the fecklessness of a Liberal government that failed to effectively mediate — and make both sides face reality far earlier. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn