Being on strike when your employer is a union 

Chris Little (CL) and Jeffery R. Webber (JW): Before digging into the details of the strike itself, let’s begin with a little biographical background. Can each of you explain how and why you were drawn into the labor movement, and how you came to be union staff at YUFA, specifically.

Manuel Marqués (MM): Well, in my case, I actually started in nationalist politics back home in Puerto Rico, and then in university, I started reading Marxist authors and that brought me here to York [University], back in 2001. I became involved with CUPE 3903 [the union at York primarily representing teaching assistants and contract faculty] and I became more exposed to the labor movement through 3903. From there, I was able to get a union job at another CUPE local, 3913, at the University of Guelph. And eventually, I came here to YUFA.

One of the interesting things from my perspective as a staffer was that YUFA has a collective agreement that affects not only the professors but other workers on campus. To give you an example, the facilities and services that exist and that provide protection to professors under the collective agreement then also bring protections to other workers on campus. And it is a very wealthy union, so it has the resources to push back against the employer, York University, and many of the changes that we are seeing in the sector. So those things were attractive for me in coming to YUFA.

I also don’t want to shy away from the fact that this is a job. We are workers, we are employees, for unions. So I want to establish a distinction. We are employed by an organization that is part of the labor movement, but it’s not the same as, you know, coming into the labor movement.

Nicole Leach (NL): I don’t know that my labor politics got started there, but my first time in an institutionalized capacity within labor relations was with the bargaining team at CUPE 3903, and then as a member of the executive, and then as a rank-and-filer. Being in 3903 was also an interesting place from which to see York University politics, or university politics, and figure out if that’s where you wanted to exist for the rest of your life. And I chose union over academic work. I ended up back at YUFA, despite various warnings, because of the community of staff that it had. Workplaces are workplaces, bosses are bosses. There’s some that are better on a scale than others, but the collective that you have at work does matter, so the colleagues that existed at YUFA were an attraction.

CL & JW: Let’s move on to the present moment. Why did you decide collectively to go on strike?

NL: It’s been a rough couple of years at YUFA. One of our colleagues has been employed by YUFA for about 13 years, and in that tenure, they have seen the complement of staff turnover three times. It is a difficult place to stay, people leave work at YUFA without a competing job offer, without somewhere else to go, because the workplace is the workplace that it is. I think right now—and it’s in the last couple of years, because of the people who are there, and a commitment to each other—there has been more of a want to fight back against that dynamic, rather than go with the tide, and to try to see if there’s a way to slow down that dynamic, if not stop it.

Three years ago, in our last round of bargaining, one of the main proposals was a pension plan, which kind of signaled a turn in the group of employees of wanting to stay, and wanting to make YUFA a place that people would want to work longer than three years, longer than had been the case over the last decade.

So, it’s not a decision that happened six months ago, it’s a decision that’s been in the works for the last few years, based on what the workplace looks like. And I’d say that it has been accelerated over the last couple of years with at least three harassment grievances relating to complaints of transphobic/ gender-based harassment, [and] race-based harassment. There have been a number of grievances around contracting out of work as well. There’s just a state of affairs that has left no other option than to strike.

MM: There’s the background that Nicole just mentioned and then there’s the specific situation of the employer trying to restructure the workplace into a very top-down structure. Not only that, but also creating positions outside of the bargaining unit that would be doing bargaining unit work. And that for us signaled various things. First, there was an interest in changing the established democratic structures that exist in the union workplace and of course that was something that would impact our work and make an already difficult workplace into a worse one. But also, our job security was at risk, and is still at risk. Finally, it’s just pure and simple union busting. Because you start moving the work that belongs to the union outside of the union, and then suddenly you don’t need a union anymore. You can give that work to the people that are not unionized and get rid of the workers that are unionized through attrition, layoffs, firing them, or as people get sick and resign because they cannot handle the workplace.

