Queen's University classes and tutorials run by members of PSAC Local 901 remain paralyzed as their strike continues for a third week. Some 2,000 research assistants, teaching assistants and postdocs are demanding decent wages, affordable housing, reduced tuition, paid hours to learn course content and a better balance between funding and workload.
The strike began on March 10, after workers were offered a proposal deemed “incredibly disrespectful”. The North Star visited the picket line in Kingston to speak with Jake Morrow, President of Local 901 of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
“We're striking because the University will not give us a deal that reflects the priority and bargaining demands of the members, that addresses the fact that our members live under extreme poverty, inequity, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace,” says Morrow. “The University brought us an offer which we saw as incredibly disrespectful, and we had no choice but to strike.”
“If you work full time at the minimum wage, you make around $36,000 per year. Our members make around $23,000 and often less,” Morrow explains. "We still have to pay $8,000 tuition every year back to the university even though many, many, many of our members do not take classes.”
With about $8,000 gone to tuition and ancillary fees, graduate student workers are left with about $1,300 a month to pay for rent, utilities, food and childcare.
Morrow says that Queen's University graduate student workers are today paid the same amount annually as they were 20 to 30 years ago. The cost of living has, of course, risen sharply over the last 20 to 30 years.
At the beginning of 2025, the City of Kingston declared an emergency because one in three households in the city was experiencing food insecurity, a sharp increase from 2022 when only one in nine households were facing food insecurity.
“A third of our members are here on temporary visas,” explains Morrow, drawing a parallel between the condition of migrant workers and these student-employees in a precarious situation. The unionist sees this as a way of facilitating the exploitation of their labor, as they don't have access to the same rights and legal tools as permanent residents and citizens.
A key offer from the University was a one-time payment of $140,000 over the course of three years to address mental health, housing and tuition costs for PSAC workers. This translates to $23 per worker. The union called this offer “insulting” and rejected it.
At the beginning of 2024, Queen's University announced that it was facing a $48 million deficit. Still, the University's journal reported later in the year that Principal, Patrick Deane, spent $85,635.80 on business class flights between August 2022 and August 2024.
“A budget is a political decision. It's not a statement of facts. The University makes the decision to pay upper-level administrators exorbitant wages. Last year, Deane spent $27,000 on limousines to Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa and back,” says Morrow.
“This is a multi-billion dollar corporation. The chief executive officer is quite wealthy. All of these upper-level administrators are extremely wealthy. This is an organization that invests in genocide, that invests in weapons of war, that invests in environmental degradation and resource extraction. We're poor so they can stay rich.”