Tag Archives: Unions

#CAUT begins censure of #UBC for course copyright policy #highered #bced #bcpoli #yteubc #criticaled

Posted on March 20, 2014 by | Comments Off on #CAUT begins censure of #UBC for course copyright policy #highered #bced #bcpoli #yteubc #criticaled
Faculty Association of UBC, March 20,  2014– At its meeting on March 14 & 15, the CAUT Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee considered UBC’s Policy 81 and all of the associated documentation.  Following that consideration, the committee voted unanimously to recommend to the CAUT Executive that it bring a motion to CAUT Council in early May to begin the censure process of the UBC Administration. If they approve the recommendation, the Executive would bring a motion to Council that “CAUT will censure the UBC Administration at its November 2014 Council meeting unless the University ends the policy that the University may use, revise, and allow other UBC Instructors to use and revise a faculty member’s teaching materials, unless the faculty member specifically prohibits such use.”
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Posted in Academic freedom, Administration, Corporate University, Employment rights, Faculty, Governance, Intellectual property, Legal issues, Protests, Shared governance, Students, Technology, Working conditions

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Chomsky on the destruction of #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Posted on March 3, 2014 by | Comments Off on Chomsky on the destruction of #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Noam Chomsky, AlterNet, Reader Supported News, March 1, 2014– The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.

How America’s Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management-a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration-and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor-and vulnerable labor-is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous-but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state-you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.

On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them-that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party”[1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.

On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty substantial raise, almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.

On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.

On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting-and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative-what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.

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Posted in Academic freedom, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Job market, Politics, Shared governance, Students, Tenure & Promotion, Unions, Working conditions

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#BCed budget shortchanges students and families #caut #ubc #ubced #bcpoli #yteubc

Posted on February 19, 2014 by | Comments Off on #BCed budget shortchanges students and families #caut #ubc #ubced #bcpoli #yteubc

Robert Clift, CUFA BC, February 18, 2014– The 2014/15 provincial budget continues to shortchange students and their families according to the organization representing professors, librarians and other academic staff at BC’s public research universities.

“In a time when we should be increasing investment in the people and research necessary to diversify our economy and support local communities, this budget cuts funding to post-secondary institutions and does nothing to help us keep BC’s best and brightest at home,” said Richard Kool, President of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC (CUFA BC).

“By 2016, per student operating grants to universities, colleges and institutes will have dropped 20% in real terms since the Liberals formed government,” Kool added. “Students have already lost support services and learning opportunities due to inadequate funding and these new cuts will shortchange students even further.”

“Moreover, we are losing some of the best and brightest BC students to other provinces because we don’t have a provincial graduate fellowship program to support tomorrow’s innovators,” Kool said.

The creation of the BC Training and Education Savings Grant will do little to help students and their families, say the professors.

“The BC Training and Education Savings Grant is completely inadequate”, Kool said. “The value of the government’s contribution will not even cover the projected increase in tuition fees for one year by the time a child born today reaches age 18. We should be able to do better.”

“Using the government’s numbers, the value of the government’s contribution will fall $473 short of the projected tuition fee increases. Using more realistic calculations, the gap is $754,” Kool added. “This is on top of tuition fees that have already doubled under the Liberals.”

“Our society and economy demands educated citizens,” Kool said. “Simply training people for resource-dependent jobs, as proposed by this budget, ignores the need to prepare people for the social, economic and environmental changes in front of us. The provincial government’s narrow focus limits our possibilities and ill-prepares us for an ever changing world.”

The Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC represents 4,600 professors, librarians, instructors, lecturers and other academic staff at BC’s five public research universities – UBC (Vancouver and Kelowna), SFU (Burnaby, Surrey, Vancouver), UVic (Victoria), UNBC (Prince George, Quesnel, Terrace, Fort St. John) and Royal Roads (Victoria).

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Posted in BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Economics, Faculty, Government, Organizing, Students, Unions, Working conditions

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#UBC mismanaging PT faculty career advancement plan #adjunct #highered #ubced #bced #bcpoli

Posted on February 13, 2014 by | Comments Off on #UBC mismanaging PT faculty career advancement plan #adjunct #highered #ubced #bced #bcpoli

The Faculty Association of UBC (FAUBC) recently surveyed its members about preferences for the University’s management of its members’ Career Advancement Plan (CAP). Most of the 3,300 faculty members and librarians do not realize UBC manages their CAP, and perhaps most would conclude that their CAP is mismanaged.

In short, the CAP is performance pay—$2m in discretionary salary funds for Management to allocate to a select few FAUBC members each year (i.e., merit pay, performance salary adjustment). A large majority of members do not share in the spoils and the FAUBC’s part-time faculty or Sessional members (approx. 1,000) are excluded by status.

Exclusion, whether systematically or by status, from a CAP is mismanagement by definition: if your career is not advancing according to plan, you may have the employer that manages the plan, UBC, to blame.

Moreover, UBC’s Management does not fairly allocate this exceptionally large amount of potential salary increases. Alternatively, this $2m could be included in an across the board or general salary increase for the Sessionals, adding at least $2,000 per year to each part-time members’ meagre year-end wages. Instead of a divided FAUBC by status, this would mean the Association stands further united.

Just say no way to Performance Pay. Faculty associations, please pay attention.

PAY EQUITY :: Equal Pay for Equal Work :: Pay the Sessionals what it costs for a FT faculty member buyout = about $10,000 per course. Faculty associations, please wake up.

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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, BC Education, Contingent labor, Employment rights, Faculty, Government, Organizing, Solidarity, Unions, Working conditions

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Cuts to English language learning programs in #BCed #highered #caut #edstudies #ubc #ubced #bcpoli

Posted on February 13, 2014 by | Comments Off on Cuts to English language learning programs in #BCed #highered #caut #edstudies #ubc #ubced #bcpoli

Cindy Oliver, CAUT Bulletin, January 2014– English Language Training (ELT) programs play an increasingly critical role in Canada’s post-secondary institutions as the diversity and complexity of our student population changes, and with it, the need to address those changes with programs that strengthen language proficiency. Although post-secondary education is primarily a provincial responsibility, the federal government plays a crucial role in the funding of ELT programs across the country. And it’s the looming cuts to the federal government’s contribution to those programs that has united British Columbia’s student organizations and the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators to pressure governments to take a different approach.

