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Quick updates on a bunch of stories we’ve been following…
- The University of North Carolina has become the twenty-first US campus to dump Russell Athletic in response to labor violations.
- A three-part analysis of the Power Shift 2009 conference: Background, Tactics, and The Future.
- A hundred NYU grad students held a “work-in” at Bobst Library yesterday afternoon.
- The economic crisis is leading students to transfer to cheaper colleges.
- Hillary Clinton has announced a million-dollar scholarship program for Palestinian students.
- President Obama will be providing major new details of his education plan at a speech this morning.
I was figuring today would be a slow news day on the York University strike. I figured wrong.
- The Liberal party is rejecting calls for a tuition refund.
- CUPE is planning a court challenge to the upcoming back-to-work legislation.
- More than a thousand students have signed on to a class-action lawsuit against York over their handling of the strike.
January 28 Update: CUPE won’t be challenging the BTW law after all. Classes at York should resume on Monday.
Not long ago, the York Federation of Students raised the idea of a tuition rebate for students affected by the strike. This morning’s Globe and Mail notes that there’s some precedent for such a move, and that some politicians don’t seem averse to it now.
The same article quotes New Democratic Party leader Howard Hampton as suggesting that his party’s refusal to grant consent to a back-to-work bill may delay the legislation’s passage by only “two or three days.”
Meanwhile, the York administration has released a timetable for when classes would resume if a back-to-work law passes this week. In short, if the law is enacted today, tomorrow, or Wednesday, classes would start up two days later. If it passes on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, classes will resume next Monday.
Finally, there’s the question of what’s likely to happen if CUPE fights a back-to-work law in court. York law professor David Doorey posted some thoughts on that question on his blog last week.
10:44 am Update: Journalist Sarah Millar of the National Post is liveblogging (livetweeting?) the legislature’s question time on her Twitter feed.
1:36 pm Update: Liberal Party sources are now saying that Thursday is the earliest the bill could pass, which would make Monday the earliest York could re-open.
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.
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