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Sunday, May 18, 2008
McGill Dubs Grads Naughty Children
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
At the bargaining table, finger-wagging McGill rep tells grad unionists to “grow up.”
Luke, I am your father.
Counseled by a major union-busting law firm, McGill is playing hardball with AGSEM , the union of its striking grad employees. It’s employing what some faculty are describing as “pressure tactics” and erratic behavior at the bargaining table in an effort to stall bargaining, break the strike, and get individual students to sign workload agreements that repudiate some of their rights under Quebec law.
Last month, the university fired striking teaching assistants from their non-union positions at the school, claiming that the Quebec labour code compelled them to do so, while--in blatant violation of the code, also forcing faculty to do the grading work reserved for the graduate employees. “The firings have really galvanized the graduate students,” one McGill prof told me. “Faculty too. It’s been a real wake-up call for some of the faculty. They’re dumping hundreds of papers for grading on the professors, and pressuring departments to do the students’ work. The provost has called at least one department head, yelling. It’s intimidation.”
Junior faculty report being advised to file grades in violation of Quebec law, and “not to say anything, because it could affect your tenure case.” There are numerous reports of graduate students denied full payment of pre-strike hourly earnings, including both teaching wages and research stipends from grant funds completely unrelated to teaching activities.
Last week, the administration overplayed its hand in an amateurish attempt to bypass union leadership and the bargaining process itself by electronically self-publishing what it called a “global offer” to teaching assistants. Students were fired up by the arrogant paternalism of the move--essentially saying to union members, “the heck with bargaining and your leadership, just sign here, kids.” But they also understood the offer as a sleazy effort to get them to agree that other university employees could do their work, essentially giving up core labor protections in the Quebec code. The “offer” was rejected overwhelmingly, by 86% of voting members.
Frustrated by the thumping rejection, McGill returned to the table but adopted an unprofessional and hectoring tone, accusing the grad students of attacking the role of the professoriate and academic freedom, and, most egregiously, telling the union’s bargaining team to"grow up and take responsibility,” resulting in the students’ walking out of the session and this response by Richard Hink, AGSEM president.
This past Thursday and Friday, the administration continued its hijinx at the bargaining table, making a verbal agreement with grad employees to a version of the workload form consistent with Quebec law, then repudiating the agreement the next day. “This deal occurred at the table with a provincial conciliator present --- everyone in the room agreed. This morning, we returned to the table and the Administration informed us that they were retracting the deal,” an AGSEM official informed me. “This is a stab in the back and we’re looking into legal action for bad-faith bargaining. Our position is that the text was accepted and remains part of the workload form.”
“They’re stalling,” my faculty source told me. “The administration doesn’t appear willing to bargain in good faith. It’s not just about the TAs. Their negotiations with the clerical workers’ union (MUNACA) have also been dragging on. The administration appears more interested in control than in saving money. This is the politics of neoliberalism.”
Grad student activists appear to share this view. “McGill appears to be trying to make an example out of the TA union because the administration is currently in negotiations with clerical, technical, library assistants, nurses and others. If MUNACA goes on strike, the University shuts down,” one said. He thinks the university’s hardball tactics are backfiring. “If anything, the support from MUNACA members on the TAs’ picket line indicates that our refusal to give in to pressure tactics has only inspired their membership to fight.” The same source offered several examples of McGill’s corporatization, including centralization of food services and the shutdown of student-run businesses and the takeover of spaces traditionally controlled by faculty and students:
The attempt to bust the TA union is only one part of a general plan to not only obliterate student autonomy, their organisations, and places of discussion, publication, dissemination, and thus, dissent, but to make circumstances very difficult in which students, faculty and staff could freely meet each other and discuss issues pertaining to their workplace and the increasingly stifling campus climate.
While faculty feeling about unionism is mixed, some have been questioning the role of their own faculty association, the MAUT, described by many as a classic company union. As one commenter in an earlier blog post on the strike noted:
As a junior McGill professor, I can say that it is par for the course for our faculty association to be another arm of the administration. In fact, most of the administration is part of the faculty association. Who is going to show up at a MAUT meeting and ask the faculty to cross the administration when their dean is sitting beside them? The main role of MAUT seems to be to keep the salaries rising nicely and to monitor the pension fund. Real concerns, like workloads for junior faculty, access to daycare, conflicts with management, etc., are not things that interest MAUT. The result is that the faculty are financially probably better off than many places with unions, but we have no bargaining power on other issues.