On Dec. 16, the federation, along with the BC division of the Canadian Federation of Students held a press conference at the Vancouver Community College’s (VCC) downtown Vancouver campus to announce plans to launch a province-wide campaign to pressure the federal and provincial governments to protect the funding arrangement that sees close to $20 million in federal funding flow through BC’s Ministry of Advanced Education to support a range of ELT programs in BC institutions.

It was no coincidence the press conference was held at the Vancouver campus of VCC; it is the largest provider of ELT programs in western Canada. It’s a role that VCC has excelled at for more than 40 years. And it has become something of a professional hub for a growing number of international students who have come to Canada to begin a new life, but need to strengthen their English language skills to ensure they can fully participate in their new country.

On hand for the press conference was Saeideh Ghassarifar, a foreign trained doctor who enrolled at VCC after immigrating to Canada from Iran. During media interviews, Ghassarifar pointed out she has an extensive educational background in her chosen field — she has three degrees, including a PhD in health care education — but she recognizes that her English language skills need to be much stronger. As she said in one interview, “as a doctor I need to understand and be understood when I am dealing with patients.” For her, the VCC English language programs are critical to her ultimate success in this country.

However, the very programs Ghassarifar accesses at VCC are under threat if the federal government moves ahead with its plans to withdraw funding currently in place under a long-standing federal-provincial settlement services agreement. It is through that agreement that BC receives close to $20 million in federal funding that eventually works its way into ELT programs at institutions like VCC. The change to the settlement program in BC, if it goes ahead as announced, would take effect on April 1, 2014.

The federal government’s rationale for cutting the funding makes no sense. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s austerity rhetoric has permeated every aspect of life in Canada, from oversight of the environment to the muzzling of federal government researchers and scientists. In every case, Harper’s approach has been to diminish the capacity of government to provide information and services that would fulfill the federal government’s part of the social contract with Canadians, a contract that should respect our rights as citizens while ensuring sustainable and balanced growth is shared. During his ten­ure as Prime Minister we have seen no evidence that he intends to keep up his side of the contract.

Just as troubling, however, is that Harper’s reneging on the $20 million in funding for BC programs comes at a time when the pro­vincial government’s commitment to post-secondary education has come under enormous pressure. For most of the past 12 years, core funding of BC’s public institutions, like in many other provinces, has simply not kept pace with the demands of increased enrolment or system-wide cost pressures. Add in the fact that government policy shifts that have allowed tuition fees to skyrocket over that same period — in BC the average undergraduate tuition fee has more than doubled — and the pressures on access and affordability have simply added more barriers to the education that government, business leaders and the broader community all know are critical to our collective success as both a province and a country. Notably, the BC Business Council — hardly a left-wing think tank — has pointed out on numerous occasions that 75 per cent of all new jobs in BC will require some form of post-secondary education (a degree, diploma, certificate or completed apprenticeship). The council notes that currently only two-thirds of BC’s labour force has that education.

The cuts in funding for English language programs are a step backwards. They will hurt students, the very people that BC and Canada need to support and encourage. Our campaign will focus on their stories and highlight the urgent need to keep ELT funding in place. Working together with allies and the broader community we are confident we can make a difference.

Cindy Oliver is president of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC.

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Posted in Academics, Advocacy, BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Diversity, Employment rights, Equity, Government, Job market, Solidarity, Students, Unions, Working conditions

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UI Urbana faculty line up on sides to unionize #highered #criticaled #edstudies

Posted on February 10, 2014 by | Comments Off on UI Urbana faculty line up on sides to unionize #highered #criticaled #edstudies

Christine Des Garennes, The News-Gazette, February 2, 2014– On one side you have an award-winning, internationally-known scholar. On the other side you have an equally respected researcher and professor with just as many publications and grants to his or her name.

One believes establishing a faculty union would protect and strengthen the university. The other insists a bargaining unit for faculty would weaken the institution.

Can anyone win this debate?

Efforts to form a faculty union on the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign campus in recent years have for the most part entailed discussions in offices and meeting rooms. But as union organizers ramp up their activities — asking people to sign a statement of support (an announcement disclosing numbers is expected soon) and distributing promotional literature — the discourse, if you will, has intensified.

Not long after the Campus Faculty Association, the group behind the unionization effort, delivered to every faculty member a brochure unveiling some of its more prominent supporters, an opposing group ratcheted up its campaign. That group released its own list of notable professors and their reasons for coming out against a faculty union.

Meantime, university officials, including Chancellor Phyllis Wise, have said publicly they don’t see a need for a faculty union and that having one would only make dealings between the faculty and administration more confrontational. And about 140 miles north on the UI’s Chicago campus, the nascent UIC United Faculty is in its 17th month of negotiating with administration for its first contract after organizing back in 2011.

Whatever happens in Urbana, it’s likely the debate will continue for some time.

One union, two contracts

In the U.S., more than 350,000 college and university faculty are represented by collective bargaining units, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College City University of New York.

Because of a Supreme Court ruling in 1980, which stated that faculty at Yeshiva University acted as managers or supervisors rather than employees, few unionized faculty are found at private institutions, said William Herbert, executive director of the center and former deputy chairman of the New York State Public Employment Relations Board.

The majority of unionized faculty are at public institutions, and about 43 percent are at four-year institutions. In Illinois, there are about 20,062 unionized faculty. Unions are found at state universities like Southern Illinois and community colleges such as Parkland College.

“It’s safe to say that when there is an effort to organize on a campus, it’s democracy in action, and democracy in action takes many different variations,” Herbert said.

Illinois has a public sector collective bargaining statute, which allows employees to unionize. And the process can entail a gathering of what Herbert called “a showing of interest to establish support for unionization.”

