Current labour action smells of futility

How we run Ontario’s college system as a place where profs don’t have steady jobs

If you were a student at Algonquin College and had an awesome instructor or two, would it matter if those teachers worked part-time?

Probably not, but this is among the issues that has brought Ontario’s college system to a halt for a month in the heart of the fall semester. It just seems too “back-of-house” an issue to really engender much public sympathy.

For this, we need to ruin the fall term, possibly wreck or at least alter the Christmas plans of 500,000 students, cancel convocation and put diploma fulfilment in doubt?

And we know what will happen. The strike will end one way or the other in the next few days — by forced vote this week or legislation soon after — the central issue won’t be resolved to mutual satisfaction and the students will have to pick up the pieces.

In other words, it smells of futility.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says as many as 70 per cent of faculty members have precarious part-time status, a ratio it would like to see reduced to 50/50, though it isn’t clear what is magical about halfand-half. (The issue is further muddled when the actual hours of instruction by full and parttime staff are factored in.)

Of course the union would like to see more full-time profs. There are almost 400 employees at Algonquin on Ontario’s sunshine list (at $100,000 plus annually), so why not a pile more?

And of the rest? They’re now part of the so-called “gig economy,” where instructors live from semester to semester, without any job security. No wonder the colleges like the idea — it puts them in the driver’s seat to pick up and drop instructors as they see fit and as market demands change. What an education for millennials.

The $80 an hour paid to part-time profs for classroom work may seem generous, but not when you throw in the prep time, the marking, the off-hour student support. I’ve had friends who taught occasionally at Algonquin and there’s neither much money or glory in it.

Inevitably it raises, too, the broader issue of who is really teaching our kids for the thousands of dollars of hard-earned tuition poured into the postsecondary system.

If you’ve ever had a teenager in a 300-student class or stuck taking courses by video — it’s the opposite of Cheers; it’s where nobody knows your name — you might well wonder what you’re getting for $7,000 or $8,000 a year.

We know there’s money in the system. Who hasn’t witnessed the explosion of buildings at Algonquin’s Woodroffe campus, while the school blows $6 million or more on a loopy venture in Saudi Arabia?

Yet, we get letters like this, from the most neutral but knowledgeable source — a student herself, one Heather Maranta:

“Our desks are falling apart, chairs are broken, cameras for filming are faulty or simply do not work, and our professors are overworked and underpaid. Algonquin administration claims that it doesn’t have the money to hire full-time professors or buy new equipment, yet it is renovating an entire building that did not need it. College president Cheryl Jensen makes triple what the average full-time professor makes.”

Her take-away? “Algonquin administration does not care about its students.” Harsh.

In the face of these realities, it does seem a little hollow to hear the union talk about “academic freedom” as a hill to die on. Academic freedom to do what? Teach guerrilla accounting? Colleges, for Pete’s sake, are becoming more and more like universities — and not in a good way.

It has been a frustrating thing to watch unfold. After the strike began on Oct. 16, there was a 17-day dead zone when nothing seemed to happen — no talks whatsoever, as though this were a required part of the standoff, everyone back to their corners. (History tells us the average strike in Ontario lasts 23 days.)

Then came a resumption of bargaining in early November and things seemed to be falling into place.

From an initial offer of a pay increase of 7.75 per cent over four years, the sides were said to be only a quarter of a per cent apart. And the tricky issue of part-time versus full-time was to be sent off to a provincial task force. Then the wheels fell off.

Now “academic control” — or power over course content, evaluation methods and research projects — is the issue over which the sides are wrestling for the steering wheel.

Fairly paid teachers, decent equipment, together providing an education at a rate students can afford. Why not get control of that idea?