Welcome to your unionversity
UNION-LED ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS CHALLENGE THE GOVERNANCE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
In the gathering storm of anti-israel protests on North American university campuses, it might be news to many Canadians and Americans that these activities are being supported and even financed by seemingly unrelated organizations. Take, for example, the ongoing encampment by protesters at King’s College Circle in the middle of the University of Toronto. One would expect students, professors, teaching assistants and others who work for the university. But how many Canadians would know that a leading player in the encampment is the United Steelworkers’ (USW) Toronto Area Council?
In an interview last week with The Varsity, the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, Carolyn Egan, president of USW’S Toronto Area Council, said the union has been “involved from the start with supporting the movement to stop the bombardment that’s been taking place in Gaza, to really be supportive of the Palestinian people. We’ve been in many of the demonstrations that have been taking place.”
Egan said the USW has been working with the Palestinian Youth Movement and other organizations to advocate against the war, activity that peaked Tuesday night when 3,000 protesters joined the King’s Circle encampment.
Among other objectives, the Steelworkers and other unions want university administrations to divulge “monetary investments in businesses that are supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and their continued slaughter of Palestinian civilians.”
The average Canadian would be unaware of the union movement’s role in the demonstrations and occupations, mostly because the rising power of unions within universities across the continent has received inadequate attention.
Also missing in the global political fog of war is the fact that the activist union role in the anti-israel movement represents an abuse of members’ rights — an abuse that is tolerated in Canadian and U.S. labour law and jurisprudence.
Welcome to the new academic world, the unionversity, essentially a new institutional structure facing multitudes of governance, financial and academic struggles.
The Steelworkers’ Toronto Local 1998 has more than 10,000 employees at the University of Toronto and the union claims another 5,000 at other universities in Canada and thousands more members at U.S. universities. While 10,000 U of T members get to vote on wages and other labour contract issues, none were asked to vote on whether the union should support the political occupation of King’s College Circle along with anti-israel/prohamas protests and marches.
In the United States, the labour movement’s takeover of the academic world is being led by the United Auto Workers (UAW). As auto industry membership declines, universities are filling the gap and now account for about 25 per cent of the union’s U.S. membership.
One joke making the rounds is that maybe the union should be renamed the United Academic Workers. But there is no joke in the idea. On April 5, about 3,000 non-tenure Harvard law faculty were enlisted into the HAW-UAW — the Harvard Academic Workers UAW — even though only 1,000 actually voted in favour.
That’s the way union democracy often works.
At Mcgill University in Montreal, where a dozen unions already operate, the faculty of arts last month voted 60 per cent to unionize, leaving 40 per cent of the arts department out in the cold. Arts became the third faculty, following law and education, to form a new union at Mcgill over the past two years.
The surge in university unionization has created governance problems, as warned by many observers and administrators over the years. The former president of the University of Saskatchewan, Peter Mackinnon, wrote in 2015 that university governance and collective bargaining were “on a collision course.” Above all, he warned, the formal objective of unionized collective bargaining was to give the unions control over academic matters that should remain with a university’s government body. At York University in Toronto, the Canadian Union of Public Employees — representing contract faculty, graduate assistants and others — issued a statement of solidarity “with students protesting in solidarity with Palestine.” It repeated the demands made by other unions “for disclosure of, and divestment from, any financial investments and institutional relationships that facilitate the continuation of violence, genocide, and apartheid, (that) have been echoed around the world by students, activists, and workers.”
As with CUPE and the Steelworkers, the UAW is an official backer of the anti-israel campus occupations across the United States. A Wall Street Journal editorial on Monday nicely summarized the state of the autoworkers union: “The UAW has a Gaza Policy.” The Journal accused UAW President Shawn Fain of launching an anti-israel campaign within days of the October 7 Hamas attacks by calling on Israel to halt its war of self-defence after Hamas mutilated women and killed 1,200 Israelis.
Then the Journal raised the issue of union democracy and freedom that hangs over the union-backed demonstrations and occupations in both countries. The UAW’S non-auto views on Gaza, said the Journal, may have come as a surprise to Volkswagen workers in Tennessee who just last month chose to join the UAW. The union’s pitch to workers in Tennessee noted the Journal was “conspicuously light on solidarity with Hamas.”
Unions claim to represent their members, but what role do members have in formulating policy positions on international wars, social issues and a range of other topics that are unrelated to collective bargaining? What gives union bosses the right to drag union members into the Gaza debate both in Canada and the United States?
Kevin Macneill, an international labour lawyer with Norton Rose Fulbright in Ottawa, calls the situation a legal “dog’s breakfast” in the United States and perhaps even worse in Canada.
The U.S. situation is governed by the National Labor Relations Act, notes Macneill in a Linkedin post. Unions argue and the courts have granted that the labour code contains protections that give union leaders the right to ask a university to divest from Israel “as if it related to working conditions.” The connection between events in the Middle East and local working conditions is not clear, added Macneill.
In Canada, lack of connection between working conditions and the Middle East is irrelevant. In an interview, Macneill said unions have a blank cheque to take positions on issues that “are not part of their core mandate” of collective bargaining. How many members of the Steelworkers, CUPE and the UAW ask: “Why is my union doing this?”
The answer in Canada is because they can, thanks mainly to a Supreme Court of Canada 1991 decision that gave union management the right to do whatever they want with union dues, regardless of the views of the members who paid the dues.
The case (Lavigne v. Ontario Public Service Employees UNION-OPSEU) was filed by Mervyn Lavigne, a teacher at the Haileybury School of Mines, who objected to the fact that his mandatory union dues were being used to promote the NDP, international disarmament campaigns, and other causes he did not support.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Lavigne case stands today as a blank cheque for union leaders to do as they please with the funds, from supporting radical social policies to standing against Israel and for Palestinian liberation.
Mandatory dues under Canadian law are paid, said the court, to further the union’s objectives, which in turn are automatically deemed to be related to furthering the “collective good” — even though union members might disagree.
As the court put it: “The stated objectives in compelling the payment of union dues, which can be used to assist causes unrelated to collective bargaining are to enable unions to participate in the broader political, economic and social debates in society, and to contribute to democracy in the workplace.
“These objectives are rationally connected to the means chosen to advance them, that is the requirement that all members of a unionized workplace contribute to union coffers without any guarantee as to how their contributions will be used.”
That’s where law stands in Canada’s unionversities.