Subscribe to our newsletter:
Over 15 000 professors, instructors, counsellors, and librarians across Ontario are voting on a strike mandate starting today and ending on October 17. The OPSEU/SEFPO College Faculty Bargaining Team and the College Employer Council (CEC) have been in negotiations since July, but the union says that prospects for an on-time agreement have been spoiled by the CEC's demand for concessions.
Michelle Arbour, Acting Chair of the bargaining team and faculty at Lambton College, states that: “The reality is that the colleges are rapidly expanding a corporate, for-profit model of education on the backs of the most precarious workers and students.”
Indeed, Ontario's 24 colleges have accumulated a record combined operating surplus of over $1 billion as of the last fiscal year, on top of the provincial government's $1.3 billion investment in post-secondary institutions.
Arbour contends that “Those funds should be readily invested in quality education. Instead, we’re seeing precarity on the rise as partial-load faculty hiring outpaces full-time faculty hiring. Three-quarters of teachers, counsellors, and librarians working in Ontario colleges are on short-term contracts with little to no benefits or job security and no redress for workload concerns.”
It's worth noting that the $1.3 billion investment is barely half of the $2.5 billion recommended by a provincial panel convened to address the financial woes apparently faced by post-secondary institutions.
President of OPSEU/SEFPO JP Hornrick said in a February press release, “Dressing up $1.2 billion in funding shortfalls with language of ‘affordability’ and ‘historic investment’ won’t make the reality any prettier. It’s wholly inadequate. The funding crisis being faced by post-secondary institutions is snow-balling with no end in sight.”
The release adds that the funding is contingent on the institutions proving their “efficiency”, all the while class sizes have increased while evaluation time per student drops.
Hornrick, in the press release announcing the vote, puts it plainly: “As the workers in college classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and offices working directly with students, we’re fighting for a better college system – because we know firsthand that student and faculty futures depend on each other.”