Readers’ Feedback

On April 21, 2024April 21, 2024 By ontariocollegeprofIn antisemitismLeave a comment

Well, several people have read my efforts to avoid a breakdown — I’m grateful for everybody’s time and attention.

I’m also grateful that the time and attention occasionally took the form of feedback, some of which I’m going to excerpt here, anonymously (I’ll dispense with my usual custom of identifying respondents by geographic region). Let’s start with the supportive comments:

Thank you [. . .] you’re a true voice of reason in this cesspool of insanity we find ourselves in. It brings comfort to me to read these blogs.

This next one is a bit more sad than surprising:

I’m sad that I feel I have to post anonymously, but I’m not as brave as you are. Thank you for putting what I’ve been thinking into words. I’ve been struggling so much to find ways to articulate what I’m feeling.

This next letter is a bit more nuanced, and I appreciate the sentiment, even if I’m not fully in agreement with it (which I’ll explain afterwards):

You have my sympathy and were I Jewish, I would no doubt be fearful too. The war-mongering on both sides is very frightening. And you’re probably right that there are those who cannot separate anti-semitism from their feelings about what is happening in Gaza. There are, however, many people who can. This includes even many anti-Zionist Jews who protest the government of Israel’s actions since the October attack by HAMAS. [. . . ]

I am really not sure that our union needs to be making statements about international events of any kind but it is part of our history. So, if we must, I do believe it is possible for clear thinking and compassionate people to support peace in the Middle East. I think that does mean criticizing the government of Israel who long ago left the realm of self-defence and entered the territory of overwhelming retribution. It really is no wonder the word genocide is being used. I will repeat that holding that belief does not make me an anti-semite. I believe there are people on both sides who don’t want war and who want to be able to live in peace and that, given the right support, over time, peaceful coexistence would be possible. [ . . . ] Hurtful as it must be to hear pro-Palestinian support for violence against Israel from a colleague, next time, try talking to them to find their grey. I believe with all my heart that it exists.

So, I think it’s probably more the premises than the conclusions that I might dispute here. The first is probably the writer’s calm confidence that a Jew — anti-Zionist or not — is necessarily immune to antisemitism.

Now, let’s be clear that I would expect that a Jewish — Zionist or no — or a Palestinian member of my union would have extremely strong feelings one way or the other about Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, and also about Israel’s response. I would be quite surprised if they didn’t, given that they are associated — whether by ethnic identification, familial bonds, or personal relationships — with the individuals who are directly involved in that conflict. And typically, I think that OPSEU/SEFPO has generally respected when its members have different, conflicting opinions about global conflicts, and remained neutral in such cases. Quite simply, we have rarely if ever said, “This will be the official position that represents the will of our membership, even though some of our membership finds this position repugnant.” I can’t think any examples of this in my roughly 16 years of convention attendance.

I believe that there was, approximately 33 years ago, a resolution passed at Convention to sanction South Africa for its policy of apartheid. Now, I’m pretty ignorant about the situation about South Africa leading up to and during apartheid (and anybody’s welcome to instruct me), but I’d say that the current issue of Israel / Gaza is far more morally ambiguous than the issue of apartheid in South Africa for several reasons, including: 1. Quite unlike apartheid South Africa, voting rights in Israel are not based upon race; Arab Israelis have equal rights under the law. 2. Quite unlike the ANC in South Africa, the leadership of Gaza (i.e., Hamas) does not recognize the right of a Jewish state of Israel to exist, and has frequently attacked Israel, including most recently the mass-murder and -kidnapping of its citizens and residents.

Now, that kind of (admittedly-reductionist) analysis of the dynamic between Israel and Gaza is, I think at the heart of the last letter that I’m going to excerpt — I’m afraid that it was fairly long, and I’m only going to include maybe half of it below:

Like so many interpretations of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, your analysis is presented in a near total vacuum. Suicide bombings by Palestinians and their incursions into Israel, the murder of innocent Israelis by Palestinians, missile attacks, and the event of October 7th all happened in a response to a great number of things that you continuously and conveniently leave out, things that Jews (before the official creation of Israel) and Israel since then have done to Palestinians for the last 75 years, and counting.

