Last Fair Deal in the Country
The CUPE 3903 Strike in Historical Perspective
June 14, 2024
I never knew the power
That I held inside my palm
Until I joined the union and
We marched each day at dawn,
As joined in hands we’re stronger than
We ever thought we’d be
Be wary, Oh employer of
3903
—Tyler Shipley, CUPE 3903 “Song for The Lines” AKA “We’ll Go All the Way” (2008)
The class war between employers and workers over the product of Labor goes on without letup. ‘Settlements’ in wage movements, whether these are accompanied by strikes or not, are at best only truces in the ceaseless struggle, only turning points where the struggle takes on new forms. The employers will continue to try to destroy the workers’ standard of living and break the unions; the workers will continue to build their unions and to advance their interests. Organization campaigns, strikes, settlements and their aftermath, are but various phases of the one great process of class struggle under capitalism.
—William Z. Foster, “Strike Strategy” pamphlet, Trade Union Educational League (1926)
1: They Pull Me Back In
My union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 3903, fought a hard struggle against our employer, York University, in late winter and early Spring 2024. Our local is made up of about two-thirds graduate student workers—these are mostly teaching assistants in the first of five bargaining units, Unit 1. There is also a number of graduate assistants (Unit 3). The remaining third or so are in Unit 2 and are contract faculty (what I am calling adjuncts). Some of these adjuncts have quite recently exhausted their PhD funding; many others have been at York for decades.1There is also a somewhat recently-organized Unit 4, representing library workers, and the brand new Unit 5, representing workers at the York University-based Canadian Observatory for the Homeless. Neither of these bargaining units were on strike. This year’s strike was my fourth as a member of CUPE 3903 and my third as a very active member. I previously struck as a graduate assistant; I was an MA Student editing a departmental journal in 2008. I struck again in 2015, as a PhD student and political theory TA. I was a mostly inactive “political member” (a member within a year of their last contract), for the first few months of the ill-fated 2018 strike: I had defended my PhD the previous summer but not yet, as we say in 3903, “broken into” Unit 2. I am now a member of Unit 2 and teach mostly in the department of Politics—in addition to any other work that I am qualified and can snap up. Adjunct life: if you know, you know.
Beyond implications for our local, the following reflections reveal key questions for socialists and other radicals operating in the labor movement and in social movements generally. These reflections are particularly applicable in the academic sector and most especially in academic unions that bridge different workforces. First and foremost is always to keep in mind that trade unions operating within the capitalist mode of production serve a dual purpose. They are institutions of the working classes, defending working-class gains and furthering our interests. Yet, structurally, they also serve to buttress and juridically enshrine acceptable and unacceptable means with which our class can defend its interests, and to determine how far our class may go in doing so. In turn, even the limits upon acceptable means shift at the whim of employers and of the ruling classes. Our members experienced this when police attacked a picket line our union had used for at least a quarter century. In the face of a picket captain’s arrest, naturally the union insisted that to strike is a charter-protected right. Yet, as the old man says, between equal rights, force prevails.
In this sense, radical trade unionists need to see our central role as one of building space and decentralizing power—and not simply to concentrate on gaining formal, institutional leadership. Yet over the past decade, 3903, not alone among left-led trade unions, has increasingly focused its attention on the latter strategy. Here, a cautionary tale: in response to internal threats from politically questionable forces in the last ten years, radicals in 3903 consciously oriented towards gaining “formal” hegemony through constituting a majority of the union’s executive committee. Yet the increase in formal hegemony has occurred alongside a decrease in substantive hegemony. A corollary to this lesson is that in unions including members with significantly different incomes, both within bargaining units and between bargaining units, to ensure solidarity among them is perhaps the most important practice, both officially and from below. Special effort should be expended to foster solidarity among members who have carved out a decent living and those who are among the working poor.
The following reflection on the events of this year is by no means comprehensive and does not aim to illuminate the specifics of the strike in a microsense.2This has been done elsewhere, notably in an intervention published immediately post-strike by the CUPE 3903 Black Tie Collective, and in a very detailed interview with veteran rank-and-filer (and Spectre contributor) Neil Braganza in Marxist Worker. It is also meant to be a comradely critique and I sincerely hope that CUPE 3903 members, my old and new friends, can take in what I have to say here without the “shooting of the messenger” that has sometimes been the case in recent years in our local. My purpose here is to examine the strike within the context of CUPE 3903’s historical role as not just a militant union but as a progressive pole of attraction within the labor movement in the greater Toronto area, and at some points even an organizing space.
Broadly speaking, our contribution to the class struggle in Toronto has been exemplary overall. There may be more than a fair amount of “inside baseball” contained here, but no more than is necessary. Trade unionists across sectors may well identify with some of the internal dynamics described here over a twenty-five-year period. Rank-and-file members who have come in more recently may be interested to know the history behind the internal and external forces shaping our struggles. As Ellen Wood classically points out, “economism” often corresponds to the reality of capitalism itself. It is not merely based on “false consciousness,” but on a contextually determined “take” on what will best serve the workers’ material interests. The two primary groups of workers in 3903 develop and redevelop distinct forms of economism. Even if the two groups’ material interests sometimes diverge, they are at least theoretically balanced within our long-held custom of coordinated bargaining.
The bigger story here is CUPE 3903’s internal shift towards business-unionist and centralizing practices we once inveighed against.3As someone who was on the strike-time communications committee for the union, I was often frustrated at not merely the amount of “vetting” that “content” needed, but also the focus on creating a “brand” for 3903, as if we don’t already have one! This shift was not inevitable; it resulted from specific (and often understandable) choices made in the face of debilitating divisions between and within bargaining units. This shift, however, has a structural explanation, primarily concerning the increasing focus, among left forces in the union, on securing institutional leadership. In turn, left layers in 3903 tend to be less oppositional than they had been historically, whatever the political stripe of the executive committee. Certainly 3903 is more democratic than just about any other; our tenured colleagues in York University Faculty Association (YUFA), among others, would love to have the limited degree of open bargaining that we have. Yet, over the last nine years or so, we have looked inwards. What this has led to is captured well by Sam Gindin who, pointing out the limits of social unionism, writes, “unions can be more democratic and combative yet this may only translate into more aggressively pursuing their own specific needs, what Raymond Williams called ‘militant particularism’.”