“That can lead to voluntary recognition by the employer or, if employer refuses to recognize, then a petition can be filed” with the Illinois Educational Relations Labor Board.

To prove a union has support, organizers can hold an election or a card check in which faculty would sign (or not) cards stating that they favor union representation. If at least 50 percent plus one of all eligible faculty sign authorization cards in favor of forming a union, eventually the union would be able to negotiate a contract.

The Campus Faculty Association has indicated it could go the route of the card check.

“I think it’s going to go much more smoothly here,” compared with the Chicago campus campaign, said CFA President Harriet Murav, UI Professor of Slavic languages and literatures. “This is a campus that has a reputation for excellence. This is the flagship campus … and I don’t think administration would want to impede what we have going on here, in terms of research, teaching and public service excellence. I think the whole country will be watching closely.”

Read More: The News-Gazette

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Academic job market decimated, crashing #highered #edstudies #criticaled #caut #aaup #bced #bcpoli

Posted on February 10, 2014 by | 1 comment

Oftentimes, the academic job market for full-time (FT) faculty is inversely related to economic recessions. Not anymore. In this prolonged Great Recession, turned Great Depression II in parts of North America and across the world, youth have been particularly hard hit, more pronounced by race. The most common description for this current economy for youth is “a precipitous decline in employment and a corresponding increase in unemployment.” In Canada and the US, unemployment rates for the 16-19 year olds exceeds 25%. At the same time, one of the most common descriptions for postsecondary enrollment and participation in Canada and the US is “tremendous growth at the undergraduate level… the number of graduate students has grown significantly faster than the number of undergraduate students over the last 30 years.” With “school-to-work” and “youth employment” oxymoronic, corporate academia and the education industry are capitalizing on masses of students returning to desperately secure advanced credentials in hard times, but no longer does this matter to the professoriate.

If higher education enrollment has been significant, increases in online or e-learning enrollment have been phenomenal. Postsecondary institutions in North America commonly realized 100% increases in online course enrollment from the early 2000s to the present with the percentage of total registrations increasing to 25% for some universities. In Canada, this translates to about 250,000 postsecondary students currently taking online courses but has not translated into FT faculty appointments. More pointedly, it has eroded the FT faculty job market and fueled the part-time (PT) job economy of higher education. About 50% of all faculty in North America are PT but this seems to jump to about 85%-90% for those teaching online courses. For example, in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Master of Educational Technology (MET), where there are nearly 1,000 registrations per year, 85% of all sections are taught by PT faculty. In its decade of existence, not a single FT faculty member has been hired for this revenue generating program. Mirroring trends across North America, support staff doubling as adjunct or sessional teach about 45% of MET courses in addition to their 8:30-4:30 job functions in the service units. These indicators are of a larger scope of trends in the automation of intellectual work.

Given these practices across Canada, in the field of Education for example, there has been a precipitous decline in employment of FT faculty, which corresponds with the precipitous decline in employment of youth (Figure 1). Education is fairly reflective of the overall academic job market for doctorates in Canada. Except for short-term trends in certain disciplines, the market for PhDs is bleak. Trends and an expansion of the Great Recession predict that the market will worsen for graduates looking for FT academic jobs in all disciplines. A postdoctoral appointment market is very unlikely to materialize at any scale to offset trends. For instance, Education at UBC currently employs just a handful (i.e., 4-5) of postdocs.

To put it in mild, simple terms: Universities changed their priorities and values by devaluing academic budget lines. Now in inverse relationship to the increases in revenue realized by universities through the 2000s, academic budgets were progressively reduced from 40% or more to just around 20% for many of these institutions. One indicator of this trend is the expansion of adjunct labor or PT academics. In some colleges or faculties, such as Education at UBC, the number of PT faculty, which approached twice that of FT in 2008, teach from 33% to 85% of all sections, depending on the program.

Another indicator is the displacement of tenure track research faculty by non-tenure track, teaching-intensive positions. For example, in Education at UBC, about 18 of the last 25 FT faculty hires were for non-tenure track teaching-intensive positions (i.e., 10 courses per year for Instructor, Lecturer, etc.). This was partially to offset a trend of PT faculty hires pushing Education well over its faculty salary budget (e.g., 240 PT appointments in 2008). Measures in North America have been so draconian that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was compelled to report in 2010 that “the tenure system has all but collapsed…. the proportion of teaching-intensive to research-intensive appointments has risen sharply. However, the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system.” What is faculty governance, other than an oligarchy, with a handful of faculty governing or to govern?

Read More: Petrina, S. & Ross, E. W. (2014). Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth. Workplace, 23, 62-71.

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The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: new issue of Workplace #occupyeducation

Posted on September 23, 2013 by | Comments Off on The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: new issue of Workplace #occupyeducation

The Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) is extremely pleased to announce the launch of Workplace Issue #22, “The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students” (Guest Editors Bradley J. Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski & Shelley Pineo-Jensen).

 The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students

Articles:

  • The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: Introduction to the Special Issue (Brad Porfilio, Julie Gorlewski, Shelley Pineo-Jensen)
  • Dismissing Academic Surplus: How Discursive Support for the Neoliberal Self Silences New Faculty (Julie Gorlewski)
  • Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism? (Paul Thomas)
  • Survival Guide Advice and the Spirit of Academic Entrepreneurship: Why Graduate Students Will Never Just Take Your Word for It (Paul Cook)
  • Standing Against Future Contingency: Activist Mentoring in Composition Studies (Casie Fedukovich)
  • From the New Deal to the Raw Deal: 21st Century Poetics and Academic Labor (Virginia Konchan)
  • How to Survive a Graduate Career (Roger Whitson)
  • In Every Way I’m Hustlin’: The Post-Graduate School Intersectional Experiences of Activist-Oriented Adjunct and Independent Scholars (Naomi Reed, Amy Brown)
  • Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education (Nicholas Hartlep, Lucille T. Eckrich)
  • Lines of Flight: the New Ph.D. as Migrant (Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim)

The scope and depth of scholarship within this Special Issue has direct and immediate relevance for graduate students and new and senior scholars alike. We encourage you to review the Table of Contents and articles of interest.

