University at Union: The conclusion, the sequel

As we all know, summer labour disputes at Queen’s have long been resolved.

QUFA Reaches Tentative Agreement
CUPE Reaches Tentative Agreement

QUFA Ratification Vote
CUPE Ratification Vote

Labour struggles continue in Kingston at St. Lawrence College with support staff (OPSEU Local 418) striking for reasons not dissimilar to those raised by CUPE and QUFA: they seek job security, fair wages, equitable treatment, improved communications with management and the list goes on.

I was working in the Film House when I heard the results of the CUPE ratification vote. I’d been spending my days and nights on campus for much of August, tolling away on a variety of projects. Both my physical proximity to ‘Queen’s’ (full stop) and my personal investment in the labour actions made August a non-stop stress storm. I enjoy predictability. I treasure the routine of returning to productive spaces and seeing friendly faces. When I heard the CUPE results, and when I felt it was fairly certain QUFA would likewise ratify, I felt both a sense of relief and a curious feeling of disquiet.

For those of you who have never been inside the big red brick house at 160 Stuart Street, you are missing out. Like an extended dream from my undergraduate years, August was me curling up on the Film and Media department’s bright orange 1970s lounge chairs, peering out the ivy coated windows to check on the rain and slogging through my other contracts while waiting for my film footage to digitize, transfer, transform and burn. Absent were the murmurings of other 3rd and 4th year film students, walking around like zombies in the wee hours of the night, alternately high-fiving and consoling each other as they pecked through their post-production work.

I don’t believe there exists another film program in Canada where students are given keys to a kooky old house and told they can edit into the night. I wondered, how could these relationships, these deeply personal and subtle relationships between film students and film professors, between students and the discipline of film and between students and the spaces where they do their work transpire without the incredible and transparent intimacy of working collectively within one house, under one roof? I doubt they could, or at least, not in the same way.

I’m worried about the future of Queen’s and am already feeling nostalgic for my university undergraduate experience that ended just five years ago. I see the corporatization of the University as a terrible trespass against the more human elements of post-secondary education, many of which are unquantifiable. The spaces in which we can perpetuate independent thought and side-step fiscally motivated research and ‘development’ are decreasing, eroding. I’m not sure what will happen to the Film House when the new Performing Arts Centre is built and the Film and Media Department relocates off-campus. This is less a bleak, ‘Woe is the future’ sentiment and more a question: Where are we going? and, What’s left behind?

I’d like to thank everyone who worked tirelessly during the summer months to bring light to the labour struggles at Queen’s, and to the CUPE and QUFA members who had already worked and fought for months and months prior to keep Queen’s, among many other things, a decent place to work. Thank you for your inspiration, your concern, your heroic patience and your enthusiasm. Let’s all stay connected.

Queen’s TA’s and TF’s: Come to your union meeting at 5:30 tonight! (Wednesday)

Wednesday 10 August 2011
5:30pm
Robert Sutherland Room, JDUC

More information about PSAC Locale:  901’s Special General Meeting Notice: Labour Action at Queen’s can be found here.

QUFA Rally for QUFA Members

You Are Invited to a QUFA Information Rally!

[Originally posted on the QUFA Job Action Readiness Blog here]

A sent to QUFA Members via qufacomm on Tuesday 9 August 2011

Dear QUFA Member:

You are invited to a

QUFA INFORMATION RALLY

11.30 a.m. – 1.00 p.m.
This Thursday (11 August 2011)

Outside JDUC (corner of University and Union)

Free pizza!
Free drinks!
Free full and accurate info!

Show your support for our union!

Come all, stand strong, and come to proclaim that
Education is Our Bottom Line!

Sincerely,
Job Action Committee, QUFA

SGPS’s Letter to Principal Woolf

[Written by Daniel Moore, Graduate Student Senator and approved at the SGPS Council meeting Tuesday August 9th, 2011]

To: Principal Woolf

cc: Allan Manson, Paul Young, Dan Bradshaw, William Young

We write to express disappointment with the approach that the University seems to have taken at the bargaining table with QUFA. Since these conversations take place behind closed doors, we attempt to listen to both sides critically and with open-mindedness; however, your recently publicized letter to Mr. William Young has shaken our confidence in the goals of your administration regarding these negotiations, and others. Furthermore, we understand that QUFA and the University will arrive at a legal lockout or strike position by 15 August 2011, and so we write you in some urgency.

Very simply, we ask that you revise your stance, as well as the priorities of the University negotiating team, on the following points:

• Labour disruption is “a necessary step” to the University’s success at the bargaining table

In your letter dated 25 June 2011, you request that members of the Board of Trustees view any labour disruptions on campus in the coming months as “a necessary step in order to achieve success in salary restraint and pension reform” (8). The notion that the University would entertain compelling job action on the part of QUFA or push towards a legal lockout situation while negotiations were still underway is disheartening, to say the least. Our members rely on both parties to negotiate keenly and sincerely so that their time at Queen’s is productive. Yet these concerns do not appear to play a part in the University’s outlook on negotiation. Instead of drawing attention to the profound impact that interruption to faculty labour will have on students—and on graduate-student research during the summer, especially—you only warn that such interruptions will be “potentially reputational-damaging” (8). We certainly agree, but we also would expect that you will represent the scope of the issue to the Board, and show as much concern for current students as you appear to show future ones.