An analysis of this ongoing conflict cannot begin without a honest reco[unt]ing of what predates all of this: namely 1948, which is remembered in the Palestinian collective consciousness as the Nakba: the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians by Jews, the destruction of the their homes, villages, towns , cultural centres, places of worship and the forced migration of over 700,000 of them into what is now the West Bank, and Gaza, the largest open air prison in the world.

Reflecting back on apartheid era South Africa, white Afrikaners used the same excuses to murder and detail and deprive Black Africans for decades – until the rest of the world finally had a moment of clarity that this was somehow wrong. [ . . . ]

Facts matter. If you’re in the GTA, check out Independent Jewish Voices, started by Sheryl Nestel, a Canadian Jewish academic, professor who lived in Israel for more that fifteen years, had two children born there and who’s married into a Holocaust family (in the event you might think she’s biased or somehow antisemitic).

Okay, so let me be clear: This is not a history blog, and I don’t purport to offer a thorough analysis of Middle East politics, let along history. I’m not here to offer an “analysis of this ongoing conflict”, as the titles of my previous three posts indicate. I am trying to offer thoughts and analysis on what I call the Progressive Left in Canada, as it affects my union, my life, and my psyche.

Secondly, I would suggest that, in the context of the Progressive Left, my voice may also qualify as an “Independent” one. If anybody in the Progressive Left in Canada has been publishing opinions comparable to mine, I haven’t seen it. (And hey, I invite people to refer me to them, so I’ll feel a bit less that I’m shouting into the wilderness.) I won’t go further than that, except to say that we might want to consider what we mean when we call voices “independent” (or not) in the context of collectivism. I think calling someone (or calling oneself) an independent voice says more about the person doing the labelling than the person being labelled.

Here’s the other thing: Unlike others, I am not proposing that OPSEU/SEFPO make my personal position on Mideast conflict its official position. In fact, I wouldn’t want OPSEU/SEFPO to make my opinions on Israel and Hamas its official position (even if I had that magic wand) because I acknowledge that other people with different lives and different experiences will think differently about these issues, and I believe that it’s toxic for a Union to tell either party that their feelings are wrong. When Unions do that, they end up in a position where segments of their membership get told that they are legally obliged to spend money for the Union to advocate positions that those members find discriminatory and morally objectionable. That’s a bad place for a Union to be, and it ends up weakening unions.

But to engage with the substance of the respondent’s letter, I think that it’s probably fair to say that I do treat the current Israel / Gaza situation in a bit of an historical vacuum — I tend to look at the Second Intifada as the foundational moment for the dynamic as it currently stands. Was the Second Intifada an effect of several causes (including a failed peace process) for which both Israel and the Palestinians hold much blame? I expect so. Were those causes themselves effects of still-earlier causes, for which both Israel and the Palestinians hold much blame? I expect so. If there’s a definitive “start” to the Israel/Palestine conflict, I don’t believe that historians agree upon it, and I lack the confidence to suggest that I’m likely to arrive at it, “independently”.

(Of course, I’d argue that the people who blame the entire situation on Benjamin Netanyahu also tend to look at in an historical vacuum as well.)

But I’d suggest that my respondent’s brief treatment of the situation also views it in a vacuum — not necessarily an historical one, but a regional one. This letter suggests that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be understood (and moral / political judgements and “solutions” can be arrived at) without reference to other (non-European) countries, including the countries of which the West Bank and Gaza Strip were previously constituent (Egypt and Jordan); the countries where Palestinians also are not automatically granted citizenship and equal rights (Lebanon and Syria) And the country that is funding Hezbollah: Iran.

I understand why somebody might want to reduce the Israel/Hamas conflict to, well, Israel and Hamas. It simplifies matters. But it also skews the true dynamics, which are more complex. There’s certainly a narrative where Israel is the oppressor and Palestinians are the oppressed — that’s rather obviously the dominant narrative of the Progressive Left. But that narrative (which features only two parties, although “the West” seemingly manages to play a determinative role through ideology) firstly denies Palestinians agency over their own choices, and secondly ignores a broader regional dynamic in which the existence of a Jewish state has not been tolerated for a single day of Israel’s history.