Our blogs and links to our Facebook timelines and Twitter stream can be found at https://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/ and https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/

 

Thank you for your ongoing support of Workplace,

Sandra Mathison, Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Directors
Institute for Critical Education Studies
Critical Education

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Quebec intellectuals denounce Charter of Values

Posted on September 10, 2013 by | Comments Off on Quebec intellectuals denounce Charter of Values

CTV Montreal, September 6, 2013– A group of 91 Quebec thinkers – mostly francophone academics – have signed a letter denouncing the PQ’s charter of values that is expected to be debated at the National Assembly as soon as next week.

Although the exact details of the soon-to-be proposed legislation remain unknown, the group is clear in its rejection of the project, as evidenced in its 1,000 word manifesto entitled “Our values exclude exclusion.”

The letter begins emphatically: “We are against any proposed Charter of Quebec Values. We share values such as equality between men and women and the secular nature of the state and public institutions.

The signatories include McGill academics Abby Lippman and Ethel Groffier, writer Norman Nawrocki and activist Will Prosper.

The letter defends what it calls “the rejection of racism,” and calls the bill a “repressive and divisive project.”

Read more: CTV Montreal

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What Contingent Faculty Can Learn From Fast-Food Workers #bced #yteubc

Posted on September 7, 2013 by | 1 comment

Brian Haman, Counterpunch, August 30, 2013 — It has become a truism in American higher education: seventy-five percent of undergraduate courses at U.S. colleges and universities are taught by contingent faculty1, most of whom lack health insurance,2carry onerous student debt,3 receive poverty-level compensation, and often rely on public assistance such as food stamps in order to make ends meet.4 This percentage translates into more than 1.3 million highly-educated, qualified, and competent, but poorly-paid, undervalued, and underappreciated American workers. Conversely, administrative costs at colleges have soared in recent years. The academic managerial class (provosts, vice and associate vice provosts, deans, presidents, vice presidents, etc.) routinely earn six-figure salaries, often with generous perks including vacation homes.5

According to U.S. Education Department data, “U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security”.6 Most new hires on American campuses never even set foot in the classroom simply because they are not teachers but administrators.7 Furthermore, the cost of a college degree in the U.S. has increased by 1,120 percent since 1978.8 The overwhelming majority of the academic labor force (to say nothing of students, who voluntarily submit to indentured servitude in the form of student debt) suffers disproportionately due to enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a small and privileged elite.

We find a similar dynamic in other segments of the American labor force, especially in the fast-food industry. Fast-food workers endure low wages (and indeed wage stagnation), few if any benefits, and a scarcity of full-time contracts.9 The marginalized and contingent workforce at places such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and KFC share similar concerns and face similar challenges such as starvation wages, reliance on government assistance, and job insecurity that academic workers endure at some of our nation’s leading universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Michigan.10 However, unlike the academy, the difference between CEO compensation and fast-food workers’ pay is truly breathtaking. David C. Novak, CEO of Yum Brands, which includes chains such as KFC and Pizza Hut, received a total annual compensation of $29.67 million in 2012.11

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Last year, McDonald’s gave [Dan] Thompson a compensation package worth $13.8 million, or more than 558 times what McDonald’s expects employees to make — from two jobs”.12 The national minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 per hour and the top five largest employers (McDonald’s is among them) pay its workers at or near the minimum wage. We may reiterate the conclusion of the previous paragraph with one minor revision: The overwhelming majority of the fast-food labor force suffers disproportionately due to enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a small and privileged elite.

When faced with such systemic and structural inequalities, how have fast-food workers responded? The answer is quite instructive. They have staged local protests and walkouts in cities across the country and are planning a national walkout in order to fight for a higher minimum wage. As Professor Anne Kalleberg has noted, however, the protests are not union-sponsored but socially organized.13 Fast-food workers, just like their academic counterparts, often struggle to unionize due, at times, to explicit efforts by their employers to prevent them from doing so. Nevertheless, despite such grim circumstances, fast-food workers have pushed their plight quite successfully into the national consciousness just as Occupy movements have done.

Their campaign, entitled “Fast Food Forward”, articulates their purpose with self-assured clarity: “Fast Food Forward joins the momentum of the Black Friday strikes and other low-wage worker struggles to build community engagement, hold corporations and their CEOs accountable, and to raise wages so that all Americans can prosper”.14 Despite its origins in New York City, the movement is gaining momentum; many are now calling for a nationwide strike to take place on 29 August and even President Obama has addressed the issue.

How is all of this relevant for the contingent academic workforce? Well, for one thing, there is strength in numbers. Collective action is an especially effective instrument both to challenge and redress structural inequalities. If, as the aforementioned statistics indicate, seventy-five percent of undergraduate courses at U.S. colleges and universities are taught by adjuncts, then a walkout would bring the academy to a grinding halt. If fast-food workers with fewer career opportunities, less educational attainment, more grueling working conditions (e.g. fast-paced environments, high-temperature workplaces, etc.), and far more to lose can risk their only source of income for themselves and their families for the sake of the collective good, then what is preventing adjuncts from doing the same? The short answer is simple: nothing.

Alas, many adjuncts enable and perpetuate the “system” through their deferential subservience simply by participating in it (recent unionization efforts at Georgetown and elsewhere duly noted). As universities and departments downsize and the numbers of Ph.D. graduates outpace available jobs, many adjuncts accept grossly underpaid positions with long working hours and virtually no benefits with the expectation that a foot in the door will somehow lead to the promised land of a tenure-track position. Supply and demand dictates otherwise and the vast battalions of well-paid academic administrators are more than happy to continue to exploit such naïve and misguided expectations in the name of efficiency.

