February 19, 2010 - No. 37

Ontario College Teachers

Provincial Government and Its Agencies
Make Mockery of Rule of Law

• Provincial Government and Its Agencies Make Mockery of Rule of Law
• Mudslinging, Intimidation and a Rigged Vote Do Not Equal a Mandate for the Imposed Contract - Dave Starbuck
• The Heart of the Matter - Blog entry, www.collegeprof.ca

McCarthyism in Canada
• Gaza Photo Exposition Threatened with Closure - Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

Ontario College Teachers

Provincial Government and Its Agencies
Make Mockery of Rule of Law

The necessity is for a workers' opposition to organize for political renewal

Striking teachers at Cambrian College in Sudbury, March 2006.

On February 10, full-time and partial-load faculty at Ontario's 24 community colleges voted on the colleges' last "contract offer." Unofficial results indicate that 51.25 percent voted to accept the offer, The count stands at 4,285 voting to accept and 4,075 to reject, a difference of 210 votes.

The Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) will make a final determination of the vote on February 24 when up to five hundred segregated and mail-in ballots are to be counted. The OLRB may well uphold the unofficial result and declare "acceptance" of the colleges latest offer, in which case the Ontario government will have succeeded in disregarding the recommendations of its own arbitrated settlement from the last college teachers strike, and impose instead its own workload arrangement agenda on full-time and partial-load faculty.

Interference by the colleges and vote list irregularities makes it nearly impossible for the outcome to be a true and accurate representation of what the members of the bargaining unit actually think about management's so-called final offer.

In a press release on February 12, the OPSEU CAAT(A) bargaining committee pointed out: "There are serious irregularities with the voting process conducted by the colleges." It cited as an example that the colleges are attempting to hide the mail-in voters list from the union. OPSEU also cited actions by some colleges to characterize the vote in a prejudicial manner in order to influence the vote. OPSEU also notes that between the January 13 strike vote and the February 10 offer vote, the number of eligible voters increased by over 750!

The vote list irregularities are examined in closer detail below, in an article by Dave Starbuck, in which he points out, amongst other things, that "seven colleges saw an increase of more than ten percent in the number of eligible voters, including St. Lawrence where the increase is 87.9 percent. The investigation should begin at St. Lawrence for this amazing increase is accompanied by the highest vote to accept at 80.5 percent. Only three other colleges voted more than 55 percent to accept. The 167 new voters at St. Lawrence almost equals the 210 vote differential in the unofficial results."

Even if this is not outright fraud, there are serious discrepancies in how the colleges arrived at the number of full-time and partial-load faculty eligible to vote, in the same way one can say the colleges played fast and loose with the number of part-time and sessional faculty eligible to vote for union certification.

Responsibility for the current state of affairs rests squarely on the shoulders of the Ontario government. It is escalating the anti-social offensive which includes cutting further investments in funding of social programs, attacking the public sector workers and privatizing public assets. All this is done in the name of "deficit reduction" allegedly as the government's approach to addressing the consequences of the economic crisis.

In reality the government has been steadily moving to implement this offensive against college teachers even before the latest economic crisis reared its head. From the Whitaker Inquiry in 2007, to the drafting of Bill 90 (the new Community Colleges Bargaining Act -- CCBA 2008), to the blatant interference by the colleges and the OLRB in counting the ballots cast by part-time and sessional faculty in their union certification vote, to the employer walking away from the negotiating table in October and then unilaterally altering workload arrangements and other terms and conditions of the previous contract with full time and partial load faculty in November -- the Colleges Council has been the messenger delivering the Ontario government's "budget deficit" agenda. For college teachers it takes the form of unilaterally imposing new workload arrangements, altering long established salary comparator groups etc. and generally setting up the teachers to take the blame if they resist.

It is clear now that the entire exercise of modernizing the CCBA was about setting the stage for imposing workload arrangements which the government had not been able to achieve at the bargaining table in previous contract negotiations. In so doing the government of Ontario, has made a mockery of rule of law and put its institutions into even further disrepute.

One of the conclusions that can be drawn from this entire experience is the necessity for the working people of Ontario to be political, organize themselves as an effective workers' opposition to provide society with pro-social solutions to the crisis.

