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OPSEU Local 558 Professors, Librarians and Counsellors at Centennial College |
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I walk the line, a BLOG from the Centennial
picket lines
Of course, I do not have access to the evidence used by Traffic Service Investigators. It is unclear from their short announcement whether they did not have enough clear evidence to lay a charge, or if in fact they had sufficient evidence to determine that the driver was not guilty of anything chargeable. They could easily have delayed this announcement until after the strike ended, thus perhaps encouraging all drivers to be more careful and observant around picket lines. In fairness, however, I should note that the Metro police I have encountered around our picket lines have been without exception friendly, courteous, and concerned about our safety. * * * With the call by OPSEU’s bargaining team for binding arbitration, and the growing pressure from students and citizens for the strike to end, it seems obvious that we will be back to work soon, one way or another. This is no bad thing – most of us love our jobs, and want to help our students finish their year successfully. Chatting with colleagues at the start of the strike, I predicted two weeks before the government intervened to end it, so we are just past that deadline now. But will this mean business as usual? Not quite. Strikes, I’ve found in the past, polarize people. Not everyone agrees with a strike, or votes to undertake one, but being in a union means supporting the will of the majority. Once the strike process begins, you develop a sense of community with your fellow strikers as you attempt to prevail against the weather, careless drivers, boredom, fatigue, and the tactics of the opposition. Each refusal to compromise on the part of the other side makes you identify more with your own. The more that the opposition – in this case ACAATO, composed of the college presidents and their appointed board of governors – adopts an intransigent and contemptuous attitude during negotiations, the more their employees will feel disinclined to cooperate with future new initiatives, volunteer their time for “visioning” or other exercises, or buy into new marketing or image ventures. You reap what you sow, you know? Jesse Greener of the Canadian Federation of Students, who made an excellent speech at the March 16 demonstration outside Chris Bentley’s office, recently went on the record again to note that the atmosphere of the negotiations was not going to encourage optimal relations between faculty and management once classes resume. How right he is. I don’t think any of us would short-change our students, who have already suffered enough over the past few weeks. But you can’t hard-nose negotiations, incurring charges over bad-faith bargaining, and then expect everyone to make nice afterwards as if it never happened. Even middle-aged professors have long memories about this kind of stuff. If managers note some lack of enthusiasm from faculty members over their future proposals, it would help to re-read some of the announcements, advertisements and position statements from ACAATO, Rick Miner and others during this labour disruption. That will help recall why we’re not all jumping up and down, tails wagging, begging for one more throw of the stick. Again, in fairness, I will add that not all
of the presidents jumped on the bash-wagon to make rash or dismissive comments
recently – but some of them certainly have. March 21 Here, from a combination of often-fragmentary news reports, and eyewitness reports I gathered from picketers, is an account of what may have happened to leave Prof. Stammers on the road unconscious and bleeding from the head: A young man who was not in fact headed to Centennial, but rather to the Scarborough Centre for Alternative Studies, a kind of last-chance high-school located on the campus, stopped his car at the picket line. He soon got out of it, yelling and swearing repeatedly, in particular at Prof. Stammers, for impeding his progress. He then got back in his car, and started to drive forward. Prof. Stammers – how, exactly, no one seems sure -- landed on the hood of the vehicle. The driver kept going, and Prof. Stammers fell off, striking his head on the pavement. The driver did not stop after this. Picketers rushed to aid Prof. Stammers, covering him with a coat and wrapping his head wounds with a scarf, while they urged the seemingly-confused Centennial security guards to call 911. Later, when interviewed by a TV crew, the driver showed no compassion for the victim of this accident, instead complaining of the inconvenience to him, and that Prof. Stammers had “jumped right onto the hood of my ****ing car.” Police are still investigating the incident, and have been examining Centennial security videos of the incident. No charges have yet been laid. Prof. Stammers was admitted to Sunnybrook Hospital in critical condition. This next morning he showed some signs of recovery, and his condition was upgraded to “serious.” Some of the picketers were too traumatized by these events to return to the picket line the next morning.