With some notable and indeed important exceptions, 3903 is far less institutionally tied to the broader left in Toronto than it was even a decade ago; but this shift is not uncommon given the general weakening and dispersal of left forces in the Greater Toronto Area. No doubt, many dedicated rank-and-filers across all units are politically active, especially with regards to Palestine solidarity, climate justice, and Indigenous land struggles. This activism suffuses the best of our space, but simply is not as much the norm as it once was. In turn, our membership, notwithstanding an admirable and exceptionally courageous rank-and-file network, is just as willing to strike as it ever was, but far less politically sophisticated beyond this “militant minority.”4Picketers this time around were especially courageous in the face of police repression and York’s stoking the flames of multiple violent picket-line incidents. Picketers were resilient even in the face of the arrest of a picket captain. They shifted line positions as necessary, deployed flying squads to fuck shit up, and did all the good stuff a union should be doing. The presence of “hard pickets” was once controversial to raise in our local. This, as well as the attempted disruption of construction work, revealed a battle-readiness among the picketing hardcore. That being said, I know of multiple stories of other members duped into scabbing, told by departmental managers that teaching online wasn’t crossing the picket line. The union had to do an information campaign about this. There was an unprecedented amount of scabbing in the strike, to a point that it was difficult in some milieux to even exert any social sanctions, let alone sanctions from the union. This worker and others have critiqued these trainings as teaching a top-down method in which “the organizer” is the conductor, not the facilitator, and implicitly is either an elected officer or staff, not a “coworker.” The McAlevey model, notwithstanding her great victories in less politicized sectors, is a key factor in the eclipse of democratic practices in CUPE 3903. A sophisticated and refreshingly sober layer has emerged from the “school of struggle,” as Kyle Bailey and I have called CUPE 3903 strikes. This being said, it is the eclipse of 3903’s historic connection to class struggle politics that threatens to become a long-term issue for our local today; this eclipse therefore is at the center of the broader set of internal issues that arose during the strike.5There are pockets of 3903 that still engage in broader left initiatives through the union, such as Jane McAlevey’s “Organizing for Power.” No doubt McAlevey is an influential figure for some of the rank-and-file and Executive members right now. These educationals are not without their critics on the union far left, with one IWW member pointing out that “radical-sounding phrases being thrown around, the ‘workers rising’ was just bog-standard business unionism reunited with the lost enthusiasm of its heyday.” R. Totale, “My Thoughts after Attending the ‘Workers Rising Everywhere’ Training: A Critique of the McAlevey Organizing Model,” libcom.org, July 30 2021, https://libcom.org/article/my-thoughts-after-attending-workers-rising-everywhere-training-critique-mcalevey-organising. This worker and others have critiqued these trainings as teaching a top-down method in which “the organizer” is the conductor, not the facilitator, and implicitly is either an elected officer or staff, not a “coworker.” The McAlevey model, notwithstanding her great victories in less politicized sectors, is a key factor in the eclipse of democratic practices in CUPE 3903. Whether or not the new rank-and-file network can address these issues and build cross-unit solidarity is the key question now for CUPE 3903 itself.
school – presser mid-strike
2: Reading 3903 History Backwards
Historically speaking, 3903 has consistently provided both practical and material support for the social movements in this city. In terms of the latter, we helped pay rent for vital social movement organizations such as Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. OCAP, which recently dissolved after over thirty years of service, was a historic and nonsectarian militant antipoverty group. Alongside all factions of the broad left, OCAP creatively fought multiple ruling class institutions, through the fabled 1990s “days of action” to the famous so-called “OCAP riot.” This is not to mention countless day-to-day actions helping those without housing and the more marginalized fractions of the working classes, generally. Indeed, our historic slogan, “Strike to Win,” is an adaptation of OCAP’s “Fight to Win.” Social movement funding was always a part of our budget, as has often been legal defense for our members involved in a variety of movement struggles. We were the first union local in Canada to champion the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions campaign and help popularize it within CUPE and the labor movement more broadly. Organizers rooted in CUPE 3903 helped lead to the provincial federation, CUPE Ontario’s Resolution 50, which passed in 2006—eighteen years ago!! This was perhaps the first significant large North American union federation’s adoption of BDS. We continue to be a solid contributor on that front. Members of 3903 populated pretty much all social movement or left organizations in Toronto, from healthy to unhealthy. Members and supporters were major contributors to the 2010 G20 protest organizing in Toronto and its aftermath, with significant overlap between 3903 and the “co-conspirators” who faced political repression. Members of 3903 also formed a significant layer of the ill-fated but sometimes innovative experiment of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly (GTWA), not to mention countless other socialist and anarchist organizations and publications.
In the annals of significant twenty-first century left scholarship, whether in the Historical Materialism book series (and journal and conferences), or other imprints/milieux, 3903 veterans—often thanking their former union—form a significant, influential, and international fraction of left academia. In a sense, we are everywhere: in other faculty unions, as members or staff, and as union staffers; in the social democratic New Democrats, and even in some notable instances, the centrist Liberal party. In a deliciously ironic circumstance, one of the Deans at York, a certain JJ McMurtry, presiding over an institution that openly recruited scabs, was a member of 3903. This is perhaps where “critical academia” lays out its test—be willing to preside over an institution that recruits scabs. Certainly, JJ would hardly be the first “critical” academic affiliated with York University to side with management against labor.
3903 first developed its reputation in the strike in which our JJ was an enthusiastic participant, the hard fought 2000 struggle defending tuition indexation. That is to say, pegging any increase in tuition for graduate students with a commensurate increase in funding for teaching assistants and applying the same principle in turn to graduate assistants, after an organizing drive in the previous round. This strike is best captured by one time member, and longtime Toronto socialist activist, Clarice Kuhling. The first of five battles, perhaps unlike the four that followed it over the last quarter century, was fought by people in the thick of the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It overlapped with veterans of the “Days of Action” during which the left-wing of the workers’ movement, and organizations like OCAP, struggled against the right-wing Mike Harris provincial government. These participants, together with members who were themselves informed by rank-and-file strategy-oriented traditions, created a union full of troublemakers and a “workerist” orientation in the best possible sense. The institutional memory of this layer helped hone the tools of 3903, bringing in open bargaining or, as we used to call it, “bargaining from below.” At its best, this was not about members “observing” bargaining, but members essentially joining the bargaining team and often exerting informal power greater than the formal power of the team itself.
From the onset of open bargaining in the early 2000s until at least the 2015 round of bargaining, open bargaining was truly open. Meetings of the team would perhaps privilege BT members, but all members present had a say. Members may not have had votes, of course, but we implicitly had veto power. At points at which the bargaining team went against a key union constituency—such as with the dropping of Unit 3 demands during the 2008/2009 strike—they could be and were compelled by membership pressure to restore these demands. When the union was led by antistrike “#renewal slate” forces during the 2015 strike, for example, rank-and-filers were able to hold the bargaining team accountable and ensure that they “stuck within our red-lines,” as the saying went, chest-thumpers that we were. I won’t soon forget those long days during those strikes, whether at dingy hotel conference rooms in Downsview or down at the Ministry of Labour. Open bargaining is no longer truly open in that sense, a point to which I will return.
3: 2024 and the Specter of the JSP
The purely material aim of the 2024 strike was a solid increase in wages to make up for the public sector wage cap enacted by right-wing Ontario premier Doug Ford via Bill 124, which was overturned by the courts not long before the strike. All of this occurs against a backdrop of a severe cost of living crisis. Like all public sector workers, 3903 was not just negotiating for wage increases for the period of the contract we were about to begin, but also for retroactive wage increases. 3903’s goal was to catch up with inflation, with special attention paid to our most destitute members, whether teaching assistant/grad students or adjuncts who teach just one course a year (bringing in just shy of twenty grand before taxes). On wages, and monetary issues in general, one can’t but see this strike’s result as underwhelming in an absolute sense, even if successful in a relative sense. Our wages have not kept up with inflation, yet they are sector leading. This is a reality that we do not have the strength in numbers to fight. This was sobering and sometimes demoralising for a lot of members as the strike came to its conclusion (and especially given the already insufficient internal political education prior to the strike). Not only did our wages not rise sufficiently in an overall sense, but perhaps more distressingly, our benefits package had also deteriorated so much in value that we have been taking material concessions on it for the entire time I’ve been a member. We have the same coverage for paramedical expenses that we did a decade ago. Once again, this really was the best we could do, given the balance of forces, not the least significant of which was our own long-term decline in strength as a union local, alongside York’s innovation at embodying the sweet spot in the dialectic of malice and incompetence.
