Dear sisters and brothers,
Ontario’s colleges are out of control.
With all the media glare around the e-Health and OLG
scandals this year, the outrageous antics of the Colleges Compensation
and Appointments Council – the colleges’ employer group – have mostly
gone unnoticed. With the spotlight elsewhere, the Council has been
obstructing democracy, misleading its employees, and wasting tax dollars
throughout 2009. And Mr. McGuinty has allowed them to.
A few basic facts:
·
In 2008, the government passed legislation to allow
part-time and sessional college workers to unionize.
·
Last year, thousands of part-time and sessional faculty
signed union cards. They wanted to vote on whether to join OPSEU.
·
The Ontario Labour Relations Board ordered a vote. The
vote took place at all 24 colleges from Jan. 19 to Feb. 6.
·
College presidents and the Council urged part-time and
sessional faculty to get out and vote. More than 3,600 people did so.
·
As soon as the vote was over, the colleges began to use
every legal delaying tactic they could think of. And every day the
colleges spend arguing at the Labour Board costs Ontario taxpayers at
least $5,000 a day in lawyers’ fees.
·
The ballots are still in the boxes.
College lawyers say the union did not get 35 per cent of
the bargaining unit to sign union cards, which is what the law requires
in order to trigger a vote. The number of cards signed was far more than
35 per cent, but the colleges have worked hard to make it impossible to
tell. Using an old trick called “flooding the list,” they’ve added
thousands of people (on paper) to the part-time workforce. These paper
employees are former employees who were not working at the time of the
card-signing drive. Naturally, they did not sign union cards.
To add more confusion, the colleges’ employee records
are a tangled mess of missing and incomplete information. Under the
current process at the Labour Board, untangling the mess could take two
more years – or more – before we have an answer.
On Nov. 23, we had our first meeting at the Labour Board
to talk about opening the ballot boxes from the part-time support staff
vote that took place in October. Sadly, it looks like the colleges plan
to use the same list-flooding tactic that has delayed justice for
part-time and sessional faculty.
All told, more than 7,500 part-time faculty and support
staff signed OPSEU union cards. They’re still waiting for justice.
Meanwhile, in what can only be called a “stunt,” the
colleges have given up on collective bargaining for full-time faculty
and imposed a collective agreement.
The colleges are willfully obstructing Ontarians’ right
to have their voices heard and their wishes known. They are trampling on
workers’ rights to join a union and bargain collectively. Democracy is
being denied.
Ontario’s colleges are out of control. It’s time Dalton
McGuinty did something about it.