And above all, the inevitable outcome of closing our eyes to the other countries the region is that we end up holding Israel to a different level of moral responsibility and culpability than we hold any other country. It means that we base Convention resolutions on this report by Amnesty International, and not this one, to say nothing of this one or this one.

And that, I maintain, is antisemitic.

As ever, feedback is welcomed at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.

Field Notes from the Progressive Left (Part Three)

On April 19, 2024April 19, 2024 By ontariocollegeprofIn antisemitismLeave a comment

“The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbours” — René Girard

So, let’s look at two walls (fences, etc.).

What do these walls have in common? Both border the Gaza Strip, and both restrict the movement of Palestinians in Gaza and the flow of trade into and out of Gaza.

What differentiates these walls? Well, a couple of things, but for the moment, we’ll focus on the fact that only one of them is addressed in Resolutions I1, I2, and I4 as found in pp. 33-35 of the Resolutions Booklet that has been compiled for OPSEU/SEFPO’s upcoming convention. I invite you to compare them, below:

Wall #1: Intolerable to the motivating bodies of Resolutions I1, I2, and I4

Wall #2: Tolerable to the motivating bodies of Resolutions I1, I2, and I4

What’s the difference? Wall #1 has been built along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip– Gazans went over, under, and through it in order to murder and kidnap Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, resulting (if Wikipedia is indeed up-to-date) in the deaths of 1,139 people (including 36 children and 71 foreign nationals), and the kidnapping of roughly 250 more, including 36 children.

Wall #2 is, of course, situated on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, and was built in 2009. That’s four years after Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers entirely from Gaza. (October 7, of course, revealed to the world what Gaza’s leadership spent the next 15 years doing, and will presumably spend the next 15 doing, if they remain in power.) And while I’m not in the habit of quoting Wikipedia, I do feel like the following sentences illuminate Egypt’s relationship with Gaza:

Egypt reinforced the border with several hundred troops to protect construction crews from Palestinian sniper attacks.

Palestinian sources said that construction of the barrier was damaging dozens of smuggling tunnels as deep as 30 m (100 feet), causing them to collapse on a nearly daily basis and killing operators, especially tunnels near the Rafah border terminal. They added that most of the 1,500 tunnels between Gaza and Egypt remained unaffected. The sources also stated that the project has alarmed the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, which charges an annual $2,500 for the right to operate a tunnel

But here’s the point: Both of these walls were designed and constructed to limit the flow of goods (such as smuggled weapons) into Gaza and the flow of individuals (such as terrorists) out of it.

There’s also a third wall that’s relevant: The wall between Israel and the West Bank.

Israel began its construction in 2002, during the Second Intifada, in response to Hamas’ practice of suicide bombings (including, of course, civilian targets such as city buses and shopping malls) that lead to over 400 civilian deaths in that year. In 2007, two years after the wall was completed, the number of Israelis killed by suicide bombing was…three. In 2008, it was one.

In 2009, it was zero.

But let’s come back to the question of these walls as they figure in three resolutions targeting Israel that Convention delegates are being asked to consider:

Resolution I1 seeks to have OPSEU/SFEPO join a international campaign to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel. It seeks (in part):

…an immediate ceasefire and that the state of Israel end the siege of Gaza and occupation in the West Bank, and dismantle the apartheid wall and Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and fully comply with international law[.]

Resolution I2 wraps itself in the cloak of ceasefire while posing a laundry list of obligations on Israel, and virtually no obligations on the Palestinian government. (It conspicuously neglects to demand that the Palestinian government recognizes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.) But where walls are concerned, the resolution: “Demands an immediate end to Israel’s blockade, bombing and invasion of Gaza, and the mass detentions and killing of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank”.

Similarly, Resolution I4, “Demands an immediate end to Israel’s blockade, bombing and invasion of
Gaza, and the mass detentions and killing of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank”

My point is this: Israel is geographically incapable of blockading either Palestinian territory, unilaterally. The Gaza Strip borders two countries: Israel and Egypt; the West Bank borders two countries: Israel and Jordan.

Not one of the three resolutions that the delegates of Convention are asked to consider acknowledges that fact, and they are therefore profoundly intellectually dishonest and/or discriminatory to the point of antisemitism.