This defeat, however, was accompanied by a victory. The perhaps more structurally important aim of the strike was to fight off our employer’s union-busting move, the so-called “Job Stability Program.” The JSP would fundamentally shift our model of hiring away from a balance of seniority, incumbency, and qualifications, which, while not without flaws, was a great step forward for adjuncts. Before the unionization of our sector, adjunct faculty workforces were dominated by star academics’ favorite pupils and/or nepo-baby children of university donors. Having a union and hiring based on qualifications and seniority in its own right, for all of its flaws, is actually something many adjuncts don’t have; it is a historical gain for the academic working class. Nominally “part time” workers have been able to carve out careers and dignified standards of living by giving years and even decades of service to York University.
Rejecting some unicorn known as “job stability,” from the employer’s standpoint or even our own, at a time when building a life beyond precarity is just beginning to be possible due to our historic battles and the system in place which we’ve already won, should be a no-brainer. This does not, obviously, preclude the development of job stability mechanisms for adjuncts, such as the ones we have already. In the last instance, for our sector, job stability does not exist, and cannot exist, insofar as we are precariously employed adjuncts. We do have programs which do not conflict with our general hiring model and that allow for a theoretically guaranteed workload for multiple years for members who have themselves worked at a given rate of intensity for a set number of years, depending on the program. Yet these programs themselves do not guarantee that departments—even progressive departments—will comply with them, as in the case of the so-called Continued Sessional Service Program (CSSP). Other programs provide a tad more assurance, but the only genuine job stability program that CUPE 3903 has is when our adjuncts can be converted to the tenure track. As noted, we didn’t do that well on conversions this round, to say the least. It is, however, nice to see how many conversions there are amongst my departmental colleagues.
Under our current model, hiring is predicated upon a candidate’s suitability for both the required and preferred qualifications for a teaching posting. If one has incumbency for a course, that is to say, if one has taught it in the previous thirty-six months, then one is deemed to have these qualifications. Under the employer’s JSP, a worker’s application is separate from any given position, giving the employer significant discretion, based on a “teaching file,” over whom is hired for what course. Under the current model, the job must go to the senior qualified candidate and if errors are made, they can be grieved. Under the JSP, the employer has total discretion. Under our current contract, adjuncts are able to teach up to 5.5 full course equivalents a year, while the JSP would effectively lower the cap to 3.0 full course equivalents, which could lead to a very significant loss of work and income for some members. There were countless other calumnies in the employer’s plan that would lead to job and income loss. This was particularly the case for graduate students wanting to “break into” Unit 2, members with low intensity workloads (hence not teaching enough to qualify for this new program that would eventually absorb all adjunct work), and members with high intensity workloads who would lose some of their work. Essentially speaking, the JSP was union busting.6This paragraph draws on an infosheet put together by Neil Braganza.
Essentially speaking, the JSP was union busting.
One would think defending our very model against union busting would be a big strike issue from the jump, but for reasons to be discussed, it had to become an issue in its own right. The union itself did not really talk about it until pushed to do so. For those of us who were animated about the JSP, it was not politically difficult when rank-and-file adjuncts, who saw it as a key issue for the strike, used word-of-mouth and produced information sheets to unite all bargaining units against union busting. Yet, it was institutionally difficult to make the JSP an issue that became part of our narrative. Certainly, at least some members of the bargaining team took it seriously and rank-and-filers of all units eventually knew they were fighting it. We could not have defeated the JSP without the courage of the picketers and rank-and-file Unit 2s mobilizing from below around the issue. It did, however, take a fair amount of effort and some minor squabbling.
Truth be told, however, opponents of the JSP butted heads with those who had championed the so-called “graduate job stability program.”7After the previous round of bargaining, the union ill-advisedly entered into a labor-management cooperation initiative with the employer, a so-called “Job Stability” committee. In hindsight, this was an explicit opportunity for the employer, using the language of equity and job stability, to sell the union on disempowering itself. While the talks fell apart, a “graduate job stability program” was developed as one of 3903’s bargaining proposals. At first, members at a General Membership Meeting accepted this program without much discussion. That meeting was mostly made up of people socially acquainted with, and intrinsically trusting towards, those who had negotiated the program. Then members, especially adjuncts, read the fine print and were outraged at the bargaining team, who were compelled to change direction in the face of members threatening to vote against a strike mandate. The BT, to its credit, shifted our “job stability” demands to “status quo” programs with some gains. This last-minute shift left us far less prepared to refuse concessions once we finally beat the JSP. At one town hall for adjuncts, when the JSP had long been accepted as a central strike issue, one influential member seemed to defend it in an attempt to “correct” a rank-and-file member’s fact sheet (to its credit, the union leadership did agree to send that fact sheet out in our newsletter). That the JSP motivated a leading member to situate themselves outside and above rank-and-file sentiment—and not for the first time—is reminiscent of Brecht’s “the Solution.” It was often the case that some leading members seemed to want to dissolve the membership and elect a new one. Previous to this, one Unit 2 member, along with graduate students, had drafted an infographic making the claim that it was “high seniority” members who mostly opposed the JSP—an ageist and insulting argument, especially coming from official circles.
From this perspective, higher seniority members or members who taught at a high intensity were “privileged” and that work should be “redistributed” amongst unit members. To defend seniority and incumbency was absurdly seen as effectively an “antiwoke” position. Members tended to make an argument reminiscent of the problematic labor aristocracy framework, justifiably criticized by Charlie Post. Except in this case the proverbial labor aristocracy was within the union itself, with the higher seniority members being the core, and the lower seniority being the periphery. The fact that this line of thinking—literally reducing (or “redistributing”) the work, and thus income of some members—was seen as a legitimate position in a union context is revealing. Gone were the days where we would attempt to fight work shortages by calling for more classes, smaller classes, and lower thresholds for course directors to have access to TAs or marker/graders. Now a layer of the membership, having moved away from a class-struggle-derived analysis of how to fight against job loss, implicitly accepted the employer’s zero-sum game with regards to class(es). This leads to a logic that would in turn lead members who had eked out careers as adjuncts (teaching often twice as much as tenured colleagues) to a loss of employment and income.8Some thoughtful members do point out that seniority is not guaranteed: the employer can use all sorts of clauses to affect seniority and incumbency and can rewrite postings and retitle courses. More damning are circumstances in which seniority overrides both incumbency and qualification—situations in which for example BIPOC members are pushed out of teaching equity studies by white men with far less expertise instrumentalizing the grievance process. Issues like this should not lead to the “fuck seniority” argument some made at certain points, though it does provide a bit of context. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed on this question.