Surely, too, graduate programs inculcate (and indeed indoctrinate) students in the ways of the academy: publish or perish and do not rock the proverbial boat. On the one hand, academics are expected to challenge scholarly orthodoxies in their respective fields through creative, innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. And yet in other aspects of their lives, namely those that deal with the contractual conditions under which they labor, they must conform and remain obedient in order to secure employment. It becomes an insidious and corrosive form of selection in which independent thought is filtered out of a system that was designed to protect it. Contradictions become self-evident: the imposition of an authorial canon in the humanities is anathema, whereas wage slavery becomes institutionalized.

Read more: Counterpunch

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Posted in Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Advocacy, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Government, Job market, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Strikes, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Student Movement, Students, Unions

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CFP: Building International Labor Solidarity

Posted on July 18, 2013 by | Comments Off on CFP: Building International Labor Solidarity

CALL FOR PAPERS: BUILDING INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY

Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society will devote a thematic issue to Building International Labor Solidarity, which will be published in early 2014. The thematic editor is Kim Scipes of Purdue University North Central who will work closely with Working USA editor, Immanuel Ness. As new labor movements emerge in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, we seek essays that focus on research that is designed to build international labor solidarity with these and other workers. The editors seek in-depth, critical description and analyses of efforts motivated by the rise of workers’ movements that engage in transnational solidarity, as well as articles that examine imperial and global power efforts to control, guide, and circumscribe them. Historical examples must retain focus that refract on today’s problems and concerns.

Paper proposals are encouraged that address labor unions and workers’ movements in the United States and beyond, but priority will be given to research across the developed-developing country divide, or among developing countries of the Global South. Proposals for papers in the journal should be submitted by August 15, 2013, with a length of 250-500 words. Final papers will be peer-reviewed by referees appointed by the editorial board, and should not exceed 7,500 words.

For author guidelines, go to the following website: http://www.working-usa.org
Papers must be received by October 15, 2013.

E-mail for questions or submissions: kscipes@pnc.edu and iness@brooklyn.cuny.edu

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Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference August 1-4, 2013

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | Comments Off on Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference August 1-4, 2013

You are cordially invited to the 22nd annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference and the 9th annual Canadian Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions conference, hosted concurrently by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America Local 896/Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS).  This year’s conference will be held on the campus of the University of Iowa from August 1-4, 2013.  The conference will begin in earnest Friday morning and wrap up by noon on Sunday.

The C/CGEU was formed to support the organization of new graduate student employee unions; to strengthen established unions; and to provide a forum for graduate employee unionists to meet, share information, and work together toward common goals.  The annual conference features workshops on organizing, leadership development, negotiation strategies, and member mobilization.

We invite you to participate on panels and/or in workshops on a variety of subjects. Possible topics might include:

• Organizing in a Right-to-Work (for less) State: Examples and Strategies

• Fighting “Back Door Tuition”: Bargaining Against Increased Student Fees

• The Affordable Care Act: Anticipating Changes and Using Them to Your Advantage

• Effective Use of Social Media

• Higher Education and the Labor Movement: Where Do We Fit In?

• Developing New Leaders

• Building Coalitions On and Off Campus

• Political Action and Legislative Fightback: On ALEC and other Woes

• Strengthening Steward System/Training

You’ll find other options on the registration form, including panels on bargaining contexts.  If you would like to propose a panel or workshop not listed above, there will be a space on the electronic registration form to do so.  We look forward to your suggestions.

Please join us in Iowa City in August to meet unionists from throughout Canada and the United States.  To register for the conference, please use the following link at the bottom of the page or click on the CGEU tab of our website, cogs.org.  For a discounted registration rate of $45, please submit your registration by Monday, July 1, 2013.  After that date, registration will increase to $50.  Please be sure to bring your conference registration fee with you to the conference if you choose not to mail it in advance.

In Solidarity,

The CGEU 2013 Organizing Committee

Registration Form

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Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Advocacy, Employment rights, Job market, Organizing, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Unions

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For Profit U Survey

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | Comments Off on For Profit U Survey

Have you attended a for-profit university, such as the University of Phoenix?

If so, we’d like to hear about your experiences.

For Profit U is a project of Service Employees International Union centered on improving transparency and increasing student and faculty success at for profit universities. We need input from you. Click the link to take a short survey about your experiences as a student at a for-profit university: http://action.seiu.org/page/content/for-profit-students/

For-profit colleges enroll between 10 to 13% of college students, yet receive 25% of all federal financial aid dollars. Ninety-six percent of for profit students take out student loans, and almost one-quarter default default within 3 years of entering repayment. By sharing your experiences, we can work to improve transparency and student outcomes at for-profit schools. Take the survey here: http://action.seiu.org/page/content/for-profit-students/

If you haven’t attended a for-profit university but know someone who has, please forward the survey to them. Thank you, as always, for your continued suppport.

Sincerely,
Rob, Kyle, Natalia, Aaron & The Student Debt Crisis Team

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Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Corporate University, For Profit Universities, Organizing, Students, Unions

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News and Views from the Center for the Study of Education and Work

Posted on June 3, 2013 by | Comments Off on News and Views from the Center for the Study of Education and Work

News and Views from the
Centre for the Study of Education and Work (CSEW), OISE/UT
http://www.csew.ca

NEWS & VIEWS
‘PUSHED TO THE EDGE,’ SEATTLE’S LOW WAGE WORKERS JOIN SWEEPING MOVEMENT
By Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams In the seventh action in just eight weeks across the United States, fast food workers in Seattle are walking off the job Thursday joining a sweeping movement of low-wage workers who have been “pushed to the edge and are now taking a stand.” “We work in one of the fastest growing industries in the nation, and our companies are making huge – even record – profits, but we barely earn enough to pay for basics like rent, food and transportation to and from work.” -Caroline Durocher, striking worker Repeating the calls made by striking workers in other cities, the Seattle workers are demanding a living wage of $15 per hour and the right to form a union without intimidation. Read more: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/30-7

THE COST OF A BARGAIN From The Maytree Foundation As Alan Broadbent writes in this month’s Maytree Opinion, we all have become used to the notion that we can get most things cheap or free. But when we are faced with the true cost of things, we don’t like it. We only have to look at areas such as housing, transit or maintenance of public spaces to see what happens when we expect high quality while preserving the fiction that we can have things cheap. Read more: http://maytree.com/spotlight/the-cost-of-a-bargain.html