GREED Let’s assume that most current faculty are making annual gross salaries of somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000. If we round a year off by a couple of weeks, that means their weekly gross is between $1,000 and $1,300. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but when one is on strike, one no longer receives a salary. Therefore, college faculty are losing 2% of their annual salary for every week they are on strike. By March 22, that will be 4% (two weeks). But what, I hear a plaintive voice asking, about the strike pay from those huge union coffers? Here, at Centennial (because locals elected to save different amounts, increasing dues to “top up” strike pay), we’re getting $300 a week total. That means Prof. Poor, who normally makes $1,000 a week, is now losing $700 a week, and Prof. Rich, near the top of the grid, is losing $1,000 a week. So our revised percentages of salary loss per week are 1.4% a week for Prof. Poor, 1.6% for Prof. Rich. When talks broke off over workload and class size, there was a 1% difference between the college’s salary offer of about 3% increase a year over three years, and the union’s demand for 4%. So, to quantify the issue of greed, let’s look at how much money each faculty member loses by not meekly accepting the last offer. If we’d taken that offer, we’d obviously be ahead already by two weeks of salary. If the settlement we’re all hoping for is negotiated by March 25, AND management’s offer goes up to a 4% annual increase a year, it will take more than a year just to replace the money we’ve already lost in salaries-less-strike-pay (4.2 % for Poor, 4.8% for Rich).. Things will improve during Year Two of the new collective agreement, as we begin to move ahead, having caught up on the strike “losses.” And, of course, three years of increases (be they 3 or 4% or somewhere in between) will give us a higher starting place for next time’s negotiations. So, the moral for this
brief exercise in calculation is simple: unless you’ve got hopes of pulling in a
substantial increase of 5% or more a year (much like college managers have been
awarding themselves for the past few years), going on strike is a money-losing
proposition in the short term. It won’t satisfy your greed. But it’s not
necessarily foolish in the long term. Meanwhile the union locals are working quite hard, in fact running instant businesses with payrolls of several hundred workers, many inquiries, requests for help and complaints to field from members, communications to organize, and so on. It doesn’t sound like laziness to me, and when it comes to sloth, I am a bit of an expert. I’m just not practicing it right now. WILL They do, of course have advantages like the use of their offices and PR people, their own organization (ACAATO) to counter OPSEU, and not least the comfort of their over- $200,000 a year salaries,. They also enjoy unquestioning acceptance by some of the media and public of even their loonier proposals, like taking up teaching and grading themselves. Let’s see what happens in Week 3 of this struggle.
During the pre-march events, I was reminded by one speaker of a fact that I had previously paid scant attention to: David Lindsay was appointed the President of ACAATO last summer, and presumably became the chief architect of the colleges’ “strategy” before and during this strike. Prominent on his resume is the role of Principal Secretary to Mike Harris during two years of the Common Sense Reich, I mean, rule. I’m sure Mr. Lindsay is an honourable man – so are they all, all honourable men – but you have to wonder what Rick Miner and the other college presidents were thinking. Had they really forgotten all the funding cuts, the disdain with which Harris and his minions treated all levels of education and unions, the “Let’s create a crisis, so we can solve it” approach to schools? Or, rather, did they feel the time had come to appoint a hit-man to take out those mouthy faculty folks once and for all? If so, who would be better qualified than one of Harris’s backroom boys from the Bad Old Days? I don’t know, and I’ll say no more about Mr. Lindsay. But lately, I’ve had the eerie sensation of being trapped in a grade-B zombie movie. You know the ones where the surviving heroes and heroines think they’ve finally buried the monsters once and for all, and suddenly, fingers clawing through the earth, the Undead totter forth once more, wreaking destruction? First it was the election of Harper, who although slicker than Harris, shares much of his ideology. Then it was the election as MPs, and elevation to Cabinet, of two Harris loyalists, Bradley and Clement, the former of whom (ironically enough) is going to “represent” Toronto. Its citizens, unlike our college presidents, apparently did remember what life was like with Reform-a-tories in power, voting nary a one of them into Parliament. What could be behind these disturbing developments? Were nefarious forces at work in the dark? I decided to do some investigation, and called one of my underworld friends, Light-finger Vince. Vince is not only a gifted observer of society, but an even better lifter of its wallets and other possessions. Within hours, Vince struck gold. He saw, and lifted the Blackberry of, a sinister character, spotted on the fringes of both ACAATO meetings and college picket lines. We’ve been able to identify him only as “Operative Z.” Z appears to be a consultant whose employers, we believe, are not OPSEU. Far be it from me to interpret anything for my readers, so I’ll simply record one day of the disturbing entries we found on Z’s calendar and note pad files: MONDAY
And that’s just from one day. Would I make this kind of stuff up?