4: “Don’t Fuck with My Livelihood”
How did a layer of the membership—including some adjuncts—support a version of this employer-backed union-busting scheme which, in turn, led to its initial absence from the local’s list of priorities? To answer this question, and the question of the overall lack of interunit solidarity that occurred during the strike (primarily, it must be said, by economistic and often reactionary adjuncts), one must go right back to the dawn of the near-twenty-five-year “modern” history of 3903 and look beyond the mythology while celebrating our victories. The mythology—one that I bought into when entering graduate school sixteen years ago—was based on a kernel of truth in the aforementioned connections with the social movements and the internal democratic structures. Yet that is only one side of things. Another is the narcissism of small differences. Still another is the worst kind of grad student grandiloquence and self-righteousness combined with the worst kind of petty-bourgeois adjunct tactical caution and capitalist realism. I have met some of the most wonderful and terrible people in the world in my years in 3903, sometimes embodied in the same person. Lord knows, I’ve most likely been that person. I’ve made friends, enemies, and friends again with more people than I can remember. But lord knows, we don’t treat each other very well. None of us.
Beyond that, another piece of mythology that needs to be debunked is the easiest. We have never sufficiently balanced the interests of adjunct faculty and graduate student workers. Coordinated bargaining has brought material gains, but in three of the five strikes in the last quarter century, Unit 2 has voted to settle early. Whether this was based, as it often was, on political intrigue and bad faith, or was just plain economism, is immaterial. Any Unit 2 member with a coherent analysis of class struggle would acknowledge that it is through strikes primarily but not exclusively fought by grad student workers in Unit 1 that Unit 2 has, perhaps even more so than its grad student siblings, the best collective agreement in our sector. Even those who push early settlements do so after instrumentalizing the picket-line labor power of the graduate students.
With this being said, there are genuinely diverging interests with their own “spontaneous” ideologies that emerge within the context of concretely distinct material interests between adjunct faculty on the one hand, and teaching assistants and graduate assistants (both of whom are funded graduate students) on the other. This became clear during the strike when not just the “right wing” of Unit 2, but also the historic Unit 2 left, members with decades of history, were far more cautious on wages and far more proactive in pushing for moderation than were graduate student workers. In turn, however, graduate student workers, notwithstanding a fair amount of unfortunate generalization and even a hint of ultra-left Unit 1 chauvinism, which sometimes acted as a mirror image of (no doubt far more dangerous) right-wing Unit 2 chauvinism, generally acted with far more unconditional solidarity towards adjuncts than most adjuncts did towards graduate student workers.9At times, Unit 2s not associated with any known faction, nor known to be strike breaking, were shouted down at General Membership Meetings as “scabs” and “sunshine list,”: the latter is a conservative-introduced list published by the government, listing every public sector worker making over one hundred thousand dollars a year. No doubt such workers exist among the tiny fraction of our members teaching at the cap. Moreover, a member who teaches at cap might do so in one year and then the very next year, have no work at all. Year-by-year alternation between high-intensity and low-intensity teaching is the norm in our union. The anti-Unit 2 chauvinism and generalization that sprang up at certain points fortunately seems to have been nipped in the bud, though one still hears sometimes about Unit 2s who are told they are “honorary Unit 1s”, implying that the veteran socialist trade union organizers among adjuncts are perhaps not as “cool” as the TAs. Oh, well. In a strike in which the main issue for adjuncts was more easily dealt with than the issue of wages for graduate students living below the poverty line, adjuncts need to double down on activating and renovating interunit solidarity. Instead, a significant number of adjuncts were openly derisive of the “militants ruining it for everyone else.”
Yet for decades, the reactionary wing of Unit 2 has been trying to split the union. After back-to-work legislation ended the 2008/2009 strike, Unit 2 won the Long-Service-Teaching Appointment program in post-strike binding arbitration. This was possibly the first time that “a mechanism to stabilize teaching appointments and workloads for contract faculty has been achieved” in the Canadian academic labor movement. One of the prime aims of this latest round of bargaining was to defend the LSTA; to do this, we ended up having to drop other job stability demands. Yet in the face of winning the LSTA in the first place, something that united all members in celebration of something that could not have been achieved without a strike, the right wing of Unit 2, some of whom overlapped with the bargaining team in that round, started to throw its weight around.
In the summer of 2009, with many of their milieu on the post-strike executive, the right-wing executive members of Unit 2 even voted in a “temporary” abeyance on the cap limiting how many courses a member could teach. They themselves would be the obvious beneficiaries of this abeyance. Ostensibly, this was a response to members being seemingly inaccurately coded as having reached the cap, which prevented them from signing new contracts. Rank-and-filers in all three units, as well as progressive executive members, suspected something else was afoot—that such anomalies could be dealt with individually and were too rare to merit even a temporary change in policy. Even those who took these members at their word were harshly critical of this move. This change occurred alongside innuendos—likely spread by the same right-wing members—about the progressive strike-time union leadership and about activists from the strike committee (like me). In addition to all of this, as alluded to above, we treated each other like royal shit; the union left was very divided or scattered and demoralized. We came together across factional lines to defend our union’s historic positions on BDS, but the coolness of strike-time extended into the post-strike period.
In the face of this and the mounting pressure of CUPE National, not to mention of rank-and-file Unit 2s angry over this crowd violating the cap, the executive allowed itself to be taken under trusteeship/administration by the union bureaucracy. When progressive executive members tried to push back against this decision, another executive member reportedly shot back, “Don’t fuck with my livelihood.” The executive carried out this vote at a poorly attended meeting that was not announced to progressive executive members and barely had quorum. As a result, we no longer had an elected leadership. We had a bureaucrat sent in from headquarters as if it were the RCMP sending in a field agent. We considered our struggle akin to the antibureaucratic labour activism in the US at the time, the so “Civil War in US Labor,” particularly in California, where the National Union of Healthcare Workers was taken over by the SEIU. Members read their Steve Early and their Labor Notes. We saw ourselves as part of an international rank-and-file movement against union bureaucracy everywhere.
Rank-and-file members mobilized within an hour of the union’s surrender to the bureaucracy. By the next evening, over a hundred rank-and-file members gathered at a mass meeting, representing a renewed unity of what had, in the previous year, been a fractured left. We constituted the Ad Hoc Coalition against Administration, eventually to be renamed the Democratic Membership Committee. We had a coordinating committee that acted as a shadow executive. We polled members. We held meetings and had far more legitimacy than CUPE National’s appointed bureaucrats or the caretaker members who had stuck around the “executive” after selling us out. The battle against the bureaucracy had some of the same trappings as the strike but we also worked “with” administration, keeping our enemies close so as to monitor them the way they monitored us. Members played key roles on the bylaw committees and elsewhere, attempting to make the best of a situation in which National did everything possible to permanently alter our union.
While the Left worked “with and against” administration, the right in Unit 2 mobilized to split the union. Of course, they had been doing so for a decade or more, but now they seemed to pick up speed. Claiming they had been held back by graduate students—an absurd charge given that they would not have won the LSTA without a strike and coordinated bargaining—they gained converts to their cause. Some complained about our stance on Palestine, our First Nations Solidarity Work, and our activist focus in general. Others made wild and conspiratorial allegations about corruption and “fat cat” behaviour in the 2008/2009 strike. Some members even openly harassed 2008/2009 strike activists or former leaders over said “corruption.”10The union made some really dumb financial mistakes in the 2008/2009 strike, mostly having to do with the assumption that National would show good faith towards us. Cases of members accidentally going home with too many TTC tokens or some missing picket line sign-in sheets notwithstanding, there was no corruption of any kind. This didn’t stop right-wingers from making this charge even seven years later.