THE CASE FOR A CANADA SOCIAL REPORT By Ken Battle and Sherri Torjman, The Caledon Institute The demise of the National Council of Welfare, announced in the 2012 Federal Budget, has punched a huge hole in Canada’s social policy database. The Council’s annual Welfare Incomes and Poverty Profile reports have for decades provided invaluable information on welfare and low income. Rather than simply lamenting this loss, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy is acting to rescue this important data by taking over its preparation and distribution. The welfare and poverty information will form part of a new Canada Social Report. Read more: http://www.caledoninst.org/Publications/Detail/?ID=1011

HEALTH CARE SPENDING IN ONTARIO CONTINUES TO DECLINE By Doug Allan, The Bullet Contrary to the hysteria from conservatives, health care spending continues to decline as a percentage of the provincial budget. Last year, health care accounted for 38.5 per cent of total expenditures, this year the government plans to bring it down to 38.3 per cent. This continues the trend downward since 2003/04 when health care accounted for 40 per cent of total expenditures. The Ontario provincial Budget reports that program spending is going up an impressive sounding 2.99 per cent and health care spending is going up 2.3 per cent. Although that sounds like a larger than expected increase in these days of austerity, these figures are, unfortunately, misleading. The reason is that last year funding fell well short of the Budget plan and the government is now playing catch-up. Read more: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/826.php

VIDEO – CSEW’S D’ARCY MARTIN GIVEN UNITED ASSOCIATION FOR LABOR EDUCATION’S 2013 LIFELONG ACHIEVEMENT AWARD Watch the video: http://vimeo.com/65786753

 

ABOUT CSEW (CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION & WORK, OISE/UT):
Head: Peter Sawchuk Co-ordinator: D’Arcy Martin The Centre for the Study of Education and Work (CSEW) brings together educators from university, union, and community settings to understand and enrich the often-undervalued informal and formal learning of working people. We develop research and teaching programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT) that strengthen feminist, anti-racist, labour movement, and working-class perspectives on learning and work. Our major project is APCOL: Anti-Poverty Community Organizing and Learning. This five-year project (2009-2013), funded by SSHRC-CURA, brings academics and activists together in a collaborative effort to evaluate how organizations approach issues and campaigns and use popular education. For more information about this project, visit http://www.apcol.ca. If you have any questions about the list, or have an event you would like to promote or news to share, send an email to csew-broadcast-oise-l@listserv.utoronto.ca. Messages will be reviewed before posting. For more information about CSEW, visit: http://www.csew.ca

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Education, the biggest loser in the BC election, negative politics hardly to blame #bcpoli

Posted on May 18, 2013 by | 1 comment

The BC NDP may have ‘snatched defeat from the jaws of victory’, but education is one of the biggest losers in this week’s election of the fourth consecutive Liberal majority government in the province. In addition to education, the handful of biggest losers in the election includes labour, students, youth, and the increasing volume of people scraping to get by in general.

With more than a decade of labour disputes over the Liberals’ irresponsible and often careless bargaining practices, the BC Teachers’ Federation is now bracing once again to enter the fray of contract negotiations. The past dozen years of degraded labour relations included a range of arbitrations and trips to courts to stave off the Liberals’ intentions of stripping bargaining rights from teachers and alarming erosions of their academic freedom and civil liberties writ large.

Blind to the stunning turn of election fortunes this week, universities in the province were holding their breath for the NDP’s promises to invest millions in education. Flush in the face, now there is not much more for the Presidents to do but go begging for more or just morph into real estate, as UBC has, and build more, oh yes, and raise tuition. In the backyard of the provincial legislature, the University of Victoria is cutting staff and raising tuition once again.

Actually, most universities in the province, such as UBC, raise tuition 2% annually to build on the students’ backs. Smarting from the trend, students are realizing that they are “paying significantly more” and “getting less,” as Melissa Moroz of the Professional Employees Association observed. Students are also waking up to the hard facts of the fictitious economy presented to them in low res 3D: the job market for youth is actually the worst in decades and sinking to new lows. Indicators for the summer 2013 summer job market point to bleak months ahead while university graduates are left praying and hoping for mere job ads as jobs for University grads become the stuff of the past. Education PhDs, for example, anxiously open the CAUT Bulletin and University Affairs month after month only to find blank columns and a job ad section less than full enough to fold a single paper airplane.

Meanwhile back on the mainland, students at Capilano University are burning and destroying their artwork in protest of impending cuts of entire arts programs. This past year, strikes and other forms of labour action at SFU and UBC marked the sign of the times of universities, over-extended and under-funded, unable or unwilling to pay fair wage increases. Next month begins an arbitration between the Faculty Association of UBC and the University to settle a contract bargaining dispute now in its second year. There isn’t much to bargain for or with, as for the Liberals, the universities’ staff, students, and faculty remain net zero workers.

Politics in British Columbia: 14 May election results.

What happened? With all due respect NDP (and I voted NDP), please quit the laughable fiction suggesting that their negative campaign simply overshadowed our positive campaign–their power out-spun our truth. For sure, the NDP was out-campaigned and badly so. Out-witted and out-strategized would be other ways of describing this. What’s worse than a Liberal? A smug Liberal. But hey, at least we have the Vancouver-Point Grey and Vancouver Fairview ridings, two of the few flies on the windshield of that ostentatious red parade float!

