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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.
Inside Higher Ed has an interesting interview up with Ana Martínez Alemán, co-author of the new book Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture.
Alemán reminds snooping administrators that “Facebook is student space,” lays out a few reasons why faculty should hesitate before friending students, and considers the future of social networking on campus.
Worth a read.
The leadership and bargaining team of CUPE Local 3903, the union representing strikers at Toronto’s York University, have released a statement to their membership urging them to reject the university’s latest contract offer.
“Once the membership rejects not only this offer,” the letter says, “but also the offensive manner in which it is being forced on us, we will be in an exceptionally strong position to come to a speedy resolution of 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.
As the strike at York University moves into its third month, the university has moved to force a vote on their latest offer, against the wishes of the union they have been negotiating with.
Under Ontario law, the university may call a vote on an offer on the table once during negotiations. The Ontario Labor Relations Board will now make arrangements for the vote, which is expected to take place in the next seven to ten days. It has been estimated that it will take 72 hours to reopen the university after any agreement is reached.
Each of the three striking units — Teaching Assistants, contract faculty, and Graduate Assistants — will vote separately on the plan, with a majority “yes” vote required to approve the contract for each unit.
York used the same tactic in a similar strike eight years ago. Then, contract faculty approved the offer but TAs rejected it, negotiating a separate settlement.
Update: Here are the university’s statement on its decision to force a vote, and the union’s response, taken from its strike blog.
Second Update: This post is just one in a growing series of studentactivism.net posts on the York University strike, but somehow it wound up with pride of place in Google. To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the strike, check out our Labor category archives or our main page.
studentactivism.net 
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