If you are concerned about the blockade of the Gaza Strip, then it makes sense to hold Israel and Egypt responsible for ending that blockade. But these resolutions ignore Egypt.

Why? Because these resolutions are not really, in their essence, about helping Palestinians. They’re about denouncing Israel. Which is why Israel — a country that has been bombed and attacked by forces in the Gaza Strip who do not recognize its right to exist or the right of its civilians to not be murdered — is targeted for criticism, and Egypt is not.

And, with reference to my last post, I invite you to consider what principle makes Israel’s wall with Gaza intolerable, but Egypt’s wall with Gaza tolerable. If you can’t think of one, then I believe that your criticism of Israel’s wall is unprincipled and therefore antisemitic.

My own analysis of Israeli-Palestinian history since the Second Intifada (but particularly considering October 7) leads me to a few conclusions. Foremost among them is that the Progressive Left’s demand that Israel remove a wall that was erected in the face of suicide bombings and effectively served to deter them is simply a wish to sacrifice Israeli Jews at the altar of progressive ideals.

More specifically, we can look to the image of the scapegoat.

The term comes from an Old Testament passage in which God directed that the Hebrew priests might take a goat, ceremonially transfer the sins of the people onto it and then drive it out into the wilderness, where it would perish.

In this case, Israeli Jews are the goat; the Progressive Left are the Kohanim who utter their prayers of expiation as they pile the sins of the West onto Israel, as in today’s statement from the Palestinian solidarity committee of York University’s Department of Politics:

Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.

And despite the fact that that vilification reads like an example of Progressivist Mad Libs, it’s truly something far deeper and more fundamental to the psyche: It’s an incantation, a prayer for expiation; it’s the avinu malkeinu of the Progressive Left.

Except instead of focusing on purification by, say, turning inwards and fasting (as Jews do when reciting that prayer), the Progressive Left seeks purification through scapegoating: Piling its sins upon another entity and casting that figure out… to wander. Homeless.

By boycotting it; by divesting themselves of it; by sanctioning it.

Because the Progressive Left in the West cannot be cleansed of its own “original sin” of being Western unless it manages to displace its own Western-ness, which it can do only by projecting it upon an Other. It requires its sins to be transferred onto a sacrifice, and for that sacrifice to be banished to the wilderness, to perish. So that the virtuous may be redeemed.

This is why Israel is relentlessly accused by the Progressive Left of uniquely, definitively Western vices: racism, settler-colonialism (which is an absurd term to describe the return of Jewish exiles to their ancestral homeland), white supremacy (again, an absurd thing to accuse Mizrahi Jews of). The virtue of the Progressive Left utterly depends upon it.

The progressive left upholds a moral dynamic that equates privilege with evil and victimhood with virtue. But the awkward problem, of course, is that its individual members in Canada tend to be privileged, and their claims to victimhood rarely compare to the experience of others in other countries or other ages.

So, unwilling to renounce either their moral calculus or their social privilege, they need an Other upon whom to ascribe every Western fault, so that the Progressive Left can sing the hymn of its own righteousness. Having transcended its own Western-ness, it can reassure itself of its self-contented virtue despite its unwillingness to sacrifice its social privilege.

And if Jews did not exist, it would be necessary for the Progressive Left to invent them.

But in the meantime, it will denounce the wall that saves Jewish lives. It will denounce Jews for their unwillingness to sacrifice themselves (or their overseas relatives and friends) to satisfy the Progressive Left’s self-conception. Denounce them for the sin of self-defence. For building walls to keep out suicide bombers, and for hunting Hamas even into civilian areas.

And the motivating bodies of resolutions I1, I2, and I4 provide OPSEU/SEFPO with a chance to formally pronounce to the world that OPSEU/SEFPO indicts ~~Jews~~ Zionists for that sin.

Responses to ontariocollegprof@yahoo.com are, as ever welcome. I’ll try to publish (always anonymously) some excerpts over the weekend.

Field Notes from the Progressive Left (Part Two)

On April 17, 2024April 17, 2024 By ontariocollegeprofIn antisemitismLeave a comment

or, How Legitimate Criticism Becomes Discriminatory Policy

You probably don’t know NUPGE — the National Union of Public and General Employees — but you might be interested to know that they receive 2 cents of every dollar that OPSEU/SEFPO (and about 12 other public sector Unions from every province except Quebec) gathers in dues. It calls itself a “union of unions” and it ostensibly advocates nationally on behalf of public sector unions and public services, I suppose.

