38.11 YUFA Strike, Spring, 1997
38.11.1 Introduction
As my perspective is that all teachers should organize under one large union, for years I have paid attention to the union activities of the teachers at York university.
38.11.2 YUFA Negotiations, Fall, 1996 to Spring, 1997
The "York University Faculty Association" (YUFA) represents 1,100
teaching staff, including professors, lecturers, and teaching assistants, etc. YUFA, like so many other unions, had fallen into the comfortable rut of functioning primarily as a service organization for its members. It relied on representative rather than participatory structures. As a result the members were not active and not organized.
I followed the negotiations, which had been dragging on since February, 1996. YUFA's bargaining team had been negotiating for better wages and benefits without progress. One of the specific issues was equity. But it seemed that the real driving forces were the same issues that I was concerned with in a global sense: nameley teaching institutions re-orientating themselves around the corporate-driven marketplace to the extent that it threatened democratic governance of the university. In the summer of 1996 the York administration unilaterally changed working conditions, contrary to the tradition of respecting the old contractual terms during negotiations.
With these new working conditions taking effect in September, 1996, relations with the administration quickly soured.
On 20 March, 1997, with a 71% strike mandate, the YUFA executive called a start to strike action. As usual, the mainstream media sided with the administration and their version of the issues. The latter conveniently resonated with government rhetoic about greedy teachers.
38.11.3 YUFA Strike, Spring, 1997
In late April, 1997, as the strike wore on, it was voted that pay equity was
the number one priority. YUFA was disappointed that York President Susan Mann, a woman with feminist credentials, seemed not to support the union's effasis on pay equity. In mid-May there was a candlelight vigil at the home of the new York President, Lorna Marsden, also a woman with feminist credentials.
Union actions included disrupting a York senate executive meeting. The union was becoming increasingly militant. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, was building solidarity with students --always difficult during a teachers' strike. As in other strikes, the slogan stressed was that "students learning conditions are teachers' working conditions". Strikers emphasized that as students they faced larger class sizes, reduced services, and over-worked teachers. It was critical that students and teachers together recognized themselves as a community with shared interests.
Significant moral support came from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) but neither of these are unions with large financial resources at their disposal. It proved difficult to build solidarity with the larger union movement in any way beyond informal networks.
My concern or goal during the strike, was to stress the recognition that the YUFA strike did not arrive out of any situation unique to York University, but rather out of problems common to other universities and educational institutions such as the public school system. Since the rise of the New Right (Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroony) government policies had corporatized education and made them to operate within a competitive marketplace framework which tends to enphasize that knowledge which has commercial value.
By 20 May, 1997, the strike was settled.
38.11.4 Postscript
As in most strikes, the members experienced, during these eight weeks, a significant transformation in political consciousness. The members became proactive and organized in a grassroots way through the strike. Whereas before the union was an external body acting on the behalf of the members, the union was transformed into being those people on the picket line. They became committed to each other and to the union.
There were many lessons learned during the progess of this transformation. For one, the false dichotomy between workers and professionals was challenged. Faculty stressed the inseparability of consideration of working conditions and their experiences as teachers. For another, that diversity leads to strength and unity when collective struggle creates opportunities for the identifying and sharing of the needs of specific groups. The recoginition of differences in power and of structured inequities based on gender and race did not create divisions, but rather increased the potential for transformative union solidarity.
Ripley would later write about the importance of the strike in her
"Radicalization and Renewal:
The YUFA Grand Strike of 1997". She stressed the importance of unions to teachers.
The lesson was also learned that an over-worked and politically apathetic union membership can be engaged and brought to political life by the need for constituency self-organizing. But this organizing had to be innovative and fun to be successful in leading to activism, and union-consciousness.
After the strike ended, the challenge was then to channel all of this energy into re-invigorating the union itself.
All of these lessons would serve as an important preparation for our own strike by the five school teachers unions in October, 1997 (see
Chapter 39, section _ in opposition to Bill 160 and the attack by the Harris government on public education.
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