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Another update on the York University strike:
- The strike, in its 79th day, is now the third-longest in the history of Canadian higher education, according to the sidebar to this article.
- Students disrupted a meeting of the York faculty senate executive, demanding to know why the partial resumption of classes announced yesterday hadn’t been undertaken earlier or on a larger scale.
- The new labor negotiator deployed by the Ontario government spent yesterday meeting with the two sides separately. Face-to-face negotiations are slated to resume today.
- YorkNotHostage, a student group, will be holding rallies in support of back-to-work legislation next Monday and Wednesday.
January 24 Update: It looks like the strike may be over. The provincial legislature will be called into session on Sunday afternoon to consider back-to-work legislation, and the Ontario premier is hoping to have students and faculty back in the classroom at York by the end of this week.
As we noted yesterday, the CUPE membership has rejected York University’s contract offer, and York has announced that they will not be returning to the bargaining table.
This morning comes word that Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty is sending his top labor mediator to Toronto to “bang some heads” and find an agreement.
McGuinty is reportedly opposed to bringing forward back-to-work legislation in the Ontario legislature, fearing that CUPE would challenge any such law in court, further extending the strike.
2:36 pm Update: Today’s Excalibur article has material from York president Mamdouh Shoukri’s press conference last night that I haven’t seen elsewhere. They quote him as saying that the university’s rejected offer will be “the basis for any future settlement, and that York “will not resume bargaining until we see a significant move” from CUPE. He also said that the university “have not asked for government intervention, nor has it been offered.”
4:34 pm Update: Click here for some background on the strike.
The three units of CUPE Local 3903 are voting at this moment on York University’s most recent contract proposal.
See yesterday’s post for an overview of the strike, now in its 75th day.
Voting will continue until 7 pm tonight, and from 9 am to 7 pm tomorrow, with lunch breaks each day from 1 pm to 3 pm. (Union members can check here for information on where and how to vote.)
In other York strike news, the Canadian Federation of Students, Canada’s national student organization, has come out in support of the CUPE strikers.
The York University strike is coming to a head.
For two and a half months, Canada’s third-largest university has been closed by a strike of CUPE local 3903, representing teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and adjunct faculty. The university has invoked a provision of Ontario labor law to force a one-time vote by the union membership on York’s latest proposal, and that vote will take place this Monday and Tuesday.
If all three units of the local approve the proposal in majority votes, the strike will end immediately and classes may resume as soon as the end of this week. If one or more units reject it, the strike will continue.
The two sides are wrangling over pay increases and job security, but some observers believe that the length of the new contract may be the crucial sticking point. Labor agreements at half a dozen other major Canadian universities expire in 2010, and the two-year deal CUPE is pushing for would allow them to join a multi-campus strike that year, should one develop. (The university is insisting on a three-year contract.)
There has been speculation that the provincial government may attempt to end the strike with back-to-work legislation, but the legislature is in recess until mid-February. The longer the strike goes, the more likely it is that an entire semester will have to be canceled, costing the university millions in lost tuition payments and throwing students’ progress toward degrees into disarray.
Voting begins tomorrow morning, and continues through early evening on Tuesday. Results will likely be announced that night. Check back here for more updates as the story continues to unfold.
January 20 Update: CUPE’s membership rejected the York offer by a decisive margin.
The Associated Student Government at Northwestern University has been busy this winter.
In recent weeks, ASG has gone live with four different online projects serving the student community — a ride share board, a ratings site for off-campus housing, a research assistance site, and a student guide to academic majors.
The new programs are part of a strategy to shift ASG’s emphasis toward student-directed projects, an ASG representative told the Daily Northwestern. The student government’s operations director estimates that the ride share program has already saved students $15,000 since it went live in early December.
Now, none of these projects stand at the cutting edge of radical activism, it’s true. But each is intended to make a positive practical difference in the lives of students at Northwestern, and several — I’m thinking specifically of the housing site and the academic majors guide — are designed to equalize information imbalances that put students at a disadvantage in dealing with other university community members.
Student services and student advocacy are too often treated as alternatives, or even opposites. In my experience, a strong student government is likely to be (or become) an activist student government, and serving students’ needs makes a student government stronger.
studentactivism.net 
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