Giving students a ‘right to strike’ would be folly

The allocated time for discussing serious matters at next week’s summit on higher education — a mere day and a half — is already sadly short.

So it would be a travesty to waste any of it chewing over patent absurdities such as granting post-secondary student associations the legal right to strike on the same basis as labour unions. Yet Premier Pauline Marois has proposed to do just that, thereby lending further credence to suggestions that the summit exercise is shaping up to be a farce.

The minister for higher education, Pierre Duchesne, has said the government is seriously considering the right-to-strike idea. He accused the former Liberal government of “inventing” the word boycott to describe last spring’s student protest against proposed tuition hikes, intimating that the students’ refusal to attend classes should properly have been called a strike, as the protesting students maintained it was.

This suggests an unfamiliarity with the meaning of words that is unbecoming in someone who, until his leap into politics last year, was a career journalist. “Boycott,” in fact, is the term that precisely applies to the student protest action.

By definition, a strike is an action by a collectivity of paid workers who are employed in the production of goods and services — something students are decidedly not. What are they? Beneficiaries of a service provided by the state. They have every right to deny themselves this service by not attending classes as a protest action. But, unlike unionized workers (under Quebec labour law), they do not have a right — as some presumed they did last spring — to throw up picket lines and prevent students who wish to attend classes from exercising their legal right to do so.

There is a balance in legitimate labour conflicts that would be absent from student strikes. In strikes involving paid workers, the strikers forgo the wages that the employer does not have to pay for the strike’s duration. But during student strikes, as was the case during last year’s boycotts, universities and colleges would still have to keep paying their professors as well as bear the added cost of makeup sessions.

Those arguing in favour of according students the right to strike maintain that it would create a legal framework for student protests that was absent from last year’s wildcat disruptions. Such a law could require strike action to be supported by a majority vote of a student association, by secret ballot and with a specified participation rate. This would, in theory at least, prevent a repeat of last year’s travesties (which student leaders called “democracy”), whereby “strike” votes were taken by a show of hands at meetings that only a minority of students in some faculties attended. It might also be reasonably suggested that, if the right to strike were given, students would be docked their loan and bursary payments for the time they spend on strike.

But the student-protest leaders showed during last year’s printemps érable that they prefer to take the law into their own hands, and to dictate to authorities what laws they will respect. That probably explains why student leaders have been more lukewarm to the proposal for formally granting them the right to strike than have been the university and CEGEP administration representatives who have suggested it be discussed at the summit.

The administrators complain that they were put in the uncomfortable position of having to defy student protests last year after being served with court injunctions ordering them to accommodate students who wished to attend the classes for which they had paid, and to which they had every legal right.

But fobbing off their responsibility to provide education to those who wish it, by caving into the folly of granting their students a legal right to strike, would be a shameful abdication — one likely to engender even more disastrous consequences than did last spring’s fiasco.