But, this is also, along with early September, one of the busiest times for college teachers when not on strike. There are armloads of assignments to grade, final exams to create, students suddenly reappearing from suspended animation to ask how they can catch up. So here are ten suggestions for what to do with your excess energy and time – if you have any. ONE: answer all the big questions you’ve been putting off for so long. What is the meaning of life? Who will remember you in 100 years? Is Paris Hilton really as vacant a hotel as she appears, or is she just building up the suspense until she drops a new Unified Field Theory on us? TWO: put some time into your own succession planning. When will you retire? How will you afford to? Have you made any plans more practical than buying the odd lottery ticket, praying frequently, and running those classified ads that start: “Eccentric Dotcom or other millionaire needed to cherish and support slightly crochety used college teacher. Apply by writing a 5,000 word essay, with references.” THREE: Investigate exciting new learning resources like the Anagram Generator on the Web, which will allow you to convert “Centennial College” into “A connect eel gel nil” “Lancelet Ing, glee no” and “Acne cell, Eng lie not.” FOUR: Do some spring cleaning and then have a dust-bunny race. You know you want to. Line up a good assortment of dust bunnies, turn on a fan, and see which goes the furthest. Then calculate the optimum dusty bunny mass-to-blowable-area ratio, allowing for atmospheric variables. FIVE: Especially for librarians. If the books in your home are organized by subject or genre, re-sequence them by author’s last name. If they’re organized by author’s last name… SIX: Exhume your half-finished novel, poetry manuscript, or telling expose of competition and corruption in the college system (there I go again!). Read, keep the good parts, finish it, and send it out to publishers for rejection. SEVEN: Keep your teaching muscles in shape by explaining to younger people what a rotary-dial telephone is, who Greta Garbo was, or why “Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Well, you’d better let him out!” is funny. EIGHT: Land an assignment from the National Enquirer to investigate the theory that Anthony Perkins, the star of Psycho, never actually died, but was kidnapped by aliens, brainwashed, and then passed off to Ontario voters as the new Liberal leader. I mean, Dalton McGuinty? Does that sound like a pseudonym or what? NINE: Get a personal trainer and start an enhanced work-out routine, so you can stand around college entrances ripping telephone books and Collective Agreements in half, and getting lots of chili peppers beside your name in Ratemyprofessors.com. AND THE TOP TENTH THING TO DO WHILE ON STRIKE: design a new college administration and funding model that works well, saves money, reduces class sizes, and then write it in easy-to-understand words, take it to the College of Regents and announce, “OK, you can go home. I’ve fixed everything.”
One must admit that many faculty members would find this novel activity on the part of managers a diverting spectacle, particularly with those management who are not former teachers, but rather drafted from the upper ranks of business, non-profit organizations or the Albanian National Hockey Society. Imagine the possibilities of Vice-presidents expounding on the horrors of the run-on sentence, Deans illustrating the best way to comfort a cantankerous patient, Presidents illustrating how body filler can smooth out the dents in a client’s Hyundai! But I am not among those so easily entertained. No, as your loyal (and overpaid) columnist, er, blogger, I must point out the obvious: not only does this Presidential Emperor lack in the clothing domain, but the skill sets involved in management and teaching are actually different. I know I shouldn’t be giving this away, and probably I risk being drummed out of the Faculty Union just like those few magicians tempted to reveal to the unwashed the prosaic mechanics behind the Lady-Sawed-In-Half or the Elephant Vanished in Yankee Stadium. But, darn it all to heck, knowing stuff, managing stuff and teaching stuff are three different bags of cobras. I can’t say much about managing stuff, as I’m still arm-wrestling my cheque book into submission, let alone balance, and I probably couldn’t manage my way out of a wet paper portable classroom. But I do know a few things about knowing stuff and teaching stuff. Many of the public (and perhaps more than one College President) appear to believe, not having tried it, that teaching is pretty easy, and therefore teachers are spoiled Bratwursts. You show up, mumble a few maxims, scrawl A or B on the submitted assignments, and Bob’s your Rae. Then, take the rest of the day off, and do not pass Go (up Bloom’s Hierarchy). Actually, it’s a little more complicated. To start with, your classroom includes a considerable variety of cultures, educational attainments, learning styles, literacy levels, and degrees of attention and motivation. Then, you have a more or less fixed curriculum to deliver to these variable learners in a fixed time, often with too many bodies and minds crammed into a small space where the basic equipment (screens, overheads, ventilation) malfunctions due to under funding. Worse yet, you have to design and apply fair, objective, meaningful ways to assess what they’ve learned, and then fine-tune the results into a grading system. But don’t get distracted by the students who’ve had