Yet National wasn’t having it. To the chagrin of those who thought National would save them, CUPE National’s administrator was an ally to those of us who opposed splitting the union. No matter how many “official” seeming votes the right pushed, National was not going to allow a split. Unit 2 would have to vote to decertify and then organize a new union. There are still some really bitter and deluded members who desire this outcome, those who likely scabbed this year, but this was a nonstarter. All the while, rank-and-file members continued coordinated struggle against administration, in particular with the help of members who were also law students. One of our members argued on our behalf against CUPE National in front of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, arguing for an end to administration in time for us to control our own next round of bargaining, something National didn’t want.
We won and, within just over a year, we had defeated the union bureaucracy from below. We had also been able to use our skills in self-organization and a rank-and-file strategy to constitute and continue to have a proverbial union-within-a-union. That round of bargaining, by a relatively newly liberated 3903, we actually did a good job convincing the employer we were ready for a strike (an open question, to say the least), and ended up, with the help of comrades, winning a half-decent collective agreement, with some significant gains, without a strike. Notably, grad students won a variation of post-residency fees, that is to say, funding increases after one’s years of coursework were done. Various direct actions during bargaining, from a visit by the famous CUPE school bus and comrades from other unions, including some parents of York students were helpful under these circumstances. York president Mamdouh Shoukri (a far less vindictive boss, in hindsight, than President Rhonda Lenton) seems to have given the go ahead to give us a signable deal. A deal without a strike wouldn’t happen again for a decade, and this may well have been one of the better CAs we signed during my years as a member under any circumstance, in particular for graduate student workers.
5: #Renewal and the crest of the All-Unit Wave
Over these next few years, the left in 3903 began a marked turn towards ensuring maximum left presence in “officialdom.” This came after a more mixed executive took us under administration. While we still had a thick rank-and-file network and were arguably more plugged into the labor movement (via the aforementioned Worker’s Assembly) than ever before, organizing from below in 3903 was very sporadic. The Stewards’ Council (SC), an official union body comprised, at least theoretically, of departmental stewards—those entrusted in enforcing the collective agreement as well as generally being of assistance to members, planning actions and so on—was not very active at all. Indeed, a lot of union effort in these years, for the left at any rate, was fighting off repeated attempts at splitting the union. This was not spontaneous—it was discussed among activists, the priority had to be the leadership.
At this time, licking its wounds from years of struggle, the union left was weak. A new layer emerged, those that would be called the #renewal slate. This was a strange crew of members of various socialist currents that may have had issue with 3903 at one point or another: a mysterious child protection service employee, apolitical members, and the right wing of unit 2. They had no trouble recruiting supporters amongst the free riders in Unit 2. Yet among graduate students, this new crowd had to play a novel game. And thus, in the fall of 2014, as elected leaders of the union, winning with the aid of a smear campaign against members who had been involved in the 2008/2009 strike, they bandied about the discredited corruption allegations and spread malicious gossip about a wide range of members, including me.
While not without its own axe-grinding and sectarian interests, the #renewal slate acted as a catspaw, ideologically aligned with the Unit 2 right. The slate recruited heavily from disciplines that had previously been ignored or rebuffed by the union. The #renewal slate was thereby able to show weaknesses in the 3903 left’s strategy. Yet its own attentiveness was restricted to sending text messages to key figures in specific departments during General Membership Meetings, ask those present to vote a certain way, and then leave. The basis of this clientelist relationship, with a milieu that even had scabs among it in the eventual strike, was that the union leadership was promising no strike to its key constituencies, such as apolitical and often well-funded STEM graduate students who worked as TAs or lab workers but often had funding beyond most graduate students in the social sciences and humanities. The promise made by the slate was that only they could stop the corrupt militants, later to be called “chest-thumping red-liners.”
Many feared a defeat worse than 2018, but others simply saw a union that, beyond a clearly dedicated core—mostly graduate students—did not at all appear prepared to strike.
Yet, York was pushing us into a strike position, a position that even the #renewal executive could not avoid. Rank-and-file members had to fight from below to allow the Stewards Council to function and to allow for the implementation of our bylaw to transform the SC into the Bargaining Mobilization Committee. And fight we did. No sooner was a strike called than the employer ostentatiously bought off Unit 2 with an offer that did bring its members serious gains—it created the most conversions to the tenure track of any round in our recent history. But it was very controversial, especially among the Unit 2 left, to vote for an offer that offered jack shit to the rest of us. Still, the union leadership was treating it like a done deal, and called the agreement historic, even with Units 1 and 3 thrown under the bus. Unit 2 settled, but it was close. Active members of Unit 2, including two memorable former members who became “Strike Mom” and “Strike Dad” to the graduate student workers who struck over the next three weeks, continued to show solidarity.
And strike to win is what we did. The 2015 strike, in spite of Unit 2’s early settlement, has a feeling of glory that was missing from the other strikes I’ve been around. This is partly because it was conducted in spite of an antistrike leadership, and often on the dime of the strike coordinators and picket captains. This feeling, familiar to us, of fighting both the employer and the bureaucracy is a feat that comes naturally in our antibureaucratic tradition. The bargaining team absolutely required open bargaining to be able to operate independently of the antistrike executive committee. Members like the aforementioned strike parents, a Bargaining Team member known by “Hat-man,” and others did a fine job ensuring we successfully defended tuition indexation, which as noted, pegged tuition to graduate funding, and was under attack once again.11Oddly, representing Unit 3 on the bargaining team, and not without skill, was future red-brown podcaster and Aimee Terese hype man, Adam Proctor. First having been won in 1998 but on a one-time basis, it was the major strike issue for Unit 1 and the newly organized Unit 3 in the big strike of 2000. Yet that year, York increased international student tuition by the tune of seven grand, claiming it now interpreted our CA negotiated right to only apply once someone was already on contract to York. The key aim of the strike was to tighten that language and protect international students in particular from this calumny. Yet it didn’t seem important to the #renewal slate leadership. The fact that we’d strike for a month for something that was at this point affecting a small number of our members didn’t seem to register. We were just “chest-thumping red-liners.”
This didn’t matter. However, official union communication was eclipsed by the popular CUPE 3903 Rank-and-File Network Facebook page, which often published its own bargaining report-backs. This, and more informal channels and networks (including a significant cadre of undergraduate supporters), circumvented official union communications and helped progressive members of the bargaining team chart an independent path. Members published on the strike in the US iteration of Socialist Worker and Jacobin.12US members of the defunct ISO took an interest in our strike and published me, ironically while the Canadian International Socialists, loyal to the SWP leadership during the “Comrade Delta” scandal, were with few exceptions actively hostile towards CUPE 3903. The architect of the #renewal slate was also a leading IS member. In the meantime, the (Unit 1 and 3) membership were united, not just against an employer, but also against a union leadership that took every opportunity to underfund or undermine the very strike they at least nominally led. Their STEM supporters, some of whom were apparently scabbing, were not enough to carry any votes for them. All the naysayers were proven wrong. We struck and won. As the common Wire-derived memes said at the time, “Come at 3903, you best not miss.” Unlike in 2024, this was unambiguous, and the pub gatherings took place well before the agreement was brought to the membership to ratify.
