NEWS
Monday, March 9, 2015 5
Picket Lines and Fault Lines
Reflections on the Impending Strike at York University
parmbir singh gill › staff writer
Y
or k u n i v e r si t y a n d CUPE 3903 are
moving closer and closer to both a deal and
an impasse. The pursuit of one entails the
advance of its opposite. From this paradox
emerges the absolute uncertainty of the whole situation, a source of great anxiety and, for some, great
exhilaration too.
On Monday, 2 March, members of the union
will vote on the administration’s final offer, by all
accounts the most compelling it has made to date.
Although the exact terms have not been disclosed
at the time of writing, three major points will likely
remain contentious:
• Job security for contract faculty, many of whom
regularly receive offers of employment as little as
two weeks before the start of classes
• Bursary assistance for international graduate students, whose average tuition fees went up by 50%
(approximately $6000) in 2014
• Across-the-board wage increases, which the
administration is seeking to fix at 1% per year,
well below the rate of inflation
If a majority of the TAs, GAs, and contract faculty who
comprise CUPE 3903 reject the administration’s final
offer at their general membership meeting on Monday
evening, the union will proceed with strike action the
following morning. Picket lines will form, classes,
tutorials, and labs will be suspended, and 51,000
York undergrads, including a pinch of Osgoode students, will be forced to reckon with the collective
assertion of that essential yet devalued precondition
of their education - labour.
Or, to put it in the union’s terms, “the university
works because we do.”
So why stop working then? That is the question most undergrads will be wrestling with come
Tuesday. How it gets answered will not only affect the
way students make sense of the strike, but will also
influence the positions they take with regard to it,
thereby shaping the strike’s outcome.
Rather than propose an answer, however, I want to
move upstream from the actual negotiations to focus
on something particularly significant to future practitioners of law. Namely, that education workers at
York possess a legal right to strike.
Indeed, contrary to recent government conduct,
strikes are not prohibited in any province or territory
in Canada, certainly not when they are fully contemplated as part of a months-long collective bargaining
process like the one now coming to a close at York.
According to scholars Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker,
strikes are more than just permissible: they constitute “a social practice that is deeply embedded
in Canadian society.” Long before 1872, the year “it
became clear that striking itself was not illegal” in
Canada, workers frequently withdrew their labour
power in disputes with all sorts of different employers. They continued to do so thereafter in the form of
in economic sanctions as well as expressions of political protest - practices, in other words, of freedom.
Over the course of the early twentieth century,
things began to change. Proliferating workplace legislation deliberately limited the possibility of spontaneous strikes while simultaneously conferring
upon workers a set of more narrowly-defined rights
of work stoppage. The decisive moment came after
World War II, when the expansive “freedom to strike”
was finally supplanted by a more restrictive, legallymediated “right to strike,” consecrated in the socalled Wagner Act model of collective bargaining.
Notwithstanding
t he weight of
these shifts, the
h i stor y t race d
by Fudge a nd
Tucker attests to
the endurance of the practice of work refusal itself.
Striking, in one form or another, was the constant
in an otherwise variable and tumultuous period of
social, economic, and political transformations.
Such persistence \