So, we decided that this was a situation that was untenable. The negotiations also went in a manner where we tried to address what the employer had communicated as their needs, and they were just not responding to those things. They were very, very clear that it was their way or the highway. So we basically had to take the highway, and here we are now.

NL: With all of us being within the labor relations world there is a certain amount of knowledge about the system, and how it works. Knowledge about the choke points, where leverage is, what can be achieved where, and how, and under what means, and what level of duress. The question of why go on strike was also one where grievances have been filed, they are proceeding to arbitration – which is an inherently conservative path. If there is a way to try to achieve something that is more than just a conservative bare minimum, the only option for that is through a strike. There’s a very clear cost-benefit analysis of where you win gains, and how, which comes into the strike discussion as well.

CL & JW: You’ve both been members of another union at York University, CUPE 3903. Were you ever on strike with them?

NL: Yeah, I was on the bargaining team in 2012 and we didn’t go on strike then. In 2015 we were on strike for a month, and in 2018 on strike for five months.

CL & JW: It’s interesting to think about a very small local such as yours, with 8 members, and how your experience might be different to that in a much larger local like CUPE 3903, with almost 3000 members. Is there anything that seems especially interesting to you about those experiences in comparison, given that even though they aren’t in the same workplace, they are in the same institutional context?

NL: Well, even from a logistics perspective, it’s of course, very different. It’s not somebody else bargaining for you, it’s you at the bargaining table and you on the strike line. That distinction and that distance that you can have between the bargaining table and the picket line is nothing in a workplace of eight people. All of us sit on the bargaining team, all of us have been to every bargaining meeting. We have shop stewards who have led some of the discussions, but there’s no chief negotiator. So, everything is done in a horizontal manner. Everyone who can be on the picket line is there together.

So that does impact some of the politics that can really conservatize bargaining teams, who are locked up in a closed room with the employer and not on the line hearing about people’s fears; fears over how they’re going to pay rent next month, about whether this is achievable. Also maybe not hearing people’s radical stance of “I will fight until the end”. When it’s all within the same locale it really does change the tenor of the situation and how analysis proceeds if you know what each one of your colleagues is going through and what the strike means for them.

It is also different in terms of what institutional support you have. CUPE 3903 has its own strike budget that it can administer in whatever ways that it chooses to. So, they can choose, for example, to pay strike pay for workers who are not able to make it onto a traditional picket line because of accessibility or human rights-code-based reasons, or to run alternative picket lines with alternative duties (like social media, hard media, translation, administrative strike work).

Our local does have members who are not able to picket in traditional ways. Although really, in our local, eight people aren’t shutting down shit. So, what does picketing look like? What the strike looks like in that context is a very different one from CUPE 3903 shutting down access to the campus. But what can eight people do? It determines what your strategies are, but it also determines what an alternative strike line looks like for those who are not able-bodied. For us, it meant our local [CUPE 1281] buying a wheelchair so that there wasn’t a situation of excluding a colleague who is not able to walk a traditional picket and letting everybody else go off gallivanting on the strike line. So, what it means to be accessible is a very different question for a membership of 3,000 people versus a membership of eight and what that means in terms of solidarity.

If you’re not shutting shit down by a strike line, then how are you shutting it down? It does mean different strike strategies. We’ve utilized more of a spoke and hub model of putting people in a location to do a static physical picket, but then also sending people to walk around, flyer, info picket to target YUFA members and push them into taking action or at least building knowledge. Rather than relying on a static walk in a circle model, there’s more active engagement. That’s constantly in connection with each other as well, which is a flexibility that you can deploy when there’s a smaller number of people that sometimes you can’t in a larger institution.

CL & JW: You’ve mentioned some of the grievances that were animating the workplace. How were these articulated in terms of the demands of the strike?