Mudslinging, Intimidation and a Rigged Vote Do Not Equal a Mandate for the Imposed Contract

- Dave Starbuck* -

Unofficial results from the February 10 vote on college management's offer last received indicate that 51.25 percent of Ontario's community college faculty have voted to accept the contract. The official tally will be held on February 24 when up to five hundred segregated and mail-in ballots will also be counted. If the unofficial results are confirmed by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, a strike by 11,000 full-time and partial-load professors mandated to begin as of February 17 will be averted and the terms and conditions of work imposed on college faculty by the College Compensation and Appointments Council last November 18 will have the legal effect of a collective agreement between the Council and the Ontario Public Service Employees' Union.

What is legal is not necessarily just and the shock and awe imposition of these terms and conditions of work is definitely not just. College management and the Ontario government never reconciled themselves to the workload formula that came out of the 1984 strike and successive governments have not been able to break the resistance of Ontario college faculty to management attempts to modify or eliminate the formula. The formula provides for recognition of time spent for preparation, evaluation and out-of-class assistance to students as well as assigned classroom hours. The colleges say that they need flexibility to operate in times of economic crisis. This covers up the chronic lack of funding; pressure to run the colleges on the backs of low paid part-time workers who are denied the right to collective bargaining; and the looming double digit increase in student numbers as unemployed workers return to school for further training. Flexibility has been turned into a demand by management to remove the effective limits on faculty workload.

The current round of negotiations came out of the strike of 2006 which led to the establishment of the Workload Task Force. They were flavoured by the new Colleges Collective Bargaining Act of 2008, the product of an election promise and the Whitaker Report, which led to wholesale revision of the bargaining process in Ontario's colleges, allegedly to allow for the recognition of collective bargaining rights of part-time college employees but in practice providing new powers to college management while restricting the right of college employees to organize an effective strike.

As advised by their legal counsel, Hicks Morley, who are also directing Vale Inco's legal assault on striking Sudbury miners, the Council and college management with the full support of the Ontario government, embarked on a predetermined plan to impose new terms and conditions of work on college faculty. Rather than negotiating a collective agreement without pre-conditions and which was consistent with the Workload Task Force, the Council inflated the cost of the union proposals and declared that union proposals were more than the colleges could afford in the current economic climate.

Mudslinging, intimidation and vote rigging formed key components of the Council plan to force college faculty to accede to the imposed terms and conditions of work. Right from the beginning, the Council developed its media campaign portraying college faculty as greedy, lazy and bent on destroying the students' year. Workload issues were either kept out of the discussion or the mantra was endlessly repeated that all the protections of the previous contract remained intact and that the modified workload arrangements were entirely voluntary. The Council also proclaimed repeatedly that the February 10 offer was its final offer and its rejection by faculty would not result in a return to the bargaining table and would result in a strike. In this way, they sought to browbeat faculty into accepting the inevitability of the imposed contract. This was not the only intimidation from the Council and college management. A massive campaign of e-mails and home mailings sought to undermine the collective discussion through the union and impose individual discussion. At one college, faculty were commanded to accept or decline an invitation from the college president to attend a February 9 forum so that the college president could provide full information on the Council's offer. At another, faculty were offered an early retirement offer with a deadline coinciding with the strike deadline.

The campaign of dirty tricks to undermine the resistance of college faculty to imposed terms and conditions of work culminated with the manipulation of the voters lists and vote rigging. Commenting on the results of the January 27 strike vote I wrote: "Looking further, we see that the number of eligible voters increased by 1,133 or 11.1 percent from 9,108 to 10,241. Where did these people come from? The colleges have not increased their full-time workforce by more than eleven percent over the past four years. At my college, the number of full-time faculty has decreased slightly over this period. This increase in numbers is the result of the rapid increase in partial-load hires in the last semester or two. While normally resisting designation of partial-load faculty at union rates as opposed to part-time and sessional faculty at a fraction of the union rate, the colleges appear this semester to have designated many more non-full-time faculty as partial-load and launched a massive campaign to get out the vote. The assumption, of course, is that new faculty -- with limited experience in how the colleges operate and hoping for permanent employment -- are open to management inducement."