Yet the employer hit back after the 2015 strike, going on the offensive, nearly destroying the once mighty and always ready-for-a-fight Unit 3. Funding for MA students was almost entirely shifted away from graduate research assistantships and towards the so-called “fellowship” model, which also rendered many of the gains of the 2012 and 2015 rounds not so much moot but malleable. Not only did the fellowship decimate Unit 3, but it was also a major setback for Unit 1 funding. The move towards what the union is now calling “ATB” or across the board wage and funding increases is essentially winning back what we lost when the employer restructured our funding in 2016/2017, decoupling funding from income. This is further chronicled meticulously on CUPE 3903’s website, well worth reading for further background. But it is worth noting even moreso that this was a time in which the Unit 2 right continued their attempts to split the union, even in the face of their own success.
For the many members who had come into the union, a new collective image of Unit 2 was emerging. Unit 2 was the crowd that always settled early, the crowd that formed an alliance with the slanderous and devious #renewal slate. Oral history circulated that this was also the crowd that voted to take us under administration, the crowd that harassed and bullied people when called out for teaching beyond the cap. Decades of disengagement and Unit 2 settling early in three of five strikes led to this point at which a new common sense began to emerge in CUPE 3903, replacing the old all-unit common sense. The old common sense for radicals in 3903 was, as the slogan went in 2008, we were fighting for P, P, and P. That is to say, we were fighting for Unit 1s, or TAs to be above the Poverty line, for Unit 3s to have Parity with Unit 1, and for Unit 2 to fight the Precarity of the labor market for adjunct faculty. The struggles were inextricably intertwined. I remember thinking as a Unit 3 that I was striking for myself later in life, and now later, as an adjunct in my late forties, I reflect on how I gain from what I helped win way back in the day.
6: The Tim Horton’s Fallout
The new common sense was an identity very much around 3903’s status as a union of graduate student workers. This common sense was already prevalent in the union beforehand, but always entwined with the labor market. To be sure, as with now, there were always “honorary Unit 1s” as the saying now goes, among the still significant left faction of Unit 2. But we had to fight and have to continue to fight for our interests to be seen as part of the union’s broad common sense (as we did with regards to the JSP during this round of bargaining). This in and itself is neutral: it’s not negative so much as inevitable as a result of decades of some of the loudest (if not largest) elements of Unit 2 always throwing tantrums, ripping up their union cards ostentatiously at meetings, calling up CUPE National crying crocodile tears, and having secret meetings at donut shops. It was only so long that we could maintain this subjectivity of “all for one and one for all” with such a significant part of the workforce seeing their relationship with their coworkers outside of their own bargaining unit as at best transactional.
This transactional relationship, after all, led this crowd to an alliance with the bad actors of the #renewal slate, who instrumentalized antiunion sentiment to nearly prevent a strike. They did need a short strike to make their gains, but once the gains were made they beat a hasty retreat. This process led to the aforementioned shift in subjectivity and to an even more intense focus for the dwindling militant minority, at holding executive power at all costs. This came alongside the new subjectivity (that I inhabit) of being a “progressive Unit 2,” because the unspoken truth is that many of us are not progressive. Most of us are economistic and petty bourgeois “professionals.”
In turn, the 2018 strike, which I cannot analyze at the same level of detail as the 2008, 2015, and 2024 strikes, given my lack of formal membership, solidified all three of these moves within the union. This includes the drift between units, the drift within Unit 2, the concentration of Executive power, and transactional relationships replacing solidarity as the basis of relations between the primary units of the union, 1 and 2. The drift within Unit 2 became even more intense, with many progressive members referring to the Unit 2 list-serve (yes, some of us still use those) as the “hell-serve.” The nail in the coffin of even any pretense of the Unit 2 right believing in coordinated bargaining came in the Unit 2 bargaining team representatives’ secret meeting with the employer at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop, against union bargaining protocols, signing a separate agreement early. This was administration all over again.
Among those who came of age in the last decade in the union, but perhaps after administration and certainly after the 2008/09 strike (flawed as it was, based on an all-unit common sense), are those who are now low-to-mid seniority Unit 2s. Others of my vintage, who politicized around the 2008/09 strike, are still around and some serve on the Executive committee. Among the former, there is no memory of a time in the union in which there was a united common sense, a genuine sense of all-for-one and one-for-all. Any progressive Unit 2s that this crowd came in knowing were the exceptions, not the rule. The general impression of Unit 2 was not that of precariously employed adjuncts, it was cap-teaching fat cats. Of course this was not their sense of people in general, but it seemed to be their sense of the leading political forces in Unit 2. Truth be told, they were not wrong.
In the lean years of Covid, 3903 sputtered along but did a very good job institutionally in dealing with the pandemic. 3903 rank-and-filers really started to show a renewed fighting spirit in the context of members’ roles in the Ontario education workers battle against the province in summer leading into fall 2022. Of course this battle, as covered in The Breach, saw newly militant and McAlevey-trained workers ending up demoralized by the CUPE National bureaucracy who overrode progressive leaders and called off a potential general strike. That same individual who was a “moderating” force at that key moment of popular struggle, the rugged Mark Hancock, president of CUPE National, was a welcome speaker at our picket lines—and why not, really. It’s not like CUPE National is bothered by us anymore—not like when (former National president) Paul Moist got into a screaming match with us and one member jokingly challenged him to a duel. The point is that combativeness can exist alongside militant particularism, “sector leading” and all that shit, and both can exist alongside a relatively normal bureaucratic-style leadership—a left bureaucratic leadership, but bureaucratic, nonetheless. As one long serving executive officer, now a union staffer elsewhere, said, 3903 trained him to be a good left bureaucrat. And left bureaucrats are a good thing, but as this member and no doubt most others would concede, no substitute for building the working class.
The 2024 strike was one that a handful of veteran members and former members were concerned about even beforehand. Some active progressive Unit 2s genuinely believed it would not happen even after the strike mandate vote of December. The logic that the union must have known that we did not have a membership prepared to strike (let alone the budget)—even if we had strike worthy issues. Many feared a defeat worse than 2018, but others simply saw a union that, beyond a clearly dedicated core—mostly graduate students—did not at all appear prepared to strike. Even considering the militant minority that was clearly reconstituting itself in creative ways, there simply was not much known in the broader and inactive membership. This was quite the contrast with the previous strikes I’ve been around, in which one knew a strike was potentially coming for months. In my first week of graduate School in September 2008, there was already strike-prep happening for a strike starting that November. I was tabling for the union right after my graduate orientation.