NL: We went in really focused a lot on health and safety, both the anti-harassment realm as well the psychological health of the workplace. One of the things was specific language around a right to refuse unsafe work. A healthy denial of service that would empower a union staff member— in a situation where they were facing individuals behaving belligerently or abusively or who contravene harassment and discrimination policies;a process for the staff member—to exit by saying, “this is unsafe, I can’t service you” and then to notify their supervisor. Somebody else (staff or an executive member) would be appointed to work with that person. So if somebody faced a situation— let’s say they identify themselves as non-binary and the person opposite them refused to respect their pronouns and made discriminatory comments—the staff person could say, “that’s not a healthy space for me to be in. I need to exit. Somebody else will service you”.

One of the other proposals that was put forward is self-funded leave, similar to teachers who can pay for their year-long sabbatical. Knock the wage down to 80%, take 20% off for five years and then year six you get to go on a leave as a way of acknowledging that people keep leaving this workplace because it’s unhealthy and they’re not able to maintain it. If there’s an off valve that allows people a way to recharge and come back, maybe that can help with retention and the general psychological health of the workplace.

So those were ways that we thought of dealing with those issues. Then there was also stronger layoff protection language, stronger protection of the unionization of the workplace, protection from a general feeling of precarity. When we started negotiations, we walked in and were met with lawyers from Ogletree Deacon, a big “union avoidance” law firm from the [United] States who are setting up shop now in Canada. Obviously, a certain tenor of negotiations was initiated with this. A hundred and some proposals are then put on the table by the employer that gut nearly every article of the collective agreement—going after political expression, benefits, wages, all monetary aspects. Proposing to cut out every single anti-harassment protection from the collective agreement and to replace it only with “we will follow the law” in slightly more words. A complete opening up of the bargaining unit’s scope of work so that it can be assigned to anyone, whether they’re in the bargaining unit or not. This changed the union’s demands and led to a much stronger response to protecting the unionization of the workplace and what’s considered bargaining-unit work. So, while layoff protection was an original demand, the protection of the workplace didn’t become a major demand until it was under a major threat.

MM: From the beginning, our focus was always job security and health and safety. The job security objective was always concerned with the fact that we knew that they were going to come with some kind of restructuring proposal. Of course, we were not prepared to see the scope of what they proposed, so it had to evolve in a particular way given what they proposed.

CL & JW: One specificity of the strike is that your employer is a union.  Another specificity is that the present union executive of YUFA was elected on a more progressive platform than recent executives. How have these two contextual factors shaped your overall strategy as well as specific tactics? What has it meant, especially, for building solidarity with other sectors of the unionized campus workforce?

NL: An employer is always an employer and there’s structural realities to that statement. When we talk about unions, there’s this assumption that we are talking about something that is naturally progressive. Also, unions are not the labor movement. Those are two distinct things. Unions can be part of the labor movement, but you also have CLAC [Christian Labour Association of Canada] which is an employer shop. The inherent assumption that because it’s a union that you’re working for, that it is this naturally progressive, well-meaning, family workplace. That just does not fit with the reality that we exist in – it is a misnomer. Our employers are employers. Full stop. They might be elected representatives of a union, but they are also our employers and operate and behave as such. And that is who we bargain with. We are not bargaining with the labor movement. We are bargaining with our employer and the systemic pressures that they experience.

Even setting that aside, the idea that a progressive slate coming forward means that it wipes away all sins. Well, there are trans-exclusionary radical feminists. There is “progressive except for Palestine.” The idea that a progressive slate has come forward does not actually mean that everyone in that shop is safe or everyone in that union, that space, that collective, is safe. It doesn’t wash away all sins. Even a progressive union that’s there to stand for the advancement of the labor movement does not necessarily mean that it’s standing there in advancement of women’s rights, of trans rights, of racial equality. Those are dynamics that affect all movement politics, whether it be a union or not.

When you add on top that unions are institutionalized within the labor relations fabric of Canada and are institutionalized to serve state interests, that imposes other dynamics that really fight against that wish for a progressive mentality. Once you join that elected echelon, it also further distances you from the rank and file that you may have come from and imposes certain dynamics on your way of thinking and your way of operating that are usually not the same as the dynamics that were imposed on you as a rank and file member. All that comes into play once a progressive slate comes into power in a union space. Those are all things to keep in mind because I think that there is a sort of romanticized ideal that if only the Left got into power, things would be much better. But also in our case, it doesn’t matter who’s elected. Our employer is our employer. Our collective agreement is with our employer. Our collective agreement is not with an individual. An individual’s goodness or niceness does not mean that I have a good boss. What I have is a collective agreement that protects my rights.