According to the unofficial results, there were 11,035 eligible voters on February 10, an increase of 856 or 8.4 percent from the January 27 vote. This is unbelievable! The college workforce does not increase so rapidly in thirteen days in the middle of a semester. In total, the number of faculty under the collective agreement have increased 21.2 percent between 2006 and 2010 from 9,108 to 11,035 yet the number of full-time faculty in the system has not increased. Nearly two thousand new partial-load faculty, many new hires with limited experience at the colleges, and susceptible to management blandishments that "the Colleges believe the right thing to do is to give the faculty the democratic opportunity to have their say through a vote." This is highly hypocritical given that the same colleges have prevented the counting of the ballots of thousands of part-time college employees for a year. The colleges and the Ontario government have had no interest in giving part-time and sessional employees their democratic opportunity to join a trade union and undergo collective bargaining. How many of these new found partial-load faculty will be here next year?

In my opinion, OPSEU should demand a formal inquiry into irregularities in the two recent votes. The available data scream out fraud. As seen in the table, seven colleges saw an increase of more than ten percent in the number of eligible voters, including St. Lawrence where the increase is 87.9 percent. The investigation should begin at St. Lawrence for this amazing increase is accompanied by the highest vote to accept at 80.5 percent. Only three other colleges voted more than 55 percent to accept. It is at St. Lawrence, too, where an anti-union business professor set up a website to build public opinion against faculty. This professor and website were given prominent coverage in Maclean's. The 167 new voters at St. Lawrence almost equal the 210 vote differential in the unofficial results. The accompanying graphs clearly show that there is a positive correlation of votes to accept with the increase in the number of voters. It appears that a 70+ percent vote of full-time college faculty to reject the contract was turned into a narrow vote to accept.

Shame on the College Compensation and Appointments Council, the college presidents and the Ontario government for jointly concocting this scheme to force new terms and conditions of work upon Ontario community college faculty! Ontario community college faculty should be saluted for resisting the imposition of these new terms and conditions of work and fighting for conditions that enable them to provide the youth and young adults of Ontario with the education and training they need to become full and productive members of society. The Council's success will prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. Unjust imposition will not bring labour peace but increasing resistance from college faculty and increased support from college students and the general public.

College faculty have learned much through this experience. We are no longer living in the era of the post-war social contract where workers were promised decent wages, benefits and working conditions in return for staying out of politics. Now, after twenty years of the anti-social offensive, college faculty are faced with shock and awe tactics and arbitrary action based on impunity. What to do when government arbitrarily revises the collective bargaining act in favour of itself and college management? What to do when the Council arbitrarily claims a power it did not possess and imposes new terms and conditions of work? What to do when college management slanders faculty, threatens and intimidates them? What to do when an agency of the government itself rigs the voters' list to get the result it wants? What to do when the rules are changed at every turn? These are the questions that faculty have had to deal with, one coming after the other, with increasing shock and severity. In these circumstances just to find our bearings is a victory!

Analyisis of CAAT(A) Votes - 2006, January 2010 and February 2010

* Dave Starbuck has taught at Cambrian College in Sudbury since 1982. He is a member of OPSEU Local 655 and was the candidate of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada in the electoral district of Sudbury in the 2004 and 2006 federal elections.

The Heart of the Matter

- Blog entry, www.collegeprof.ca, February 10, 2010 -

At the heart of the current college negotiations, I posit, is the chronic and continued underfunding of postsecondary education (especially college education) in the province of Ontario.

Alas, we are in negotiations with a management who would prefer to call their employees greedy than to tell their employers that more funding is needed. And much of the battle that the union has been waging concerns a management that strives again and again to justify and perpetuate the continued underfunding of Ontario's college system -- a task for which they are hired and, ultimately, rewarded. Time and again, college administrators could use these negotiations as a means of communicating to the province the need for adequate funding; time and again, college management denies policies that have been jointly agreed-upon, saying "The money just isn't there."