7: It’s Not if We Move, but When We Move
This year, many long-time inactive members who had gradually become more involved did not even know the strike deadline until a few weeks before the deadline itself. Even after the successful strike mandate vote, YUFA colleagues had no inkling that we had a strike coming. Gradually, the unexpected became the clearly inevitable: the union did a very poor job conveying the likelihood of a strike to the general membership beyond the core of active (and mostly graduate student) members—until roughly three weeks before the strike itself—indeed from the moment of the no-board report and the press releases. At that point, it was still unclear. Even the strike itself, like its conclusion, came in two stages. First, there was a final offer General Membership Meeting (GMM) in which it was already clear that it wasn’t really a final offer GMM, in which we never were able to vote as to whether we were going to go on strike, which had to be followed by another meeting a week later. Contrasted with past experience of final offer GMMs as rousing, solidarity building events full of boasts of “world historical potential” and other such righteous grandiosity, this time it was a bunch of black boxes on Zoom, as it would continue to be. In past strikes—at least up to 2015, GMMs were political spaces in which deliberation took place. In 2024, to quote the meeting chair, the GMMs were specifically not deliberative or political spaces.
After a few weeks of very little movement, a minor governance crisis brewed.
And this was how the strike proceeded: a fumble here, a punt there, with steady improvement along the way—but in a top-down style that was strikingly different from 3903 of the past. To be sure, this did not prevent the rank-and-file from exercising its fighting spirit, forming flying squads, making tactical rank-and-file cultural interventions, gathering intelligence on scabs, all sorts of things. It did however render toothless any deliberative spaces in the union. Even the Strike Committee (of which I was not a member this time) had also apparently become primarily a decision-making space, not a strategic space. The strategic spaces, of course, were left to members on WhatsApp groups for their picket lines, list-serves and so on, but notably, unlike in past strikes in list-serve eras, there were no means of informal communications across units, factions, departments and social milieux. Thus, in the grand scheme of things, strategy, such as it was member driven, was executed by the agency of the informal power of the militant minority as much as anything else.
Yet the militant minority had to be reconstituted in a way that led it to see the strike more clearly. On the one hand, for the GMM not to be a deliberative space as it once was created a negative polarization between Unit 2s and TAs. Some Unit 2s were fearful for their livelihood and wanted the union to lower wage demands. They were backed up however, by reactionaries who used those Unit 2 pleas as an opportunity to bait graduate students. What was frustrating, at least for the first part of the strike, was building solidarity across units about the union-busting quality of the JSP. While this was clearly adopted by the rank-and-file as a strike issue, as noted this came with some effort. In turn, once it became an issue, there were even transactional suggestions. It became accepted, for example, that we needed to move on wages, but this was framed in business unionist-qua-radical language as “Unit 1 moving on wages,” which meant, as opined by some, that Unit 2 needed to “move on the JSP.” This distinction perhaps was not broadly shared by some in the leadership, but it was telling that the serious rank-and-filers saw this distinction quite clearly, in spite of the lack of solidarity towards them from the majority of my fellow adjuncts.
The issue with our bargaining strategy, then, was not politics so much as process. Moves were seen as transactional. It became a cliché on the bargaining team and its surroundings to state “it is not if we move, but when we move.” The transactional relationship we had with the employer was thus framed as a transactional relationship between bargaining units and seemed to even by seen by some as how bargaining strategy should proceed. Thus, a move by one unit could not be made if another unit did not have a sufficient move to make in turn. The unit specificity that National forced us to embed in our bylaws back during the days of administration mutated into how we hashed out our differences now, well ensconced in two parallel and often contradictory subjectivities. These subjectivities of course melt away in the concrete practice of class struggle, on the picket lines, and in other forms of union activity, from direct action to collaboration on media projects. Yet, there were fewer Unit 2s on the picket lines than ever before and lower turnout on the picket line, overall. The union very impressively allowed a robust “eighth line” to develop—meaning allowing for a diverse array of strike support activity (for example, activity for “picket pay”) for members needing accommodations for medical, disability, family or other purposes.13York’s main campus at Keele has seven entrances and Glendon has one entrance. Thus, in 2008, “alternative duties” became known as the “Ninth Line.” In 2015, Northwest gate was closed, becoming known as the “Eighth Line.” This name has stuck even as the other entrance has reopened. Now the story is told of the seven entrances at Keele campus. As someone in that position, anecdotally it did seem that Unit 2s were quite well represented and indeed quite active.
Yet all of this worked out to two “strike existences.” There were the hardcore—those who were on the “In Person” window at the Zoom GMMs, the flying squad cadre, the shit kickers who blocked cranes, evaded the pigs, built creative alliances with tradespeople and represented their class with pride. And there were those who were on the eighth line, or, like many adjuncts, unable to participate fully in the strike as we often work at two or three different universities. I know one member who was never able to make it to GMMs because they had to teach during all of them. These members form a not-insignificant percentage of Unit 2. The latter camp—the non-picketing but strike-supporting culture—included over one hundred people actively working on the eighth line and dozens of other progressive adjuncts working to support the strike in any way they could.14According to the treasurer at the April 19 special General Membership Meeting. The issue was a lack of communication between these subjectivities given that the GMM and other official bodies were not deliberative spaces.
It bears mentioning that from the beginning of the strike, York openly and brazenly recruited scabs. It often did so in manipulative and evasive ways. For example, politically shitty departmental chairs and directors would tell TAs in a given department that virtual work is not crossing a picket line. Like clockwork, some who fielded calls for the local heard from members asking them if this was OK, a sign of our general lack of political education. One of my own roles in the strike, through various networks, was to gather intelligence on scabbing. It was utterly astounding. Well-sourced rumors circulated that there were over six hundred courses being held that were taught in part or in whole by CUPE members. A majority of these courses were taught by YUFA members scabbing on their TAs in spite of their own union telling them not to do so. According to union bureaucracy standards, the union had only fifteen prima facie cases of scabbing; but that is utter nonsense, based on the absurdly high standard of accepting as evidence only date-stamped photographs of scabs caught in the act. Those in the know estimate there were at least several hundred instances of scabbing, given the amount of dues 3903 reportedly received from the months we were on strike.15Officially, the union leadership made the claim that there were only fifteen scabs who met the standards set by the union bureaucracy. That is to say, there was photographic or video evidence, or two eye-witness accounts from members of the local, of scabbing. Many were surprised by this. I myself had gathered intelligence on more than fifteen scabs. But screenshots of emails from scabbing TAs and professors coming from our many student informants— things that could not be faked—were not considered proper evidence. Of course, many rank-and-files have their own lists.
In some departments, anecdotally, striking colleagues placed no real social sanction on scabs. It was seen as a legitimate choice in some circles, in particular outside of traditionally progressive departments. Even in departments one would expect not to be scab-prone, there were scabs. YUFA colleagues also reportedly faced odd situations in which TAs were begging professors for the ability to scab. Shockingly, only a few weeks after the strike ended, the union circulated an “anonymous survey” for scabs, asking “What supports would have helped to prevent you from scabbing?” Perhaps proper political education and social (or otherwise) informal consequences would have done the trick? I reckon some solid rank-and-file members took direct actions, but this was disgustingly widespread without an effective deterrent. Post-strike, having signed away the ability to punish scabs, to then reach out to them with an olive branch was flabbergasting.