The Montreal Gazette reported one faculty member who took an even dimmer view of MAUT’s response: “I guess the MAUT folks don’t want to rile the administration [while negotiating their own salaries], but for one group of teachers to ignore the efforts of another group to improve their working conditions is shameful, at least.”
Many of the faculty support the union, and some individual profs wear AGSEM buttons, walk the picket line, distribute strike literature and are trying to find ways to help students to replace the lost income.
Comments
Ick ---- whatever happened to Canada being a better place for labor than the US? I can see at least a half-dozen ULPs (unfair labor practices) right there on the part of the administration --- I hope that works the same way in Canadian law and the union can take them to court.
Faculty should also be worried about this from an academic freedom, “chilling effect” perspective.
Best of luck to all of McGill’s workers!
At my institution, California’s recent budget cuts to education have translated into drastically reduced teaching opportunities for graduate students in the English department, such that the department can no longer guarantee teaching appointments for students as early as the fourth year (out of a typical seven to nine year time-to-completion). Since these are the only opportunities for keeping health care and maintaining affiliation with the university (without the tuition remissions that teaching appointments provide, remaining in the department is an option only for the independently wealthy), things look pretty grim for those of us who actually want to finish our degrees. The thing is still shaking out; it’s hard to imagine how the university will be able to cut the number of composition courses it offers so drastically (since the classes are already overenrolled), but even if the final budget is not so draconian, the whole fiasco has certainly shown the graduate student population how tenuous our position really is.
But, anyway, your title made me reflect on an interesting turn the department level rhetoric has taken as we’ve tried to deal with this crisis: the graduate students as members of the department “family.” To their credit, not only has the department faculty closed ranks with us, but a small minority of the tenured professoriat have actually taken some steps to supplement the graduate student body’s increasingly precarious financial situation out of their own pocket (both out of research funds and otherwise). But some of the language used has tended towards different variations of quasi-paternalistic “responsibility.” I count myself as quite fortunate, actually, to be in a department where this sort of thing is even possible; there are not many places, I’m sure, where established faculty would actually go to those kinds of lengths to help out the graduate student body. But it’s been instructive that not a small number of graduate students have vocally resisted being labeled the department’s “children” (even by implication), to the extent of resisting receiving this kind of “child support.” It’s worth thinking about the dangers in this kind of rhetoric, as your post illustrates: invoking the language of paternalism allows institutions like McGill to render any kind of labor organization illegitimate. And so much of the quasi-craft guild language of tenure and the profession as a whole function to re-classify the labor we temporary workers provide as something more like the kinds of chores a child performs around the house (or, worse yet, on the job training).
On the other hand, my favorite comment in the recent department meeting was another grad student who suggested part of our problem was admitting too many new graduate students: a problem, as she put it, of family planning.
It’s a difficult situation that Aaron refers to, one that brings up the problem of fake solidarity that I’ve commented on before. Labor solidarity is supposed to be based on a community of interests (personal or class), working conditions, and so on. But what to do in cases where these interests of workers are not really aligned? Appealing to a Marxist understanding of the proletariat isn’t going to cut it.
In this case the interests involved seem to be straightforwardly those of a guild, but, lacking a guild terminology that is still familiar to contemporary ears, the masters of the guild appear to have fallen back on the rhetoric of the family as the most important still-surviving non-corporate affiliation.
But, you know—the work done by a grad student is not chores performed around the house, but neither is a grad student merely a young professor, or a sort of inexperienced worker to be moved up through the ranks of the union in a typical “first hired, last fired” kind of way. They are expected to show individual skill, to effectively compete against each other. Underneath the guild structure is not a unified workforce waiting to emerge. Under it is a sort of collection of entepreneurial intellectual artisans. In those conditions, achieving a guild seems like perhaps one of the better outcomes. The problem is, of course, that professors have not been leading an effective guild, one that provides for their journeymen as well as themselves.
Ooh, I gotta say, considering who usually does the “second shift” and all the unpaid labor in the home and subsequently gets devalued in the hierarchy, using a rhetoric of “family” makes me very nervous. Does this mean I’ll get to fetch coffee for the profs and all the menfolk talking Theory?
Rich makes some good points about how the models of guild stewardship and individualistic labor contracts are both present in the way grad school is currently structured, and present in incompatible ways.
I used to expect our profs --- since they’ve “made it” --- to do more to support the grad students and undergrads financially as well as time-wise. But as I went further through the program I’ve started to think: if/when I get that tenure-track job, I’ll be scrambling to get out of all this debt and build up some savings and a cushion for retirement, not to mention the fact that I’d like to live a little less cheaply. So I’m starting to think that’s not workable either.