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The union membership vote on the York University contract proposal has been scheduled for January 19 and 20, from 9 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm each day. These are the dates the university requested, and are four days later than those the union had proposed.
York, the third largest university in Canada, has been shuttered for 68 days by a strike of teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and adjunct faculty. The university is using a provision in Ontario labor law to force CUPE, the union representing the strikers, to poll the membership on their latest proposal.
CUPE members rejected the proposal by a lopsided margin at a mass meeting last week, and are organizing to defeat it in this referendum. The three units of the union local will vote separately on January 19-20, and all three must approve the proposal to end the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The two sides in the York University strike have each released FAQs on the upcoming union referendum. The university’s document is this Supervised Vote FAQ, while the union calls its FAQ Forced Ratification 101.
According to CUPE’s strike blog, they have requested that the vote be held this Thursday and Friday, January 15 and 16, while the university is calling for a vote next Monday and Tuesday, January 19 and 20. The Ministry of Labour is expected to announce the timing of the vote today or tomorrow.
We’ve been getting a lot of traffic over the last few days from folks looking for the latest information on the York strike, and we’re going to do our best to pass that info along as we receive it.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
Update: The York Federation of Students, the university’s student government, has created a strike relief fund for students suffering financial hardship because of the university closure. According to their website, applications for relief funding will be available online tomorrow.
Last August, Mother Jones magazine ran a spread on campus activism that included a timeline of “Student Activism Firsts.”
It was a fluff piece, obviously thrown together pretty quickly and without much interest in historical accuracy, and like many such pieces it treated student activism as something that began in the sixties. I took a few notes with the idea of putting up an annotated version of the timeline, pointing out some of the more obvious mistakes, but I never got around to finishing it.
As I was preparing the Hillary Clinton/Carry Nation story last month, though, I stumbled across something that really jumped out at me.
In the course of researching that post, I Googled temperance campus prank photo, trying to remember what campus the Carry Nation prank had taken place on. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find this.
That’s the index of the Oberlin College Archives, and as I flipped through it looking for temperance materials, I stumbled across a reference to a folder titled “Temperance ‘Sit-in,’ 1882.”
Huh.
Okay, it’s a bit of a made-up stat. But as the Washington Post reports, there are going to be a lot of students at the inauguration next week.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Sidwell Friends is a quaker school, founded in 1883. For more than seventy years Sidwell was whites-only, but in 1956 the school’s trustees announced that they would allow African Americans to enter the following year. The class of 1957 was thus the last to experience Sidwell as an all white school.
William Zantzinger was among the graduates that year.
Zantzinger was the son of a prominent Maryland tobacco farming family. In the years after he graduated from Sidwell, he married and took over the operation of the family plantation. On the evening of February 8, 1963, Zantzinger and his wife went out to dinner and a society ball.
Zantzinger drank quite a bit at dinner, and quite a bit more at the ball. Over the course of the evening, he verbally and physically harassed several black serving staff. At about one-thirty in the morning, annoyed that she hadn’t returned quickly enough with a bourbon he’d ordered, Zantzinger struck African-American barmaid Hattie Carroll in the head with a cane.
Hattie Carroll was fifty-one years old, and the mother of eleven children. She collapsed not long after Zantzinger struck her, and was taken to the hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage the following morning.
Zantzinger was indicted for murder. He said he was so drunk at the time of the assault that he didn’t know what he was doing. His lawyers said it was stress, not physical injury, that caused Hattie Carroll’s death.
After a three-day trial, Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter. He was fined $500, and sentenced to six months in jail, with the sentence to begin after the tobacco harvest. (While he was still in jail, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded a song about his crime.)
On January 3 of this year, William Zantzinger died.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
studentactivism.net 
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