What does that mean in terms of our tactics? It has meant that one of the choke points that we know is out there is a bigger commitment to the labor movement and the eyes of the labor movement, which makes everyone uncomfortable. Because it’s really difficult to walk onto the floor of an Ontario Federation of Labour Convention and say “I am on strike. Please support me” when your employer also sits in the house of labor.

It creates really interesting dynamics. It becomes a real big leverage point where everyone’s uncomfortable, and wants this discomfort to end. But it does also put YUFA as our employer in a really bad situation in which now all of their colleagues and their allies are watching their internal politics play out.

MM: That dynamic of the house of labor being able to put more pressure on YUFA is possible precisely because it is a Left or purportedly Left slate. If it had been the centrist or the right-wing professors who wanted to be de-certified (withdraw the legal status as a union), they wouldn’t care about what other unions were telling them. The dynamic in that case, interestingly, would have been different in the sense that we would probably have had people like those in the current executive going against the centrists. And we would probably also have lefty professors being more supportive of the strike, taking more actions than we have seen in the current situation because of course these are their lefty friends, these are supposedly progressive people. We see people not publicly criticizing them and taking this kind of neutral ground of “we are not going to say anything. This looks like an internal conflict, this is something that you guys need to settle by yourselves and we are not going to intervene.” Or maybe they will drop by and express their solidarities and sympathies, but they are not going to, for instance, pass motions or put forward motions at meetings or at steward councils and try to actually affect changes in, in their own unions.

We know that YUFA has leftist members, but we haven’t seen those members actually take to task this so-called Left executive. And I say “purportedly” and “so-called” because while I agree with Nicole’s analysis that an employer is an employer and that there are structural aspects, there is also the other side where if you are truly progressive, when you come to a situation like this, you should be aware of the power relationships that exist. You should be aware of those structural issues and you shouldn’t be then saying things like, “we are the progressive ones and we are the ones trying to take back our union by hiring managers,” for instance, which is what they are saying. It is, of course, absurd that somehow getting managers is going to make you a more militant union or a more progressive union.

But they are doing this because they see themselves as progressive and they are not looking at the structural issues. They are simply thinking of themselves, thinking these are the things that we need in order to be able to do whatever progressive objectives we have. This is without looking at a structural analysis of where they are situated and the power relationships they have vis-a-vis their employees, how they could be working with their employees, and establishing more positive relationships with them.

CL & JW: In addition to job security and health and safety, part of the dispute seems to be a battle over how to run your workplace. Why is this so important to defend?

NL: What we want to do is organize our work in conjunction with the elected officers. And we want to make sure that our workplace is protected, but we’re not interested in running the union or battling over how the union is run. There are distinctions between the political arm of YUFA and the decisions that are taken in the day-to-day operations. What we’re looking for is similar to what YUFA has, an understanding of collegial governance, which maybe mirrors what people would think of as a participatory workplace and what people have pushed for and have articulated in sort of a centre-left imagination. There’s no delusion amongst staff of where we work, at a faculty association, which is not an inherently left or progressive space. In different constellations it can be more left than others, but a faculty association is also a step removed from a traditional union in that sense as well. In fact, not all faculty associations are certified unions in Ontario and Canada.

We haven’t been looking to run the union and run the workplace. What we have been looking for is enough autonomy over our own work and collegial governance with those who are elected. To not be micromanaged and to not be subjected to the top-down belligerence of an everyday workplace, which is something that’s been exercised in YUFA for eons now.