In fact, according to the proposed budget, OPSEU/SEFPO will be paying NUPGE $3,013,100 in 2024. (Exchanged into a different currency, I think that equates to about 33 Dodge Hellcats, annually.)

What does NUPGE accomplish with that $3 million each year? Well, I’m not positive, so I’ll just assume that issuing press releases costs more than I had previously realized.

But NUPGE’s press releases and public positions are of some importance, because, as OPSEU/SEFPO President JP Hornick and 1st VP/Treasurer Laurie Nancekivell assured us,

NUPGE speaks not just with the weight of OPSEU/SEFPO’s 180,000 members but for all 425,000 plus NUPGE members across Canada. As OPSEU/SEFPO leaders we sit on the NUPGE National Executive Board and we share NUPGE’s statements with members because they are our positions too. (emphasis added)

So, if I understand correctly, OPSEU/SEFPO has positions — positions that might not have been approved by Convention or even by its Executive Board, but positions that now belong to OPSEU/SEFPO and speak on behalf of its 180,000 members because they have been approved by NUPGE, and we as members add “weight” to NUPGE’s positions, as surely as we add money to its accounts.

One apparent NUPGE position is from 2021, and is found in a press release entitled “Solidarity with Palestinian People“. It reads, “NUPGE condemns the Israeli forces’ violent repression of Palestinian demonstrators, including the attacks at al-Aqsa Mosque” and goes on to state, “We call for respect for international law, and respect for the human rights and self-determination of Palestinians, as a fundamental precondition for an end to hostilities.”

Now, let’s just hold that up to the light for a moment… violence committed by Israeli forces is condemned outright, but “an end to hostilities” on the other hand has a precondition. So… who is it that’s permitted to maintain hostilities until NUPGE’s demands met? Seemingly not the Israel army, given that their violence is condemned.

I interpret this 2021 position to mean that violence committed by Palestinians against Israelis is legitimate, and violence committed by Israelis against Palestinians is illegitimate. Because, again, NUPGE is conditioning “an end to hostilities” upon specific preconditions.

That’s an interesting position for OPSEU/SEFPO to maintain. I find its implications for my friends and family in Israel a bit disturbing, but let me move on to a different section of that press release:

“Let us be frank,” said [NUPGE President Larry] Brown. “There are some who would equate every criticism of the Israeli government as being based on anti-Semitism.”

Permit me to respectfully ask NUPGE — or OPSEU/SEFPO, whose position this apparently is by proxy — to kindly name one person living in Canada who “equate[s] every criticism of the Israeli government as being based on anti-Semitism”.

No, seriously — you’re welcome to crowdsource this one at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.

But what’s interesting about that assertion is that it pre-emptively disregards every accusation of anti-Semitism, by pre-emptively casting it as an unreasonable, reflexive reaction to any criticism of Israel. “Disregard the Jews who call our criticism of Israel as antisemitic”, the reasoning says, “They just do that all the time.”

I remember a quotation — I had thought that it was Toni Morrison — that said, “A stereotype is an already-read book”. You don’t need to read it, because you know what it says; and you know what it says because you’ve already read it.

And NUPGE’s position relies upon and reinforces a stereotype about Jews, and about their claims of antisemitism. The implication of that position for the Progressive Left is that — unlike if your policy is accused of being sexist or racist or anti-Indigenous or ableist or discriminatory — if your policy is accused of being antisemitic, you don’t need to weigh critically whether the accusation has merit. You don’t need to investigate your position. Because (according to that reasoning) Jews’ calling any specific criticism of Israel antisemitic has absolutely no relationship to whether or not it is. (And that means that only non-Jews can offer an authoritative opinion about what’s antisemitic, but that’s the topic of a different post.)

That’s an unfortunate policy for a union to hold. I’m not thrilled about funding it, to be honest. Nor am I thrilled that my presence as an OPSEU/SEFPO member should give “weight” to NUPGE’s (dis)positions.

But this is pretty much the terra firma of the Progressive Left: The belief that accusations of antisemitism from mainstream Jews are intended to silence legitimate criticisms of Israel.

