Five weeks on the college picket line ... and for what?

After the bitter five-week-long strike by college faculty last fall, 11 per cent of the students across Ontario asked for a tuition refund, and walked away from their labs and classrooms.

At Kitchener-based Conestoga College, the loss was less. Just nine per cent, or 1,200 students, chose to leave their training programs. And according to college president John Tibbits, 460 of those 1,200 decided to return with a fresh start in the winter term.

What about the others? The hundreds of students who didn’t come back are the most obvious casualty of that strike.

For what purpose were their careers driven off the rails? Because nothing much seems to have changed.

During the strike, it wasn’t just the core business that was affected. Continuing and adult education classes “took a big hit” with a 20 per cent drop in enrolment because people didn’t like the idea of crossing picket lines.

The college saved on salaries that weren’t paid because the employees were striking, but it had to use that money to pay refunds to students for tuition, fees, parking passes and out-ofpocket costs such as extra childcare expenses when the strike ended and classes were hastily scheduled into what had been part of the Christmas break.

Tibbits says the college will break even at the end of all this, even with the loss of hundreds of students who aren’t coming back.

As the strike began in October, unionized faculty were offered a 7.75 per cent wage increase over four years. After five weeks, Ontario MPPs legislated an end to the dispute and handed the outstanding issues to be settled by an arbitrator. The resulting deal was approved by strikers and

employers in December.

In the end, the wage increase was the same as before. So was nearly everything else.

We were told the strike wasn’t really about money. It was about too many parttime faculty, and about faculty’s wish to have more control over curriculum.

And while the agreement enshrines in words what was already happening in practice, which is that full-time faculty have a say in curriculum development, the colleges held onto their essential methods of deciding what to teach.

“We could not bend on that,” Tibbits said.

Unlike universities, colleges are specifically preparing students for jobs. Colleges have advisory committees that include employers. They let colleges know about upcoming changes, for example when graphic design switched to computers from old-fashioned “hand skills.” Sometimes, this view of the future is better than what full-time faculty can provide alone.

As our economy absorbs the shocks of global trade and technological change, more middle-aged people will need to be retrained. They can’t take two years off for this, because they have families to feed and mortgages to pay. They need shortterm programs. The colleges need the flexibility of part-time teachers to deliver what’s needed when it’s needed.

Unions have been responsible for most of the decent working conditions we all enjoy. But now, their strategies are a flimsy tent against the hurricane of economic change.