The labor relations wing of the organization has worked closely with chief stewards for quite a long time. Before going on strike we would have weekly meetings with chief stewards, to talk about cases that are outstanding, things that are going on, discuss what direction, what position the union wants to take. It’s very much a space of brainstorming and coming together. York is the employer in this instance, York is the monster in the room that we’re trying to battle collectively. How do we do that? How do we share our professional knowledge and how do you share the political imaginings of the union, and how do we then come together and figure out the strategy going forward?

It’s not a combative space. It’s not top-down, do this and do that. It’s a space where both wings work as one. That is what we’ve been fighting to preserve, that collegial relation and shared imagining of what’s being fought against. To not divorce those two aspects – the professional labor relations world from the political imaginings of the union and the political leanings of the union. Let’s create a space where those work together and are shared, rather than one that dictates the other, from below or from above. We haven’t been fighting to take over the full space. We’ve been fighting to protect that sort of back-and-forth relation that’s existed in the workplace to varying degrees for a while.

MM: I think it’s important to put in context for some of the things that we have been hearing from the executive, such as “YUFA is currently a business union” and that the staff are somehow related to that business union model, that we are impeding the mobilization or the political work of the executive. That’s what we do not want to do. We do not want to run the union. That means we do not want to impede the work of the executive. On the contrary, we want to facilitate it. The fact that there is a staff doesn’t mean that there is a business union model. A business union model is one where the employer is able to go to the union to get help in implementing their objectives. That is not how YUFA operates. In fact, we are constantly pushing back against the employer.

The problem is that we tend to push back through the grievance process because that is the way the workplace has evolved through the constant engagement with the legal dispute resolution process and that is how the labor relationship is now structured. That doesn’t mean that we are not amenable to having a more militant approach. In fact, we often tell the Executive Officers that there’s only so much that the grievance process is going to do. This is an intrinsically, conservative, legalistic process that is going to politically demobilize. We are very aware of that and we tell them these things.  Nothing prevents the members, the YUFA members, the executive, the stewards, the chief stewards from mobilizing and from organizing their members. And staff is there to create the space and to support that work. That is how we see what we do.

CL & JW: We’ve seen some commentators and your employer keen to point out that you have strong salaries and benefits. How do you deal with communicating the fact that a strike can be about more than just salaries and benefits?

NL: An employer pointing out that their workers make money and have benefits? How novel. We should shut down the strike now before anybody learns that we’ve made money over the last couple of years being employed. What a progressive stance to take regarding your workers, right? You shouldn’t stand in solidarity with them. Look at how much more they might make than you. That’s why we should all shut down unions. What a progressive stance to lobby.

What I can say is that we did not put forward a wage increase proposal for the majority of our staff. There are eight employees, seven labor relations staff and one administrative coordinator. We have put forward one wage proposal and it was a two percent wage increase for the administrative position. Within the wages section of our collective agreement, one of the first sentences in that article is “the understanding that all work performed by staff is of equal value”. One thing our local has been fighting for over the last number of bargaining rounds, and have been less successful, is trying to equal out wages. The administrative coordinator’s wages are less than the staff reps. These are traditionally racialized, traditionally feminized roles and devalued accordingly. So, the only wage increase that was asked for was a modest wage increase to try to start to close the gap between the administrative and the professional labor relations staff, recognizing that all labor in the workplace is of equal value.

We’ve not asked for a wage increase for the labor relations staff in probably a decade. Our struggle is not about wages. There are two benefit increases that we’ve asked for. One was for retirees to cover their benefit co-pay. Again, nothing for ourselves, but for the few people that retire from YUFA. The other benefit that we put forward was to change the structure of one of our staff professional development funds to be administered by the local and to operate in more of an equity fund sort of capacity. And this is one way of actually trying to transition funds that are already in place. We’ve asked for a bit of an increase to it, but to not ask for a whole new set of funds, and to try to transition it into something that could take up the role of a trans fund or a disability fund or an accessibility fund. Because it’s such a small workplace, having it be a static trans fund or a static accessibility fund doesn’t work as well because it really depends on the makeup of the unit. So having to be a little bit broader of an equity fund allows it to operate in a way that can deal with some of those unequal vectors of power in ways that are more meaningful to those who are in the workplace. So those are the benefit increases that we’ve asked for. Pretty radical.