And perhaps it isn't. Because adminstrators don't demand it, even when they could legitimately do so, whether on the basis of faculty demands, the recommendations of bipartisan task forces, or their own contractual obligations. Instead, the colleges continually admit increased numbers of students and offer ever-broader programs of study, while not insisting upon proportionally-increased funding to accommodate them.

And in the end, education gets weakened: Less interaction between faculty and students. Crowded classrooms. Increased reliance on publishers' PowerPoint presentations. Insufficient time to evaluate students' work in a manner that might actually help them improve their skills.

And in the end, the colleges advertise the excellence of the education that they provide, while actively taking measures that effectively undermine quality.

And in the end, it ends up on the backs of students -- in the form of increased tuition -- and on the backs of the professors in practically every other way. More part-time faculty. Modified Workload Arrangements to begin the elimination of workload protections. Hiring freezes. Imposed Terms and Conditions. Every one of these things (I believe) is an effect of underfunding; every one of them magnifies the college management's power at the expense of the professors'.

A correspondent from Southwestern Ontario pointed me to chapter 5 of Colleges Ontario's 2009 Environmental Scan. A quick look at that illustrates some changes in the colleges' fiscal life in the last 20 years. And, as Nixon's "Checkers" speech illustrated, a financial history tells a much broader story.

Figure 4 indicates that full-time enrollment has increased 21% since 1993, while grants per student have reduced by 5%. Figure 6 shows that colleges receive $4,000 less per student than high schools, and over $2,000 less than universities (who also have higher tuition rates).

So in the midst of the boom in enrollment, colleges receive less funding than ever. "In real terms," we are told on pp. 52-3, "college revenues are still significantly lower than they were in the late 1980s and the early 1990s." Later, we are told:

"When revenues from operating grants and tuition fees are considered together, per student funding in Ontario in 2007-08 stood at $8,159, the lowest amongst the provinces. . . [and] 43 per cent lower than that in Saskatchewan...."

College revenues are still lower than in the early '90s? (Oh -- right. Harris.) Figure 7 tells us what the colleges managed to cut, to deal with this loss. Since 1993:

* The number of full-time students enrolled increased 15%
* The number of full-time staff decreased 7%

How? Let's break it down:

* The number of support staff in 2007 was unchanged from that of 1993
* The number of administrative staff in 2007 was unchanged from that of 1993
* The number of academic staff in 2007 was 15% less than in 1993

In the last 20 years, the number of full-time students enrolled has increased 15%; the number of full-time faculty employed has decreased 15% -- In 2007-8, Ontario's colleges employed 7,002 full-time staff and 11,599 part-time staff.

But here's the point that I want to make: In 1999, adminstrative, support, and academic hiring were all anywhere from 15%-25% below their 1993 levels. Meaning that, in the last 20 years, we have seen the number of support staff increase by 15% and the number of adminstrators increase by 25%. In the last 20 years, managers have been able to create jobs for managers. Managers have found money in the system for more management.

So when Dr. Rachael Donovan, chair of the college's bargaining team, claims

"A strike mandate hasn't made OPSEU's positions any more affordable. It hasn't given the colleges any more money" (Jan.13)

She is right and wrong. She may be right that the money isn't there; she's wrong because she -- like the bargaining team she chairs -- views the lack of funding as a management challenge in resource allocation (a challenge that moreover justifies management's own increased numbers and salaries), rather than as a pressing threat to the quality of Ontario's college education.

She is wrong because she does not go on the record demanding to know why this is the case. And so far, neither have we.

Neither the college's bargaining team nor the union's, I think, has ever during this round of negotiations come out and said the obvious: Our system is underfunded. The college management acts as if the underfunding is a law of nature, since they are hired to perpetuate it and rationalize its deleterious effects. The union (and, at times, this blog) acts as if the problem isn't an underfunded system, but rather that "our" share is going unfairly to "other" priorities, like new buildings, administrators, support staff, advertising campaigns, international campuses and partnerships, legal teams, online environments, severance packages and performance bonuses.

But it's insufficient for us to carp about each other's pieces of the pie, just as it's dangerous for an educational system to make academic decisions based on fiscal criteria.

