Striking CUPE members are voting today on whether to accept a 10% salary increase or continue to damage the reputation of a university that has already seen admission applications fall by 15%. Teaching assistants and contract faculty at York University have been on strike since weeks before Barak Obama won the presidency! Not over salary and working conditions, but because CUPE wants a two-year contract rather than a three-year agreement, an agreement which carries the potential to take the all the province’s universities on strike in 2010 and put a gun to the head of administrators and taxpayers.
There is some slim hope that contract faculty who need the income and may have some concern for the university’s reputation will prevail over the graduate student teaching assistants, but it seems a remote prospect, My observation is that the strike is being led by graduate students still playing at student politics as if this is some kind of classroom exercise isolated from any realities such as the university’s and province’s financial situation. Graduate students getting a free post secondary education in exchange for leading a seminar or two a week and reading a few undergraduate student papers. That they should be paid at all is astounding That they are holding thousands of undergraduates to ransom borders on criminal. The undergraduates are at peril for losing a year set aside for studies, not to mention thousands of dollars in rent/residence and university fees (even if they do get some sort of tuition refund) or losing the opportunity to work for the summer to earn next year’s fees. Graduate students have no such concern since their job is nothing more than being a student and the longer they can drag it out, the happier most are.
It was good to see several hundred permanent faculty advise the contract staff and grad students to “see the light” and end this thing. If, when the results are announced tonight, the vote is to continue the strike, I wish the university would announce cancellation of the 2008/09 academic year, give undergraduates their money back, give CUPE the summer to think things over and start planning for September. I know that won’t happen. And hope, for the sake of the undergraduates it does not come to that.
