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Here’s the latest on the strike at Toronto’s York University, which has largely shuttered the campus since November 6:
The striking union rejected the university’s latest offer last night, and negotiations are set to resume today. Some university community members have called on the Ontario legislature to force the strikers back to work, but the legislature is currently in recess, and will be for another month.
And here are some local resources on the strike:
A student blog that describes itself as “a neutral atmosphere for discussions about the strike.”
The website and facebook group of a group calling for binding arbitration to resolve the dispute — a position the university endorses and the union opposes.
The official websites of York University and the striking union local, and the union’s strike blog.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
For two months, a strike by Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903 has shut down Toronto’s York University.
The strike, by teaching assistants and other employees, has left the university’s 50,000 students unable to return to class, and some of them are beginning to take matters into their own hands:
- On Sunday, a group of several dozen students launched a sit-in outside the university president’s office, demanding that he hold a public forum to answer students’ questions about the strike. (The sit-in is a continuation of a four-day protest that was held before the Christmas break.)
- On Tuesday, the university’s student government presented administrators and union officials with a 4000-signature petition urging both sides to reach an agreement that addresses students’ needs.
- Today, the student government is holding a board meeting to discuss the creation of an emergency relief fund to provide financial assistance to students experiencing hardship as a result of the strike.
After weeks away from the table, university and union officials began negotiating over the weekend. Talks continue, but there has been no breakthrough so far.
January 11 Update: If you arrived at this post directly from a search, click through to (or bookmark) the blog’s main page to see all posts on this subject.
Labor activist Mary Beth Maxwell, mentioned by many this week as a possible Obama Labor Secretary, is a former student activist and past staffer at the United States Student Association.
Maxwell, who is the strong favorite of DC heavyweight David Bonior, was a campus activist as an undergraduate at Marquette University, and she capped her student organizing career by serving as Field Director of USSA. From there she moved on to positions at NARAL, Jobs With Justice, and her current seat as executive director of American Rights at Work, a labor advocacy organization.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.
Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.
Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.
The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.
Many American college campuses are ghost towns in June, July, and August, as administrators well know. As a result, summer tends to be a busy time for the implementation of decisions that would likely meet with student protest if announced during the school year.
So officials at the University of Washington must have been surprised when more than a dozen banner-toting students appeared in the university president’s office last Thursday to protest UW’s just-concluded deal to extend its contract with Nike to provide the school’s athletic equipment and uniforms.
“President Emmert has a clear choice,” UW senior Ashley Edens, a spokeswoman for the protesters, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “He can repudiate his commitment to workers rights and sign a contract with Nike that would guarantee that UW apparel is produced in sweatshop conditions of the next 10 years. Or he can listen to concerned students and their allies, and recommit to a comprehensive set of labor stands that would ensure that UW’s Nike apparel would be produced under fair conditions.”
Students expect the contract to be presented to the UW Board of Regents next month, and we’ll be following this story as it develops.
(Thanks to Rod Palmquist of United Students Against Sweatshops for the heads-up.)
studentactivism.net 
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