So, what do we say? Are strikes about salaries and benefits? Ours isn’t. We think it’s necessary in a space where gender non-conforming employees are being specifically targeted to have things like a trans fund in operation to show some sort of solidarity with the struggles that they’re going through in their workplace. But that’s something that is secondary to the protections that are being sought for health and safety and job security. Given the indignities of the workplace, the salary and benefits are the lowest on the line. Intuitively it feels easier to go on strike for salary and for benefits. It’s an easy ask to articulate, and it doesn’t actually require you to question your goodness as an employer. Are you progressive if you’re saying no to stronger health and safety language? It’s a lot easier to talk to people about the cost of living and why wages need to go up. It’s a lot harder to build solidarity around equity issues. It’s much harder to go on strike for health and safety and job security.

MM: I had worries about communicating a struggle about something other than wages and benefits at the beginning, but as we have been talking to people, I haven’t had a problem in explaining these things. It takes a bit longer, but people get it, right? People are like, ‘oh yeah, harassment and discrimination in the workplace’. The people who are not so familiar with the workplace, like the students, it takes a bit longer, but usually other workers are like, “oh yeah, of course, that’s fucked up, you shouldn’t have to deal with that”. When you tell people,  “our employer is trying to hire managers to do our job”, they say “fuck your employer”. We don’t need to worry so much about explaining these things, people get it.

NL: Manuel is right, I think we do overestimate how difficult those things are to explain, as if they aren’t lived realities for most workers. We assume that the particularities of our situation will be so unshareable that we need something much easier to articulate, like dollars and cents. But if you talk to anybody at York about harassment and discrimination, I think they inherently and immediately recognize this as something that is felt within their workplace, whether they’re permanent faculty, contract faculty, teaching assistants or otherwise.

MM: I think the employer has been very ineffective when they raise this issue of the salary. They have been pointing out, “oh, they make this much” and people have been like “so what? That’s not the issue on the table, there are other issues that they are protesting”.

And a lot of what we have been doing is mobilizing in the house of labor. If this was something that went to the broader community, it might be different. For instance, at rallies we’ve had conservative people walk by and say “you greedy workers, you want more money”, but that’s what you expect from conservatives. They are always going to say that workers are greedy, without even hearing that, no, it’s not about money. It’s all these other things. But these are the people who YUFA is appealing to. They are appealing to the conservatives when they put forward these points about the salaries and the benefits and whatnot. Progressive people are like, “why are you saying this? Why are you bringing these things up? This is absurd.”

CL & JW: There are initial, static demands to any initiation of a strike, and then there are the particular, moving dynamics of community, collectivity, and dignity that can emerge over the course of the struggle itself. On the other side of things, the dynamic process can also involve, over time, a waning morale, a growing sense of conciliation and retreat from the original animating purposes. Can you give a moving sense of this strike? How has it developed? What’s going well? What are the challenges?

MM: As with any strike, you always go in not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s like going to war, right? It’s a scary thing. It’s a throw of the dice. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the end, where you’re going to land. But of course, we went in prepared. We knew that it was a likely outcome of the negotiations because of the history that we have described. We have found that there has been a lot of support coming from the house of labor. Frankly, we were pleasantly surprised by the support we got. We are a small unit and there are things we obviously cannot do, but the things we can do, I think because we are small, we can do it very effectively. The fact that we have all been in the labor movement for a long time. We have a lot of connections so we were able to mobilize those. I guess those have been the upward moments. The downward, of course, has been that this has been a really long strike.