three grandmothers die in the last week, suffered a psycho-social-astral meltdown, or, like, kind of weren’t there for the last nine weeks and were wondering if they missed anything important? It takes, shall we say, a certain amount of patience, commitment, tolerance, and focus – dare we add psychic energy? -- to get your own energy up, shepherd these needy learning flocks over the necessary hurdles, and complete the grading and advising in time to get the marks in. I don’t doubt that management is challenging and presents its own difficulties. But I can be sure that the challenges of teaching and grading are pretty different, even if the management-teaching-Apprentices at Algonquin know the actual material they have to convey. It seems to me that the essential reason we’re on strike is not to overthrow the established order, or extract a vast pay increase, but to encourage the community – including our provincial government – to help the college system find an equilibrium which allows classes of reasonable sizes, teaching workloads of reasonable size, a healthy balance between full-time and contract faculty, hey, even tuition fees of reasonable levels, so we can get on with the job we actually like more than walking around holding picket signs in the post-Ides of March. That would be helping students develop their skills, knowledge and selves so they’re ready to contribute to the working (and even, on occasion, striking) world.
While reading this, keep in mind that the creative picketer can adapt the most unlikely items to the strike “runway.” After all, this morning a free newspaper carried a photo from Glamour magazine’s “Stiletto Run” race, showing women sprinting 150 metres in Amsterdam while wearing stilettos at least 7 cm. high. If they can race in spike heels, what can’t you picket in? Remember that the black and white on our pickets signs will go with almost any colour, even in you’re a Spring-Summer with a touch of jaundice. And with those massive $95,000 salaries we’re all taking home (What? You’re not either?), there’s no reason not to Armani-ize our strike ensembles. Today, I took part in an early picket line outside our corporate offices, cunningly hidden in the corner of a cosmetics company. Is this truth, or make-up? The morning offered a typically Southern Ontario menu of climate choices: wind gusts, temperatures that seemed warm until the wind blew, on-and-off rain, storm clouds that looked like the muscles on my abdomen. I mean, of course, the soft, slightly saggy clouds, not the evenly-rippled ones. Anyway, our highly-trained crew of fashion commentators noted a pleasing variety of style choices on the OPSEU line. At one end of the fashion spectrum were those who went for the academic-street-person look, running shoes on the bottom, a tuque on top, with a transparent plastic raincoat (or a garbage bag cleverly ripped to look like one) allowing the picket sign to be worn inside. This kept it dry and reduced the tendency to shred in the rain, which quickly reduced other non-covered signs to slogans like: O PU IKE Further up the Mr. Blackstone index for wise fashion choices were those who opted for the all-Canadian-outdoors-person-accidentally-caught-in-a-strike image. A friend of mine who is an avid summer canoeist sported a practical matched waterproof and hooded set in a dashing solid colour. Very eye-catching, and actually dry. I complimented another friend on her attractive knitted brown hat with an intricate pattern, and had another learning moment on the line when she told me that it was a traditional design from a West Coast native tribe who knew a lot about rain. Those carrying umbrellas, who resembled marching toadstools in a Disney production number from a distance, were the most entertaining to watch, as the unpredictable gusts raised, lowered and then turned inside out their dark domes. But the hands-down winner of our impromptu haute-couture show was a tall, blonde English professor. Starting with a strong statement in a faux-leopard-skin pants, she continued the theme with a tawny coat, accented by a complementary scarf in yellow and brown, and even the right hat. This woman is wasted teaching classes – she should be showing Jeannie Becker how to dress. The only person who got more attention was the one carrying the giant Timbits box. OK, I know you want the dirt on what I was wearing. Drawing on my two main couturier houses (Honest Ed’s and The Giant Tiger), I went with practical carpenter’s jeans, antique running shoes, and a black zip-up sweater… but to avoid looking too dowdy, I topped it off with a yellow hooded windbreaker highlighted with Jackson Pollockesque black paint drips from a reno project. Of course, if the strike wears on, we may want to look at a broader range of options. Should drivers be getting aggressive with your picket lines, there are some very racy motorcycle outfits that are not only all-leather, but include Kevlar inserts in the elbows, shoulders and knees. The Royal Ontario Museum is doing an open house on medieval armour, too, and if you’re quick on your feet you might be able to make off with one of those hard-core slit-visored helmets and a chain-mail vest or two. For safety reasons, especially when picketing beyond normal daytime hours, fluorescent pinks, oranges and yellows are advisable. I do suggest, however, that you resist the urge to wear non-OPSEU-approved slogans like “Hit me! I need to use up my sick days!” And that’s today’s blog from the line. Can it get any worse? Tune in again and see.