I did a quick google search for the phrase “legitimate criticism of Israel” — I was shocked to find only 33,500 results. Let’s take as a single example the Al Jazeera article whose subheading reads, “In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 60 organisations say the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s] definition [of antisemitism] has been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.”

(That allegation strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive, given that the IHRA itself states, “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. But I digress.)

And whenever someone expresses their concern about not being able to express “legitimate criticism of Israel” for fear of being accused of antisemitism, I always wonder what on earth they would consider to be illegitimate criticism of Israel.

It strikes me that members of the Progressive Left passionately oppose antisemitism, but only so long as they get to define what is or isn’t antisemitic. (Hint: the definition never extends to their positions.)

I’m not going to try to explain what criticisms of Israel are or are not legitimate. If only because “Legitimacy” seems like a strange category for criticism, as opposed to say, validity.

But I do think that I can offer some conclusions about when criticism of Israel — even “legitimate”, valid, correct criticism — may be discriminatory and therefore antisemitic.

Criticism of Israel is antisemitic when it is unprincipled.

And by that, I mean, when it is not rooted in a principle that is applied to other countries that share the quality that is being criticized. More simply, it’s antisemitic when it’s holding Israel to a standard to which the other 194 countries on Earth are not held.

Because if one’s principles only manifest themselves exclusively in relation to the actions of Israel, then those principles aren’t principles at all — they’re just rationalizations to criticize Israel.

Offended by Human Rights abuses? Let me hear your resolutions about China.

Horrified by civilian casualties in war? Let me hear your resolutions about Syria.

Espousing principles of self-determination? Let me hear your resolution to boycott, divest, and sanction Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

And even if NUPGE somehow fixated exclusively on human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians, I can’t help but notice that the human rights violations perpetrated against Palestinians by Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon seem to escape its interest.

So, that’s apparently OPSEU/SEFPO’s position: Criticism of Israel’s sins. Disregard of literally every other country’s.

And here’s the fundamental category error that the Progressive Left makes: In all of its worry that “legitimate” criticism of Israel might be falsely accused of being antisemitic, they fail to realize that criticism of Israel can be legitimate and antisemitic at the same time. It all depends on what countries you’re not criticizing.

So let me take a quick look at OPSEU/SEFPO Conventions past and future, and which foreign countries have been targeted for criticism, censure, etc., in the resolutions that were approved for debate. Let’s see where the focus has been.

[Note: The chart below is based on information available online. For 2017-24, that’s the Resolutions booklets, which include all proposed resolutions approved for debate at Convention by the Resolutions Committee; for 2015-16, I’m linking to both the Convention minutes, which only record the resolutions that actually got debated on the floor and the following year’s “Executive Board Report”, which includes all resolutions that didn’t make it to the floor; for 2014, I could only find the minutes.]

	Proposed Resolutions Condemning Israel	Proposed Resolutions Condemning Literally Any Other Foreign Country
2024 (upcoming)	3	0
2023	1	0
2022	0	0
2020-21 (no convention)	n/a	n/a
2019	0	0
2018	0	0
2017	1	0
2016 here and here	0	0
2015 here and here	0	0
2014 here	0	0
Total	5	0

To be clear, this chart reflects positions taken by OPSEU/SEFPO’s submitting bodies (and presented for debate at our Convention) over the last eleven years. My recollection is that one of them made it to the floor for debate, and that it did not pass. And yet, this pattern of submitted resolutions appears to roughly mirror the pattern of the Progressive Left in general:

But hey, maybe I’m missing a resolution against Russia in among all those documents. Feel free to check my work and get back to me at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com. Feel free to share your thoughts as well — they’ll stay anonymous if I print them.

Field Notes from the Progressive Left (Part One)

On April 16, 2024April 17, 2024 By ontariocollegeprofIn antisemitismLeave a comment

[I just wanted to start by highlighting an excerpt from the “About this Blog” page, which I invite everyone to read. It says, “This blog should not be understood to represent the opinions of OPSEU/SEFPO, OPSEU/SEFPO Local 560, or the CAAT-A division or Divisional Executive of OPSEU/SEFPO. [. . .] This blog contains speech undertaken in my capacity as a public citizen; in this capacity, I am speaking as an individual . . . .”]