• Negotiating faculty salaries and pensions is an opportunity to “reduce the deficit at all costs within a short time frame”

The purely cost-efficiency lens through which your administration seems to approach QUFA negotiations strikes our Council as inconsistent with the principles of quality education—and supervision—that we expect at Queen’s. Your letter to Mr. Young states:

Having established a professional labour relations team that has been assiduously strategizing and negotiating with the unions gives us our best chance of reaching agreements that will help to reduce our financial difficulties. I should note one warning here. The imperative to reduce the deficit at all costs within a short time frame is a major obstacle to completion of the HR rebuild, just as it is inhibiting the completion of QUASR. (3)

The financial priorities disclosed here suggest the opposite of what students, and the Board, should expect. While recommending that the University try to recover its losses over the last few years by focusing on faculty salaries and pensions, your letter goes on to defend expenses for administrative services—possibly the very services that created the current deficit. Such a response to the University’s financial difficulties suggests that faculty compensation is not the primary issue; it seems to involve matters about allocation, about which university services are needed and which are dispensible. Our supervisors are not dispensible, so we sincerely ask that you recalibrate your administration’s priorities at the table.

It is our understanding that the next meeting between the University and the QUFA negotating teams with the appointed mediator will take place on 11 August 2011. This certainly leaves you little time to revise your stance on the points above, but we prevail upon you to do so to your, and your team’s best.

We look forward to hearing about a mutually successful resolution to these talks.

Sincerely,

SGPS Council

 

Save the University: Wendy Brown

This YouTube lecture by Wendy Brown references an American context and is two years dated, but much of what she so eloquently and passionately says is relevant to the current climate and tipping point (if you will…and I think you will) in terms of the corporatization of the University that we are experiencing here at Queen’s.

This video was passed around at length on FB last month, but if you haven’t seen it yet, please give it a go.

Caption Action: Spend more, Educate Less

Thoughts?

Hint: The gentleman in the suit is George Avraam, the newest addition to the Queen’s Administration Legal Team. The following is a line from his bio: “Acted as lead litigation counsel for Wal-Mart Canada Corp. in a successful defence of a certification application and an unfair labour practice before the Ontario Labour Relations Board in UFCW Canada v. Wal-Mart Canada Corp., 2011 CanLII 44470 (ON LRB).”

George just LOVES unions!

Caption Action: Empty Classroom

Let’s hear it, folks.

On why Tunnel, er, Cookie Funds are Serious Business

For those of you who have already joined the Facebook group, Forum for Queen’s students regarding labour disruptions, you have likely already read Lauren McNicol’s astute parody of the bizarre justification of the Goodes Tunnel project based on the Administration’s cemented ‘allocation of funds’.

As Lauren demonstrates with dessert logic, the problem is not that the funds cannot be relocated – it’s that this project was ever deemed a priority over other initiatives (such as finishing the last overpriced and flawed initiative – the ARC).

______

“I built a giant raft made from cookies, taken exclusively from my Desserts budget which I’ll have you know is entirely separate from my other Foods budgets. So what if I cut back on my Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner budgets, and my Cookie budget expanded in recent years? Cookies are more pleasing to my palate (even if they are devoid of nutrition and give me a stomach ache, but shhhh don’t tell).

Everyone loves Cookies. They photograph well, and they’re way more fun to talk about with Cookie-lovers who like donating money for Cookies to be named after them. I know I should really spend money on something more fulfilling and healthy in the long run, but I just can’t help myself!

And don’t you dare criticize me on my Cookie spending, you Lunch Lovers and Dinner Delighters!!! You’re all just a bunch of Cookie-haters. They’re separate budgets people! And I’m just balancing them, cuz that’s my job as Head Chef. I assure you, the Cookie raft was taken fairly from a budget that was destined only for cookie-addiction. *Ahem*… well yes, I did at one time ask our largest collection of Food-eaters to donate their spare Lunch change towards Cookie-related projects. *Ermm* Yes… I did ask them to make Lunch and Dinner with fewer ingredients but with more mouths to feed. Doing More with Less I say! Get creative! That’s the best way to Meal-Plan!

We don’t at all need to entertain a discussion as to whether I needed to build a Cookie-raft in the first place, nor will I field any questions premised on the notion that more money should have been committed to the Breakfast budget. Ha! Breakfast, the so-called “Most Important Meal of the Day”. I’ll just chug an Ensure and call it a da…y. day. Wow… the room’s spinning, I’m starving and I can’t hear myself think because everyone’s stomachs are growling so much… I mean… Yum! Cookies!”

CUPE Ratification Update

From the CUPE web site.

Happy Hour for Profs and Grad Students Concerned about Labour Issues

(Posted and Created as an open event by Iain Reeve in FB)

Where: The Grad Club, corner of Barrie and Union

When: Monday August 8th, 4pm to 7pm

What: See title

Why: With all the labour strife going on at Queen’s University, it’s a shame that the Administration’s vague press releases have stifled widespread conversations about ongoing labour negotiations and education at Queen’s. It’s about time we broke the silence!

Let’s start by coming together at the Grad Club this Monday for an informal chat with grad students and professors. I know a lot of you have serious questions and concerns… so why not get it all out in the open, literally, at the open air patio of the Grad Club? Those who wish can chat while enjoying a cold pint of the Grad Club’s finest beers and non-alcoholic bevvies? It’s in all our best interests to work towards an open conversation about how the ongoing labour issues affect us all as students, educators and/or researchers. I’ve heard informally from plenty of profs and students who are willing and eager to chat. Keep spreading the word! Please invite any grads and profs you know, the more, the merrier!

Facebook Link: Here