Blatant scabbing aside, the strike sputtered along with some impressive achievements by the rank-and-file, best of which was constituting itself for itself and also learning its own limitations. The union made impressive inroads in spreading awareness among the membership of the York’s absolute boondoggle of campus development in Markham, a large suburb just north of Toronto proper. Members engaged in direct actions and picket lines at the in-construction Markham campus and thoughts floated about reaching out to those working within the trades. Yet members seemed to learn that this strategy was not working. Short of the vast media campaign that we did not launch (but sure as hell should have) about York’s dabbling in restructuring programs while building new campuses and medical schools, simply picketing and causing some minor inconveniences to their project in Markham wouldn’t make a difference. The ability to soberly analyze the efficacy of combative tactics, as opposed to seeing them as an end in themselves was refreshing, compared even to when I myself was one of those adventurist types!
After a few weeks of very little movement, a minor governance crisis brewed. YUFA passed a motion of nonconfidence in Lenton; this was symbolically important in showing how united the workforce was in rejecting the agenda of current university president, and close ally of the right-wing provincial government, Rhonda Lenton. More importantly, and no doubt helped by the 3903 rank-and-file veterans on their staff, they filed a number of grievances over the restructuring that would be taking place. But more immediately salient to 3903’s interest, YUFA grieved the JSP, the police presence on the lines, and the overreach. They put out statements opposing to York’s hiring of scabs—something York started doing on literally the first day of the strike. YUFA did a lot of what we should have been doing, in terms of media work and statements that can appeal to the university community as a whole. But more to the point, their moves may well have been a factor in the employer finally, in the second week of April, coming back to the table.
And so, leading to the tentative agreement signed on Sunday late in the evening on the fourteenth of April, there were six epic days of open bargaining with the employer, often directly with the employer’s bargaining team (effectively, its in-house lawyer and the head of faculty relations). Deans were far quieter than in past rounds. They looked highly uncomfortable and barely spoke a word. One imagines the thoughts in the head of a Foucauldian academic inhabiting a panoptic rule for the powers that be. Open bargaining in the era of Zoom is far more like immersive reality television than the hurly burly of a bunch of union militants surrounding a long table behind their bargaining team members, glowering at the employer, meanwhile proverbially running the show during caucuses. There is much value in the type of “open bargaining” practiced by the local this round. Over one hundred members were present much of the time during this long week of bargaining. Speaking as one of those members, you couldn’t not tune in. And if it wasn’t open like it was back in the day, you could always send a DM to your comrade on the bargaining team, admonishing or supporting them.
With this being said, and as the bargaining team itself recognized, they were breaking with the principle of open bargaining. The fact was that the kind of open bargaining we used to have would be logistically impossible on Zoom. At a certain point in the bargaining process, there became a rough division of time between BT members speaking to one another and what became known as “member input.” This somewhat approximated open bargaining crossed with a sort of press conference, as intrinsically it was less discussion oriented and more about members asking (important) questions of BT members. Gradually, these periods in which “member input” was welcome shrank until they became time-fillers that didn’t always seem to be taken seriously. Bargaining team members honed their personae. Then every so often, or at lulls, there would be time for “member input,” or unit-specific caucuses in which there was “member input.” But member input was not, as in the past, deliberative. There was no “discussion.” These were all questions posed to the BT, or comments made by members with some degree of wisdom, stupidity, or a bit of both. When I mentioned this to other veteran members, one considered it a bonus not to have to deal with particularly annoying sets of members on the union’s hard right who clearly regularly harassed the Executive and Bargaining Team. One member said to me “do you really want to hear more of (individual’s name)?”16That mindset about political opponents speaks to exactly that dialectic of bureaucratism and ultra leftism that characterizes serious issues for the local to think through. There were plenty of logistical challenges that sprang up and militated against traditional open bargaining—it is clear this was not the reason that open bargaining, GMMs, and so on were not deliberative spaces as in the past. Yet between this sentiment and the practice of “motions to adjourn” when reactionary forces were about to take up space or move divisive motions at GMMs, the democratic way of dealing with political opponents has seemingly been downgraded in importance. They have always been shitty to us, seems to be the mindset, so we can be shitty to them. One wonders if some members with this mindset were formed by the necessity of informal or sub-rosa organizing in 2015, and thus, already expect official spaces to be formal and not deliberative.
Yet flaws aside, our model is still the envy of our sibling locals at York and throughout the sector. To actually be able to observe bargaining and have some participation in caucuses is exhilarating. Being “in the room,” either physically or virtually. as a tentative agreement is signed, is a feeling I thought that I had forgotten. It has an effervescence that transcends the limitations of the collective agreement itself. When the employer came back on Sunday midday with a deal that we could work with, craft, and then sign as a tentative agreement, all the skepticism and sectarianism and dissatisfaction melted away, just as they did when that moment had come in 2015. Immediately it was a free-for-all for input, an hour-long truly sweet love-in among members, leaders, and rank-and-file, as well as our brilliant staff. One person was thanked, then another, then another. It was lovely to see all the recognition being spread around. Indeed, while it was immediately clear that this was the best we were going to get, as pointed out, it was wildly insufficient. One Unit 1 TA, a rank-and-file stalwart immediately, seemed to preempt a projected protest no-vote campaign, roughly by saying that it was not a good deal, but it was worth signing.17Some individual members, including leading ones, later declaimed on social media that they would vote no. This was all with the knowledge that a no vote would be futile. But were we to stay out, the balance of forces presented a strong likelihood of a provincially-forced ratification vote that we would likely lose, soon to be followed by back-to-work legislation. From my perspective, this was an understatement: we had fended off the JSP, which is a genuine victory, but one with significant costs. The point was, however, that early afternoon on Sunday there was buy-in that this was the deal. What we needed now was to hold out for better back-to-work protocol, dot some Is, and cross some Ts.
To say that there were a few hiccups on that final day, however, is an understatement. Before the team finally settled, there was as much navel-gazing vacillation that one would expect from academic workers. As hours went by, celebration turned into critique, and then ultimately successful if perhaps unwise brinksmanship to bring us on-paper better back-to-work protocol. Meanwhile, tensions flared in the Zoom chat alongside a fair amount parsing the distinction between endorsing and “liking” a deal. Yet at a certain point, especially after the key input of truly hard-working and astute staff reps, the deal was signed, and everyone went to sleep knowing that this was the beginning of the end. And so, it went. There was one more week of picketing, a sort of no-person’s land of neither being on strike or off strike. In my past experiences of strikes ending, the 2008/09 strike ended with us being legislated back to work, like 2018, while 2015 had us voting as a membership to ratify within two days of the tentative agreement signed by the bargaining team. This time around, it was a few more days, which many adjuncts used to prep, predicting (correctly) that we would literally be on the clock within an hour of ratification.
On Friday we ratified, with a smaller-than-expected no-vote. Within an hour, give or take, of ratification, an email was sent to all of our members by the employer asking us to “commit to coming back to work” by filling in an online form, with a deadline of Sunday at 12 PM. Indeed, the email stated that if we did not fill out said form by Sunday at noon, our work would be considered “abandoned.” As Osgoode labor law professor David Doorey tweeted in a mock labor law quiz, “Can an employer unilaterally decide an employee has ‘abandoned’ their job if they fail to complete a made-up form by an entirely arbitrary date invented by the employer, over a weekend?” But that is precisely what York did and did we challenge it? Nope. Of course, challenging it would have been exhausting and we didn’t have the capacity to do so. Instead, the union sent out a whole wack of emails to members extolling them to fill out this “made-up form.” And so ended the great strike of 2024.