Analysis and Opinion
For what it’s worth, here is “one man’s opinion” about how to resolve the contract dispute between the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) and the College Employer Council (“the Council”), in order to avert the faculty strike that may suspend classes at Ontario’s 24 colleges on Monday (October 16th).
There’s a lot of nebulous, airy-fairy, vague and highly political stuff on the table right now.
And, if left alone, much of that might sort itself out within six months or so through other channels.
Chief among those issues is the predicament of part-time instructors – their compensation, their job-security (or lack thereof), their benefits (or lack thereof), their conditions-of-employment, and their capacity for advancement into full-time positions.
Two “in-the-works” initiatives have the capability of addressing the lion’s share of those concerns:
• The implementation of the Liberal government’s proposed Bill 148, improving the wages and conditions-of-employment of all part-time workers in the province; and
• OPSEU’s ongoing endeavour to unionize part-time college workers (both faculty and support staff). When/if that unionization effort is completed, the workers in question would probably be covered by an entirely separate OPSEU bargaining unit (or two of them, one for part-time faculty and the other for part-time support staffers). As such, they’ll presumably have to negotiate their own contracts anyway …
… So, my first suggestion is to entirely remove the contentious “What should we do about part-timers?” issue from the current talks, until their circumstances are clarified by the developments in the bullet-points above.
Second, I entirely agree with the Council: OPSEU’s demand that Senates should be installed at every college as the overseers of all academic issues is clearly not a condition-of-employment that can or should be the subject of labour negotiations. It is clearly a major political policy proposal. As such, it should be taken off the table of these contract talks; and, instead, the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development should step in to convene a task force to study the idea.
OPSEU’s “academic freedom” bone-of-contention? A lot of that is airy-fairy, philosophical gobblety-gook. Hell, insert some similarly airy-fairy, vague language into the contract … Many complaints in this realm would still, on the practical level, have to be handled on a case-by-case level through the existing grievance system, so I don’t think it’s a big deal.
And, finally, the most pragmatic part of my solution, harkening back to the concerns about the status of part-timers …
… We’ll finally get a firm handle on that situation sometime next year, when Bill 148 is implemented and the new-member-unionization campaign is concluded …
… So, in the mean-time, OPSEU and the Council should scrap the idea of a multi-year contract covering the full-timers. Instead, sit down this weekend and work on a bare-bones, one-year-long contract – pretty much just maintaining the status quo.
It’s not an attractive solution, but it’s a reasonable one, until all of the issues pertaining to part-timers are clarified and resolved by Bill 148 and the unionization effort.
You’re welcome.