"Threatening to go on strike won't move the two sides closer, it doesn't change the economic realities," Dr. Donovan said, as if economic realities were immutable laws of physics. As if the fact that Ontario's postsecondary system has the lowest per-capita funding of any province was a necessary, a priori fact.

Today, professors will decide whether to bow to the "realities" of underfunding, or to try to create pressure from below to change that reality. If we vote to accept that offer, we will permit the current system to continue unabated (or even for its flaws to become exacerbated) and we will see some of the effects that are listed here. We will do nothing to break the Ministry's addiction to underfunded budgets, nor the Ontario college system's consequent addictions to casual labour, top-down managerial systems, and increased class sizes. On the contrary, we will enable and accommodate those addictions.

But when I permit myself to hope, here is my hope: That my managers (who really have been very good to me, personally, and whom I credit with good motives) and my college's executives join together with the faculty. That we come to some mutual recognition that excellence is something more than a marketing term: It concerns the increased potential of the students who turn to us for that purpose. It's a process that requires nurturing and careful attention, which all college employees should be encouraged and enabled to provide, rather than being prevented from providing because of increased workload or the vagaries of unstable jobs.

I hope that we can collectively turn to our elected representatives and our fellow citizens, and say, "Here's what we need. And we need it because the students need it. And the province needs it."

But (in my opinion) we will all only be able to present a united voice to the province about the real needs affecting the system -- and the system's role in addressing the needs of the province -- if professors first stand together and insist upon being treated as colleagues, experts, and equal partners within that system.

Today is one opportunity for us to do that. But so is tomorrow.

McCarthyism in Canada

Gaza Photo Exposition Threatened with Closure

- Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East*, February 16, 2010 -

On Monday, Feb. 15th, the critically acclaimed Human Drama in Gaza Photo Exposition in Montreal was threatened with closure by Gestion Redbourne PDP Inc., the real estate management firm owning the property housing the Exposition. A legal representative of Redbourne, Lieba Shell, sent an email late in the day to the exposition host, Cinema du Parc, ordering the removal of the exposition and threatening legal action if the exposition were not taken down by evening. Cinema du Parc and Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) -- the producer of the exposition -- asserted through their legal advisor, Mark H. Arnold, that such threats from Redbourne were not lawful.

Human Drama in Gaza was launched in mid-January, and received very positive reviews in several media. Redbourne, however, demanded the removal of the exposition based on a paragraph in the lease that Cinema du Parc has with Redbourne relating to "purely cinemagraphic use" of the premises. Arnold, however, asserted that the cinema's hosting of a photo exposition would very much constitute cinemagraphic use of the premises. Officials with Cinema du Parc also pointed out that the cinema has hosted dozens of photo expositions in the past several years, and has never had a complaint from Redbourne, the landlord.

"This move on the part of Redbourne is clearly political," declared Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. "Cinema du Parc is known for its ongoing expositions which touch on important issues of social concern, and Redbourne never had an issue in the past." Last week, both Cinema du Parc and Place du Parc (the shopping mall housing the cinema and owned by Redbourne) received emails and calls from individuals unhappy with the Human Drama in Gaza exposition. The complaints accused the exposition of being anti-Israel, but stopped short of questioning the credibility of the exposition content. "The suffering of the 1.5 million people of Gaza is an important social issue like any other," asserted Woodley. "The fact that certain people wish to stifle open discussion on Gaza is even more a reason to bring the debate out into the open."

According to CJPME, the exposition itself seeks to put a human face to the misery of the people of Gaza, and the poignant resilience of a people facing severe adversity. The captions accompanying the photos cite statistics and legal analyses of Israel's 22-day assault on Gaza of last winter. The legal advisor to CJPME pointed out that if security forces from Redbourne were to attempt to forcibly remove the exposition, they would be considered trespassers. As such, Arnold concluded, the "Cinema staff have been advised to immediately call the police."

For more information, please contact:

Grace Batchoun
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Telephone: (514) 745-8491
info@cjpme.org
www.cjpme.org

* Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is a non-profit and secular organization bringing together men and women of all backgrounds who labour to see justice and peace take root again in the Middle East. Its mission is to empower decision-makers to view all sides with fairness and to promote the equitable and sustainable development of the region.

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