Visibly fussed the day after the election, the best the NDP could muster up was the simplistic negative v positive excuse. Even some among the left press, such as The Georgia Straight, could find nothing to say but to parrot the NDP: “It’s sad, but negative politics rule” the Straight began its “NDP Grapples with Stunning Loss” story. NDP candidate George Chow, who went down in defeat in the Vancouver-Langara riding, decried that they lost because “negativity works.” George Heyman, who displaced the Liberal Minister of Health in the Vancouver-Fairview riding went as far as to mystifyingly say that the Liberals’ “negative campaign” “turns people off.” One does not have to be a strategy or policy wonk to know that the Liberals hardly ran a negative campaign and those who argue they did appear clueless, or more generously are understandably squeezing sour grapes from what’s left of the BC NDP’s election machinery. A federal NDP MP joined in nonetheless: the Liberals’ victory “shows the power of negative politics,” he said. C’mon now, who are we trying to kid? The ridings that went red and went to the Liberals– nay, all of us–deserve a believable and better explanation from the NDP for what happened on election day.

What happened? Is not BC a conservative province and the Liberals just as well neoliberals or neocons? Isn’t liberalism and neoliberalism basically the same at this point in time? The glove fits the hand that feeds business, if not business as usual. We know that Canada as a whole has become quite comfortably conservative. In BC, Gordon Campbell brought the Liberals to victory in 2001 and the province took a right turn that obviously sits right with a majority of the people. In this week’s election on 14 May, there were pockets of ‘vote the bums out’, such as in my riding where we did vote out the Liberals’ very astute strategist and standing Premier Christy Clark. But for the most part, if you lean left toward NDP, election night sadly trended from ‘vote the bums out’ to ‘vote the bums in’.

Now, as #IdleNoMore confronts #IdleForeverMore, it is going to be an interesting four more years in BC.

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Jim Sinclair: The terrible truth about the Liberals’ jobs plan #bcpoli

Posted on May 11, 2013 by | Comments Off on Jim Sinclair: The terrible truth about the Liberals’ jobs plan #bcpoli

Jim Sinclair, President, B.C. Federation of Labour, May 10, 2013 — It is perhaps one of the more twisted ironies of this election that Premier Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals are running on their record of job creation, a record they would probably be smarter to run away from.

Their much touted B.C. Jobs Plan has been discredited by the facts — more than 30,000 jobs have been lost since its inception. The latest figures show that B.C. lost 15,000 full-time jobs in March, setting off the largest rise in Canada. What to do when the facts don’t add up? Answer: buy ads.

While the last provincial budget cut money from programs that train workers, the Liberals could find $16 million of taxpayers’ money to try and sell us on the failed jobs plan.

But perhaps the most blatant example of the betrayal by this government on the critical issue of jobs has been its role in promoting the use of temporary foreign workers in British Columbia. Today, our province is breaking Canadian records for growth in the use of foreign workers — more than 74,000 — while at the same time more than 200,000 British Columbians are struggling to find a job and thousands cannot get the training they need.

The most high-profile case in this long, sorry story has been the HD Mining proposal to bring more than 200 miners from China to work in Northern B.C. During her trip to China, Clark announced that the B.C. Jobs Plan was working because the company was investing in the province. Nothing, it turns out, could be farther from the truth.

The facts are well known. The company claimed they could not find one single British Columbian to work at the mine. Not only that, the company claimed it would be four years before a single Canadian would be hired — and 14 years before Canadians would fully run the mine.

Yet more than 70 of the temporary work permits were granted for “low skill” workers. More than 300 Canadians applied, some with years of experience, and not one was hired. In China, HD Mining has a three-month training program for miners.

The more the facts came out, the more the people of B.C. knew something was rotten.

But the smell did not reach Victoria. Did the Liberal government stand up for jobs in our province? Absolutely not. Court documents — available thanks to construction unions spending hundreds of thousands of dollars standing up for us — show clearly that the government secretly supported the plan to bring in the workers. They even went so far as to pressure federal government officials “on a daily basis” to open doors as soon as possible.

They were successful. Within weeks, the company got the permits and British Columbians lost the jobs.

Was this an isolated event? Not in the least. According to briefing notes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, for three years the government held information sessions “for mining companies, concerning labour-market opinion and work-permit processes.”

The truth is that rather than training British Columbians to take the jobs and support their families, the government was training employers to bring in foreign workers to take those jobs.

In their glossy election platform document the Liberals proclaim that “creating jobs is the best thing we can do to protect a brighter future for B.C. families.” British Columbians would be right to ask — jobs for whom? Which families?

We are at the crossroads in British Columbia. The road to prosperity is not allowing companies to bring in temporary foreign workers in record numbers while we starve training programs for British Columbians.

Completion rates for apprenticeships have dropped to 37 per cent, the lowest in decades. Apprenticeship offices were boarded up around the province at a time when need was the greatest.

We need a government that will put British Columbians first, that will work with business and labour together to ensure the benefits of our economic development finds its way into the pockets of British Columbians who spend the money supporting local businesses and communities.

The choice is clear. On May 14, vote for change to ensure that our kids have a chance to proper training, decent jobs and to live in a province were the needs of all British Columbians come first.

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NDP Leader Adrian Dix calls for pause in Capilano U program cuts #bcpoli

Posted on May 9, 2013 by | Comments Off on NDP Leader Adrian Dix calls for pause in Capilano U program cuts #bcpoli

Posted by Capilano University Faculty Association, May 8, 2013:

Thank you for your letter highlighting your concerns about the future of Capilano University’s Studio Arts and Textile Arts programs. We understand that the university is facing a $1.3 million budget shortfall, which has threatened about 220 classes in the areas of studio arts, textile arts, interactive design, applied business technology programs, and more.

Times have been tough for BC universities for the past few years. The BC Liberals’ 2013 budget cut funding for the Ministry of Advanced Education by 2.5 per cent or $46 million over the next three years. Every president of BC’s 25 universities and colleges signed a letter protesting these planned cutbacks in 2012. Colleges throughout British Columbia have been forced to cut budgets and reduce programs as a result – the cut of Capilano University’s Arts and Textile Arts programs is surely a result of this.

Education and skills training is the number one priority of the BC NDP, and our platform commits to a needs-based student grant program as well as investing in skills training and apprenticeships. Eighty per cent of the jobs of tomorrow will require some form of post-secondary education or training and access to education is key to growing a sustainable economy that will attract investment, create good jobs, and build ladders of opportunity into a strong middle class.

