UofT’s strike in retrospective: How students and labor pushed for unity

Zach Morgenstern

From February 27 to March 26 of 2015 UofT’s CUPE 3902 Unit 1, a union which represents UofT student-course-instructors (most prominently teaching assistants (TAs)) went on strike. The Union, which bargained with a strike-vote mandate it had held since November, ultimately settled for arbitration. Arbitrator William Kaplan has since ruled in UofT’s favor, allowing for a deal the union had previously voted down, which does not guarantee funding increases for individual graduate students, to be implemented.  Despite this being a far from perfect result for the month long campaign, it has to be said that CUPE 3902’s approach to the strike was commendable, at least when it came to student-TA relations.

"Precarious and poor" on strike at UofT and York U

Sam Hammond

Reprinted from People's Voice Newspaper

At the end of February and beginning the first week of March, approximately 10,000 academic workers went on strike at two of Canada’s largest universities. They are represented by two CUPE Locals, 3902 and 3903, who represent Units of Teaching Assistants, Graduate Assistants and Contract Faculty at the University of Toronto and York University respectively. Nine thousand are still on strike.        

The issues and responses at both universities, York with about 4000 strikers and U of T with about 6000, are so close that they can be detailed in the same general overview.  A good place to start is with the words of Erin Black, Union Chair at U of T, “We are poor and precarious and need improvement in our standard of living”.  This is by no means an overstatement but what analyses will show is probably an understatement of the precarious existence of Teaching Assistants (TAs), Graduate Assistants (GAs) and Contract Faculty (CFs) at most universities.

In the battle to stop EI attack, French-speaking communities rise up

Occupation of a New Brunswick Service Canada office

Special feature report,
Rebel Youth Magazine

As public pressure against the Harper Conservative government's recent Employment Insurance (EI) reforms continues this fall, labour and community activists move forward with one of the more dynamic and united union-led fightbacks Québec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have seen in recent years, this special feature of Rebel Youth magazine reports, which appears in the October 1st issue of People's Voice Newspaper.

While a protest movement against the EI cuts has developed over the past year in response to a "double round" of EI cuts effecting the whole country, they've spread like wild-fire especially across French-speaking Acadien and Québécois cities and towns, and even villages.

This is because the double round of attacks to EI by the Harper Tories after the 2012 federal budget is disproportionately impacting workers in seasonal industries. It is a reality linked with long-standing questions of the economic underdevelopment across Canada and social inequalities faced by the French-speaking national communities.