Some classes at York to resume
Teaching assistants refuse new contract, strike drags on
Some classes at York University will resume on Wednesday as a divisive strike passes its one-week mark. The university made the announcement on its website Tuesday night that most courses within the schools of engineering, business, nursing, administrative studies and human resource management will resume Wednesday.
And in a statement released late Tuesday evening, York officials said they will work with each faculty to try to restore all classes by next Monday.
However, vice-president Rhonda Lenton’s statement warned students that many tutorials and labs will continue to be cancelled because teaching assistants remain on strike.
This return to classes followed the ratification of a three-year contract with 1,000 contract faculty members of CUPE 3903.
However, in a move that has divided the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3903 at York, 2,700 teaching, graduate and research assistants remain on strike after rejecting the university’s latest offer.
The teaching assistants voted against York’s offer largely because it failed to stop the university from raising tuition for new international graduate students, something the university started to do two years ago despite a long-standing agreement not to, said CUPE 3903 chair Faiz Ahmed.
Since 2000, the union and York had agreed in writing that any hike in tuition for graduate students in the union would be offset by a matching hike in funding, but York reinterpreted that clause in 2013 and started to hike tuition for new international graduate students, Ahmed said.
Last fall, the average tuition hike for an international graduate student was about $7,000, raising fees from $13,000 to $20,000.
The union has taken York to a labour arbitrator for a ruling on whether these hikes are legal, but in the meantime, many union members want a contract that will stop the new practice.
While York’s latest offer promises a tuition freeze for current graduate students for the next three years, an open letter to strikers from 54 former union officials dismissed that as a “one-time-only, temporary tuition freeze for the next three years.”
The letter warned the new offer “applies only to existing students, and not to incoming ones. In other words, once students begin their studies their tuition remains frozen, but the university can raise tuition for incoming students without increasing their tuition rebate.”
Many members said they want a rollback of the tuition hikes from last year, said Ahmed, who cited the cost to York at about $1.5 million.