Cleaning house

Let the administration have their negotiations back

Tessa Vanderhart, Staff

One week in, the CAW strike has not had much of an impact on campus — which is bad for the staff, bad for the students, and bad for the professors, and, damnit, bad for the university.

Perhaps it was my news-addled brain, but with the food-services, residences, and Physical Plant workers on strike I’d expected piles of garbage everywhere, mass power outages, starving residence students . . . but not a single toilet has run out of paper.

The university’s plan to fight the strike action has been simple: reduce services, produce services, with the help of management, student-employees, and, probably, some scabs (though no one has admitted to it thus far). And, with Pembina Hall mealtimes scarcely skipping a beat, the plan seems to be working. University of Manitoba Food Services director Daryl Lucyk went so far as to tell the Manitoban that he could keep up a year of working in the kitchen, if need be. A whole year! With his division alone missing more than 100 employees.

You have to give the university credit, at least at the level of middle-management, for planning to handle this strike beautifully.

But then, it was thought through even at the top levels — the university’s Board of Governors passed a policy to define overtime hours for non-unionized (student and out-of-province) support staff on Sept. 18. And the university’s sick leave policy was amended at the previous board meeting, May 28 — unnecessary, because CAW’s collective agreement explicitly frowns on “sickouts,” but a deft manoeuvre nonetheless.

It’s worth mentioning that 10 years ago, after a 17-day professors strike, the university hired Emöke Szathmàry, fresh off her success at getting collective agreements signed at McMaster, as president. Not for nothing: although the person, or even the negotiators, responsible for writing the university’s collective agreements is impossible to pin down, but the contracts, particularly the CAW’s, so favour the university that they include clauses about only taking sick days when really, really sick.

I’m not even sure if there has been any backlash against the U of M as the result of the very well publicized CAW strike. Even though Fall Convocation will have to be held off campus — at the Church of the Rock, no less — the University of Manitoba Students’ Union, the U of M administration’s natural enemy, is barely able to take a side. Even a pro-CAW protest held by UMFA failed to mention their mutual grievances with the university, out of fear, plain and simple.

None of this is helped by the connotations that CAW has developed for itself at a national level over the past few years: cheap political floozyism, demanding subsidizes to float lost industries, and persistent threats to strike, to name a few.

Yet on Monday, Oct. 15, another wing of the CAW agreed to give up its right to strike in favour of a partnership with the management (of Magna Intl.) — just to gain more members.

Perhaps the problem, then, lies with the way CAW works at the U of M. Like many outdated union policies, it’s hardwired to seniority. The contract rewards mediocrity — if you can hold the job you’re guaranteed small (too small?) annual raises, increases in vacation time, future pension benefits . . . but, as is so commonly cited, there is no room for innovation in a seniority system.

One of the CAW’s main pushes to improve the system — at least, so it would seem, as it’s coincidentally the best motivator of students support they can muster — is that university-employed full-time students, currently not part of the bargaining unit, should receive the same rate of pay as full-time employees who are not registered at university. This would serve a number of purposes: it would increase the size and pull of the bargaining unit; it would raise awareness and rally support in future campaigns; it would cull the complaint that cheaper workers are rewarded with more hours; it would be more fair.

But where does fair come into it? Does anyone really deserve to be making $14 an hour (plus benefits, plus a seven per cent increase) to do a minimum-wage job, when Manitoba’s unemployment rate is only five per cent — and, as Statistics Canada reported in 2004, 38 per cent of children living under the poverty line have a parent that is employed full-time?

Instead of hiring fewer students at a higher rate, the university should be hiring more students (particularly more international students, who have to apply for a permit to work off-campus) to give students a chance to earn their money back. Not only would this fit with the CAW’s plan to increase their union base, it would also devalue the university’s stronghold on the service workers. It’s pathetic that the only option available to CAW workers, bound by a poor contract, signed three years hence, is to strike — wasting everyone’s time, but mostly their own, when it has an hourly worth.

I sincerely hope that CAW local 3007 remains on strike for as long as they can. Every collective agreement at the university will expire over the course of 2007, including three CUPE locals and two AESES locals, and the vast, vast majority of people employed on campus. So far, only UMFA has re-negotiated (tentatively as of press time) — and, though I don’t yet have the details, I am sure that they weren’t guaranteed any of the academic freedoms they were looking for.

If all of the eight unions on campus (four academic, four support) were amalgamated, bargaining power would be exponentially stronger, the power of seniority would be exponentially lessened, and unions would have more in common with each other than they do with, say, custodians in Victoria (CUPE local 379). Union dues and costs would be significantly less, and the union could focus on building a better working (and learning!) environment at the U of M than getting a little strike action every three years to stretch to improve a university-favouring contract.

Better still, the union could focus on things like creating more daycare spots for support staff workers, gaining access to the university’s medical, dental, and mental health clinics for staff, and working to transform the U of M — the province’s third-largest city, remember — into a community, dare I say a community that blinks when 480 of its members stage a week-plus-long, voluntarily unpaid protest.

It’s possible that before anyone reads this the strike will be over. The points remain: the strike is bad for workers, who are underpaid and will not get the wage increases they seek because a lengthy strike so clearly demonstrates the inefficies of the current system. It’s bad for students, aside from the obvious reasons of food-service and cleanliness convenience, because it offers no promise of more on-campus jobs or better campus services. It’s bad for professors, because UMFA was not able to successfully capitalize on the concurrent collective bargaining to any great extent.

And above all, it’s bad for the university, because it’s wasting all of our time. Let’s throw the unions back where they came from.