The decision to cut these programs is ultimately the decision of Capilano University’s Board of Governors, but we urge them to wait until after the May 14th election. The plan does not need to be rushed through. The decision should wait until a new government in BC has the chance to discuss the future of these programs with Capilano University and determine if any additional funding is available at that time.

Sincerely,

Adrian Dix, BC NDP Leader
Vancouver Kingsway

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Posted in Accountability, Advocacy, BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Economics, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Students, Unions, Working conditions

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8 Big Reasons to Boot the BC Liberals #bcpoli

Posted on April 9, 2013 by | Comments Off on 8 Big Reasons to Boot the BC Liberals #bcpoli

BC Federation of Labour
8 Big Reasons to Boot the BC Liberals

  1. Here are 8 big reasons to vote for change in 2013
  2. Hydro rates keep going up because of expensive private power projects
  3. Raw log exports totalled over 6 million cubic meters last year
  4. BC Liberals spent $15 mil in ads about a skills shortage but cut funding for training by $37 mil #reasons4change
  5. Students deserve better than larger classes and less one on one time with teachers #reasons4change
  6. Hallways and Tim Hortons shouldn’t double as a post-op facility
  7. For thousands of children that go hungry, BC is anything but the best place on earth #reasons4change
  8. BC seniors are not getting the respect they have earned

Copyright © 2013 B.C. Federation of Labour, All rights reserved.

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“Premier’s plan is flawed:” BCTF responds to plan to undermine bargaining

Posted on January 25, 2013 by | Comments Off on “Premier’s plan is flawed:” BCTF responds to plan to undermine bargaining

Premier Christy Clark’s proposed plan for a 10-year deal with public school teachers  ignores court rulings, contradicts government’s own legislation, and risks scuttling a positive bargaining framework on the eve of its expected ratification by  the BC Teachers’ Federation and the BC Public School Employers’ Association.

“The premier’s plan is flawed in a number of significant ways,” said BCTF President Susan Lambert.

“The key problem is that it ignores the ruling of the BC Supreme Court that teachers have the right to bargain working conditions, such as class size and class composition. The Liberals’ own Bill 22 also allows for these issues to be negotiated in this round but her new plan requires teachers to give up this hard-won right. Over the past decade, when Liberal policy regulated learning conditions, class sizes grew and support for students with special needs suffered,” Lambert said.

As a consequence, BC has the worst student-educator ratio in the country, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada. In order to bring BC’s teacher staffing levels just up to the national average, the province would have to hire an astounding 6,800 more teachers.

Another major problem is the indexing of teachers’ salaries to average increases of other government employees. “This is fundamentally unfair because it effectively prohibits teachers from negotiating for their own salaries,” Lambert said. “Under such a scheme government has all the cards. The average of net zero is zero.” BC teachers’ salaries are lagging far behind those of other teachers in Canada, and the gap will only widen under this plan, she added.

Lambert questioned the government’s timing on today’s announcement, given that it comes one day before the beginning of the BCTF’s Representative Assembly and the BCPSEA’s annual general meeting. Representatives of both organizations are slated to vote on a new Framework Agreement which offers a positive process for the upcoming round of bargaining.

“In recent months we’ve quietly had productive conversations with the employer about how to achieve a smoother more effective round, and it’s most unfortunate that government chose to intervene at this time,” Lambert said. “The BCTF will continue to recommend ratification of the Framework Agreement and we hope this abrupt announcement from government will not prevent BCPSEA from doing the same.”

On the surface the premier’s rhetoric sounds conciliatory after more than a decade of conflict between the BCTF and the BC Liberals but, in reality, her plan is yet another effort to severely limit teachers’ constitutional right to bargain.

Read More: BCTF News Release

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Posted in Advocacy, BC Education, Campaigns & Contracts, Employment rights, Government, K-12 issues, Legal issues, Politics, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions, Working conditions

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Pro-Labour NDP Open to Real Bargaining with Unions in BC

Posted on November 16, 2012 by | Comments Off on Pro-Labour NDP Open to Real Bargaining with Unions in BC

Feeling pressures of government intervention and the net zero worker mandate of the Liberal Government’s Public Sector Employer’s Council (PSEC), CUPE 2278 Teaching Assistants curtailed job action and the University of British Columbia ratified an Agreement yesterday.  The 0%, 0%, 2%, 2% wage increases for the 2010-2014 contract is in line with the average annual increases of just 0.3% for public employees in the province, the lowest in Canada.

With an upcoming election in the spring of 2013, at this point unions are better off deferring settlements and betting that the 99% have had it with the BC Liberals and will elect an NDP government on 14 May 2013.  After years of the Liberals suppressing wages under PSEC’s net zero worker mandate, which made wage negotiations with employers a fiction, bargaining with the NDP will actually be bargaining.

NDP leader Adrian Dix has demonstrated the signs necessary to lead a pro-labour party to election victory and was quite candid about this in a recent interview with BCBusiness:

Public-sector unions have tolerated “net-zero” wage controls in recent years, but tolerance seems to be wearing thin. Would you be in favour of substantial “catch-up” wage hikes?
You negotiate at the bargaining table and what we’ve had over the last period was real inconsistency from the current government in the way they’ve treated public-sector unions. You’ve had, contrary to specific promises, the tearing up of contracts. Can you imagine engaging in that practice on the business side and that being good for the economy? The [current] government’s bills 27, 28 and 29, which were singularly important in health and education bargaining, were found to be illegal in the courts. That’s their approach. We had to pay for those actions. So I think you need to be balanced in these things.

These are difficult fiscal times and I expect negotiations to be difficult and challenging. Remember, the government at the bargaining table right now is offering wage increases. Should they be offering wage increases? I think the Liberals have answered yes. In order to get agreements in these next two years they’re offering wage increases right now as we speak. So they’re no longer at net zero. You only have one government at a time and they’re negotiating right now. My recommendation to all parties is that they negotiate at the bargaining table.

Read more: BCBusiness November 2012

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