OK, back to the real world of the strike. This is an interesting one, because many of the issues we’re most concerned about don’t fit neatly onto a picket sign or a five-second news sound bite. They’re complex, rooted in history and institutional culture. Some years ago, I taught at another GTA college. One of the senior executives, no doubt tired of criticism from faculty members, said something I’m sure he regretted: “Tell me how you’d reorganize the college to work better.” One professor made a “modest proposal” that I think was brilliant in its clarity. It asks the kind of questions we want in our classrooms, that force us to think about the real purposes and possibilities of something. If I may paraphrase my former colleague, he said approximately: “Do we really need all these administrators, especially the senior officers, deans, vice-presidents who are earning over $100,000 a year? Each of these senior administrator accounts for about two new faculty members’ salaries, who usually start well down the grid, at under $50,000. Our business is teaching. All we really need to support this is a president to give the college a public face and remind the province about us, a registrar to keep track of students and their information., and an OSAP office. Experienced faculty members don’t need higher-ups to tell them what their curriculum or teaching should be about. We could do a lot of this in faculty committees. Then we would,” he concluded, “get back to our core business: teaching students.” Of course, to be fair, we do need, for the sake of our infrastructure, at least small (but definitely efficient) Physical Plant and IT departments too, although even those can be tricky to come by. Our colleges are now middle-aged organisms. Centennial, the oldest one, turns 40 next year (TADA! – when the strike’s over). But unlike most human bodies, the bloat on our corporate corpus seems to occur around the top, not the middle. Union spokespeople have already pointed out that well under 50% of the college’s budget goes to full-time teaching salaries, and that the solution at Centennial to any perceived crisis or need for change has been to hire some more senior administrators. Imagine if we embarked on something like a zero-based budgeting program, but instead of focusing just on academic programs, looked at the whole college, from top to bottom with a ruthless criterion: keep only what directly supports teaching and students. The college would look somewhat different, wouldn’t it? I suspect we would keep nearly all of our support staff, who do valuable work and aren’t paid all that well for it. But suddenly, there might be money for the updating of desktop computers or a fix to the heating/cooling problems in the Progress portables, that we’re used to hearing can’t be afforded. Also, a few nice office spaces could be reconverted to faculty offices or teaching spaces, never in abundance. I am not suggesting that every dean or vice-president is a useless expense. Certainly some of them, at least, contribute to our college’s successes and support their faculty members. But do they all? How many registrars, associate registrars, or sub-registrars does it take to run a registrar’s office anyway? Wait a minute, we’re still counting. Meanwhile, let’s take to heart the immortal words of the suddenly-cool-again Johnny Cash. “I keep a close watch on this college of mine…. because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
Here are a few pointers:
Of course, the alert picketer should watch the rest of the world for omens as well. Possible symbols include:
In search
of further inspiration, I tried the website
www.googlism.com, which submits a
name or phrase to Google and then edits responses into an amusing list, rather
like a found poem. Here are some of the portents for March 7, our inaugural
strike day: I hope
this helps. See you on the line. |
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