Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!kem From: kem@csri.toronto.edu (Kem Luther) Newsgroups: ont.general Subject: Community College strike Message-ID: <1989Nov14.121020.29124@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Date: 14 Nov 89 17:10:20 GMT Sender: kem@csri Distribution: ont Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI Lines: 82 I've noticed some talk in this group about the community college strike. I happen to be one of the teachers on strike now (though I am on leave of absence while a student at UofT), so I thought I might supply a little more information and hazard a few opinions. The main issue in the strike is government underfunding of education. Most areas of education under Ontario provincial control have had a rough decade. Ontario is considerably behind other provinces in its funding of education (as a percentage of its total budget). And the funding percentage slips yearly. The technical and community college system has been particularly hard hit. The underfunding shows up in many areas. Five years ago, for example, we had to strike to force the government to cut class sizes and improve teacher/student ratios. In this strike we are taking as our main issue the way that underfunding has damaged the salary structures of professional educators in our system. For the last decade we have not had a union which has been as active and as popular as the unions of secondary school teachers. As a result we have not been able to hold our share of the government's funding attention in the area of faculty salaries. As of this year, our salaries will actually fall below the salaries of secondary school teachers with comparable training and seniority. It is this single issue, though it is not the only one on the table, which in my opinion has galvanized the college faculties to move to a strike position. The goal is simply to keep our traditional place in the hierarchy of funding between primary school and university salaries. It is, in fact, not very easy to get the community college faculty out on strike. A slightly less blatant shortfall in the last contract offer (two years ago) did not receive a strike mandate. Is it right that college faculty should be paid less than primary and secondary teachers in Ontario? Is it right that teachers at any level should be as well paid as they are in Ontario? These are hard questions to answer. I sometimes fear that we are drifting toward conditions of educational salaries which are more like those in the U.S. I have many friends who now are bearing the burdens imposed by the approach to salaries which prevails down south. It is not something I would wish imposed on my colleagues in Ontario. Nor is the U.S. educational system one that I would like to see totally modelled here. As for the opinion expressed in this group that students are the ones who are the hostages in this situation, I can only agree. The question, though, is not <> the middle party is hurt. There is in fact a very real danger that educational programs will have to be extended for many students if the strike continue even one or two more days. The real question is <> is holding the students captive. I think it is the members of the Council of Regents, and behind the Council the current Ontario government, who are not allocating the monies to provide the students with quality education and training. If the picture being projected is that college faculties are gleefully putting the students' year in danger for personal monetary goals, the pictured is radically underfocussed. We are the ones who work with them on a daily basis to make the programs a success. We know them as individuals, and not just as statistics and line items in budgets. It is actually quite painful to have to apply the medicine of a strike to the disease of underfunding when that action causes such immediate harm to persons toward whom we have developed a strong sense of responsibility. I don't know whether the strike will be a success. The union began it with only a 55% mandate. Although students have tuition and living expenses at risk, the stakes are at least as high for the faculty. I estimate that each college teacher has taken a shortfall in salary while on strike which is equivalent to the semester tuition for over ten students. Remember when you read something by a Regent that you are hearing from someone who has almost nothing at risk. Remember when you hear from an MP you are talking to someone who has a fully indexed pension plan, but who will not even allow us to table the matter of our non-indexed pensions during contract negotiations (most primary school teachers, by the way, also have indexed pensions).