We had a couple of victories in the sense that, well, Ogletree Deacon [the union avoidance law firm] is no longer advising the employer. They dropped most of the proposals that came from them. Now, what we are dealing with is the core of the issue, the fact that they are moving ahead with hiring these managers and that they don’t want to do anything about health and safety. It remains very uncertain what the outcome will be. But we have been keeping our eye on the objectives, that’s the star that we are following. Those are our strategic objectives and we have been doing everything to achieve them. And, right now, we are in a good position. We think we are in a good position to attain them. But, it’s a fight. We will see at the end what happens.

NL: There’s something about having so few people that reminds us to go back to basics. We have had to go back to what does it mean to strike? What does leverage mean? That’s something that’s had to be negotiated throughout this process. What good is speaking truth to power? What are the limitations of that? Coming into the first couple of weeks, we were thinking, “well, if YUFA members knew…”  It goes back to the progressive slate discussion. There is an inherent bend within YUFA members when there is a progressive slate. This happens within all unions, it’s not just YUFA, it’s happened within CUPE 3903 a lot as well. This inherent trust that is bestowed upon those deemed to be on the right side of the issue. That we don’t have to get into the nitty gritty. We can just play the neutral card because we assume that if they are on this side of the spectrum of what’s good and not, that they will act in a way that is commensurate with that. And so we don’t have to go into the details. We don’t have to look at what’s happening here. We can treat it as an internal matter.

We were thinking that if we just get out and talk to people and let them know what’s actually at stake, let them know what’s actually happening, that that will mean a certain action, especially from those on the left side of the spectrum of YUFA membership. And that didn’t result. To be clear, there has been some amazing solidarity and some amazing people have stepped forward, especially from those who wouldn’t be the first in the line at a general membership meeting or a rally to stick their hand up to speak on behalf of YUFA. They are from the rank and file, from the everyday membership who on hearing about the issues digested the information and thought “that is horrendous. I need to step forward.”

But there has been a lot of disappointment in terms of people who are purportedly from the Left. This is the situation on the ground that exists. Do you know we are on the line fighting for protections against gender discrimination? And you are writing about Trump’s rise and what that means for trans people in the States. So where is your outrage? Where is your solidarity? What are you doing?

That not having the result that you would immediately assume has meant a switch in tactics. If the call’s not going to come from inside the house, then whose door do you knock on? This is a very different approach to strikes than is traditionally taken within the union world, the one that means a picket line, then you are in front of the employer’s doors and you’re stopping people from getting in.

The YUFA executive has not opened its office since COVID started. Standing in front of a locked door that nobody goes to, that’s not an effective strike. This is something that has plagued unions across the board since the pandemic and Zoom. What does a strike mean? The scale issue of our line means that we actually get to operationalize these questions in certain ways and that we’re not as bogged down as a bureaucracy of a 3,000 member campus union that has to make these decisions where there are so many people to organize.

These are also conversations that we had in CUPE 3903 in 2012 when we were staring down a possible strike having just come out of administration, having no resources. What does a strike line look like when you can’t afford to buy a barricade? What does it mean to actually shut down York University?. These were conversations happening when the pandemic and Zoom happened, but these conversations keep on stalling out when boots actually hit the ground in the chaos and frenzy that happens when a strike starts.

Whether it be our personal histories in the labor movement, our histories of being on strike, or the small scale of our union, it has meant the ability to challenge these traditional ways of assuming what a strike is throughout the strike. We can ask ourselves, what is the next leverage point? If they’re not listening internally, where do we target next for pressure? It has meant a really adaptable strike that is different from others.

The strike still involves the same level of conflict, conflict resolution and solidarity building that you have to do time and again. With people inside and outside, who’s going to actually show up to your line? Who did you think was an ally? It’s a question that’s asked and answered during every strike regardless of how many bodies are walking the line. And that definitely happened here for us. We have been really lucky in that we’ve had that question answered positively enough times to have good morale, which is not always the case. But it has been the case that because there’s so few of us, we are forced to actually go through that process or devolve quickly.

Whereas I think [larger campus unions such as] CUPE 3903 have watched that slowly happen over the course of a 3 month strike or over the course of a 5 month strike. When you have eight people, you don’t have that long for that question to come to a head. But it does reiterate those questions of solidarity. How do you act in solidarity? How do you act as a common front?

