McMaster sessional instructors give union strike mandate

The two sides have met more than a dozen times

Hundreds of sessional instructors at McMaster are prepared to go on strike if talks with the university fall apart.

Members of CUPE Local 3906 (Unit 2) have voted 85 per cent in favour of giving their bargaining committee a strike mandate.

Their collective agreement expired at the end of August but negotiations had started four months before then, says local president Chris Fairweather.

“So we’ve actually been at the table now for basically a full year,” said Fairweather, who noted the unit has as many as 600 members at any time.

The two sides have met more than a dozen times, but talks slowed through fall and winter, he said.

Then at a recent session, the university “informed us that they felt we were at an impasse” and requested the province appoint a conciliator. “They’re trying to put pressure on us.”

Conciliation is a “normal part of the collective bargaining process” to help the parties reach an agreement through negotiations, McMaster spokesperson Wade Hemsworth said in an email Saturday. “The university values its sessional faculty and the important work they do in support of teaching and learning and is hopeful that a conciliator will assist the parties in reaching an agreement.”

Job and retirement security are points of concern for sessional instructors, who reapply to teach courses every semester, although limited first-right-of-refusal provisions exist, Fairweather said.

Some are professionals who teach on the side while others are graduate students or post-doctoral researchers gaining experience.

But for some, sessional work has been their main full-time job for decades, Fairweather noted.

“Because of the precarious nature of the situation the universities have created, they have to teach at multiple universities to cobble together a living.”

Kole Kilibarda has been a sessional instructor at McMaster’s school of labour studies for about eight years but also teaches at York University and takes on research contracts to make ends meet.

“In between contacts, I’m sometimes on (employment insurance), as well,” Kilibarda said. “This is the reality for most university teachers in Ontario.”

Kilibarda noted he just finished a four-month contract in April and will resume teaching in July.

He has seniority, but work depends on whether courses are offered from one semester to the next.

The union wants a four-year deal with five per cent wage increases in each of the third and fourth years. The first two years are subject to the province’s Bill 124, which has capped public-sector wage increases at one per cent annually.

Fairweather says the wage requests come during a time of soaring inflation. “Even if they gave us exactly what we’ve asked for, it would still be a real-dollar pay cut.”

Hemsworth said: “Negotiations are most effective and productive when the details of the discussions are kept at the bargaining table.”

Fairweather doesn’t expect the parties to meet with a conciliator until at least June.