Who are we fighting for? and how?

As time goes on, my perspective on these questions is changing. Or expanding, if that's something that a perspective can do.

Obviously we're concerned about our salary structure, our reputation among similar universities, our ability to recruit and retain exciting and dynamic colleagues, other governance issues, intellectual property, etc. No question.

In my mind, we're also fighting for our students, and their education.  The province is/was openly hostile to higher education, and education in general, saying things like programs that don't result in high rates of graduate employment in the relevant field are withotu value, and should be un(der)funded, shrunk, or eliminated outright. This is one of the 'results-based' measures they want to use to evaluate and reward or punish us via the funding model. In fact it is the only measure that anyone seems to ahve mentioned in the last five years, at least.

This attitude has already resulted in overworked (and undersupported) programs (waves at Nursing) that obviously do have recognizable specific employment outcome goals being further inundated with work. See previous posts.

As I hope I have said, what we hear from employers, and have been hearing since No Child Left Behind and the insistence on STEM education as the 'main' purpose of education, is that education should place high value on critical thinking and creative problem solving. At least as much as specific STEM achievements.

I've been seeing recently 'STEAM', science-technology-engineering-arts-mathematics, recognizing the importance and utility of arts education in the areas of critical thinking and creative problem solving. Turning the university into a glorified vocational school (no shade on vocational schools, but they're just different from universities), serves no one, least of all students and their future employers, let alone society at large.

One angle I had been vaguely aware of but only recently started to appreciate, was our role in history. Winnipeg is pretty famous for the 1919 General Strike, which was a landmark in worker rights, human rights, and labor relations law. The way Covid has of course changed everything, in big and small ways. Most courses are being offered online (which is problematic because the administration seems to think this is a nifty way to bypass class(room) size limitations).  But (as in 2016) our contract negotiations were in their way precedential. 

In 2016 negotiations, due to unlawful government interference, the admin suddenly (and at the time inexplicably) pulled a salary offer off the table. This was the province's first salvo in what ended up being the Public Sector Sustainability Act which after the Throne Speech last week was declared officially dead, thank heavens). So we were the first public-sector union to test bargaining in the then-austerity-happy climate.

What's interesting is that there are several faculty associations around Canada (I counted at least four, possibly more--I'm hoping to track down, or make, a proper list to continue in the practice of gratitude) that are also in negotiation, or about to enter negotiation, over their contracts, and they either have called or expect to call for a strike vote. So they are looking at our negotiation.

The union especially has received word from faculty associations, and other unions, for advice about not only organizing a strike, but especially organizing online or virtual picketing activity. So I thought I'd go into it a little, from the perspective of an online picketer.

First of all, most members who are striking are on regular sign-holding traffic-slowing, picketing. Owing to my Achilles tendon, I haven't been on the line this year or in 2016.  In 2016 I did my strike duty in a support position driving a van, transporting picket captains, bringing coffee and snacks to the lines, running the odd errand, etc. 

This year, some 200 of us asked to be accommodated, for physical limitations, for child care issues, for being out of the city/province, etc., by becoming 'online picketers' which is something the union made up this year.  I don't know how all it got organized, but online picketers are organized into 'clusters'.  Each cluster meets for an hour via Zoom, to talk about our activities, our challenges, our ideas, to get updates about what's going on in negotiation, or on the picket lines, or where the union would like is to concentrate some of our activity.  Then we spend the rest of our daily strike time engaged in online or offline activities in support of the strike. For me, this blog is a big part of my activity, followed by time on Facebook and Twitter, liking, sharing, retweeting, and commenting on strike related posts, and combing media outlets (the Winnipeg Free Press, the CBC, CTV and Global news coverage) for strike related information, posting or tweeting it as appropriate, and occasionally writing in to correct misinformation. Some of my colleague spend more time on TikTok or Instagram or any of the other social media outlets. I just happen to be an FB and Twitter person.

Some of my colleagues spend their strike time writing and recording songs, and making memes that people like me try to disseminate across social media.  Others spend most of their time writing or phoning the members of the administration, the board of governors, the legislative assembly, the premier's office, the news media, etc. making sure the struggle remains on their minds, trying to get our point of view across, encouraging helpful behaviour and occasionally calling people out on bad behaviour.  

So we're fortunate that there are enough of us that we can keep all the live picketing zones live for the hours they're scheduled (something like 7am to 7pm, or maybe it's 4 or 5pm now, for them to have settled on three hour picketing shifts, daily. For us online picketers, our three hours includes our daily cluster meeting, and (at least) two additional hours engaged in whatever activity we can that doesn't involve walking in a circle, off and on, for three hours.

I have to say, the daily cluster meetings are a high-point of my day. I get to see (and meet) new colleagues, we get to support each other through our doubts and bad moods and discouragements. We get to hear more about what's going on in negotiations than our live picketers, share ideas and activities, frustrations and achievements.  

So I hope we're also inspiring our fellow union-members and fellow unions, as well as helping to pave the online way for conducting a strike during Covid.