CL & JW: To pan out somewhat to the bigger picture, this is an enormously challenging time for the higher education sector in Canada, generally, and in Ontario particularly. What are the implications for the higher education sector of your strike? How do you situate it within the wider crisis in the sector?

NL: The crisis affecting universities in Ontario, and in particular York, in terms of funding over the last couple of years has really affected harassment and discrimination. I know that’s not the direction of the question, but I think the interpersonal, intergroup and horizontal fighting engendered by neoliberalization gets overlooked. We have seen that in terms of member-to-member harassment claims at YUFA that we have to deal with in our day-to-day working life. And it’s also downloaded, I think, into the relations of the executive and the staff at YUFA. You have these constraints, you have these battles being fought at York downloaded from the provincial situation, that itself is downloaded from the global situation. And it’s easier to punch across and to punch down than it is to punch up. And those tightening of belts lead to decisions that are not healthy for the organization. I think that that’s also a dynamic that’s at play in terms of why the last couple of years working at YUFA has been as strenuous as it has been, is because those dynamics are being downloaded and downloaded and downloaded.

And the infrastructure to fight back has not been secured and built as well as we would all like it to be. We see this play out in YUFA’s workplace and then downloaded onto our workplace. So that is one of the ways in which it is a shared global struggle, of how those dynamics are getting filtered down. And how the subject of harassment is often a side conversation to this question of how neoliberalism shapes the university. We don’t really think about the social reproduction aspect of it, we sooner think of the hard reproduction aspect.

MM: I was thinking also in similar terms, from the perspective of top-down managerial structures that we see now in the university, moving away from collegial governance structures. If you talk to YUFA members, this is always one of the biggest concerns for them. The erosion of collegial governance structures. I think this is something that is even older than the neoliberalization of the university or the structural changes that have been going on in universities for the last 20 or 30 years.

There was always, I think, an exceptionalism to collegial governance because you really don’t see that in any other sector. The idea is essentially that these workers really know what they are doing. We need to give them the space so that they can do their jobs and make decisions to structure their work in a way that is really productive and meaningful. And we are going to create all of these structures, whether it is the Senate, departmental committees, faculty councils, etc, to allow that to happen. You don’t see that anywhere else. And so there’s that exceptionalism that professors in particular have.

That is a problem because what happens is that professors tend to see themselves as different from other workers. You sometimes talk to YUFA members who will tell you, “well, I’m not a worker”. They get offended if you use the term worker with them.  That’s a problem for solidarity because then, how do you go and try to say, “we are here fighting for collegial governance” when they think that they are the only ones who deserve this type of working condition?

I think the restructuring we have seen in the past couple of years that has lessened collegial governance has created a crisis in this regard. And so when we come into this conflict with our employer and we say we are actually fighting for a structure that is more collegial, where we can protect our rights to decide that these are the best ways to do our work, and our employer says, “no, we really need a manager to tell you what you need to do”, it’s that type of downloading that Nicole is also talking about.

It would be something like the chair of a department or the program coordinator now being a manager that the employer hires externally, one that doesn’t come from the department. Not a faculty member but some kind of administrator that is excluded from the bargaining unit. It’s that type of dynamic. So I think there is that connection. And it’s something that hasn’t necessarily been picked up on by many members. We have been trying to point that out. We think that is an important aspect.

I think there is a lot of work to be done in all of these areas. Whether it is harassment,  discrimination, job security as well, which is so important for 3903 members. The things that we are seeing with the other, non-academic workers on campus. Their employer is literally hiring more managers to bust their unions. That’s what’s happening to the non-academic unions on campus. And we also see the same thing in the colleges. Those things I think have been picked up fairly quickly and are part of that broader structural issue. But I also think the issue of top-down restructuring is very important but one that is seen as an exception for professors. It hasn’t been picked up as something that is important.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured Image credit: Bradyvandruenen; modified by Tempest.