So, I learned an interesting feature about firearm regulations in Canada. If I understand correctly (and that’s improbable), prior to the Federal government’s 2022 freeze on handguns, most handguns were restricted (meaning that they needed to be registered), but handguns that were .25 or .32 calibre were prohibited (meaning, I think, that possession was lawful only if the gun had been obtained prior to the date when they were prohibited).

That leads to a peculiar situation, where, if one had the appropriate firearms license, one could obtain a .22 or a .38 pistol but not two of the calibres in between those: .25 or .32. Why is that? Well, it seems to be that .25 and .32 were the preferred calibres for “Saturday Night Specials”, or cheap and unreliable handguns that were associated with urban shootings. And that got me to thinking about the degree to which Canada’s firearm policy intersects with issues of class and race.

And if you were to ask me why this information came to my knowledge at the age of 52 — why I was inspired to research handgun ownership for the first time last December while my wife lay sleeping beside me, I can only offer one explanation:

I am a Jew.

More specifically, I’m a Jew, and I live in the Greater Toronto Area in 2024.

Which is the same reason that I removed the mezuzah from my door. Which I did not do when I was a Jew who lived in the Greater Toronto Area in 2022.

Which is the same reason that I got used to passing by armed police who were guarding the entrances to my mother’s nursing home. Who were not there in 2022.

And I’m positive that there are Jews living the the GTA in 2024 who do not feel the need to research gun ownership… but, seemingly, I am not alone.

Because ultimately, as much as my friends on the progressive left might insist that criticism of Netanyahu is different from anti-Zionism is different from anti-Semitism, I don’t have much confidence that everybody exposed to the ongoing demonization of Israel will be able to make such subtle distinctions.

And I am therefore concerned for my safety and for my family’s safety.

And my personal experience of being a Jew who lives in the Greater Toronto Area in 2024 is coloured profoundly by my involvement in the progressive left, which I believe is the epicentre for anti-Zionism in the West.

That has led me to some strange realizations. The sort of realizations that you arrive at when someone with whom you are personally friendly celebrates the effort to murder your friends and family overseas. The sort of realizations that come when events promoted by your Union as supporting a ceasefire end up communicating a slightly different goal to a different audience.

[As a quick aside, I note that the above OPSEU/SEFPO webpage promoting the December 17 rally contained a suggestion: “A labour contingent will assemble at 12:30 p.m. in front of the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, 123 Queen Street West.” The link provided refers to a post on “Labour for Palestine”, and I’d refer you to the map of “Palestine” that appears on that group’s logo. If you’re familiar with the geography in the region, consider where, exactly, a Jewish Israel would belong on that map.]

In the end, it strikes me as the latest shape of a longstanding effort to delegitimize Israel and to demonize it. All while wearing the flag of progressivism.

And this becomes all the more surreal when it’s cloaked in the language of solidarity and as the unified “voice of labour“. That’s me, right? I’m labour, right? I certainly feel like I’ve paid my dues.

But increasingly, it gets a bit hard to tell where one belongs, particularly when groups that claim to represent one’s voice may take positions that one finds problematic.

Which is, apparently, the position that I might find myself in, next week. You see, next week is OPSEU/SEFPO Convention — it’s where the delegates who are elected by the members of the union get to determine its leadership, but no less importantly, its policy positions.

And those policy positions will be selected from among the Book of Resolutions, which includes 202 proposed resolutions, all of which were submitted by different bodies (including but not limited to Union Locals) and were deemed suitable (by the elected members of the Resolutions Committee) for debate among the delegates on the floor of Convention.

Of those 202, four concern “World Issues”, and invite OPSEU/SEFPO to take positions on international affairs. I’ll be looking them in some detail in upcoming days. Maybe you’ll agree with my analysis. Maybe you won’t.

Either way, you’re welcome to e-mail me at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com. Anonymity is strictly maintained if I publish your e-mail in whole or in part.

And again, just to avoid any confusion, please read the “About this Blog” page.

A Southern Ontario Prof Shares their Thoughts

On February 10, 2022February 10, 2022 By ontariocollegeprofIn Profs' Stories, Readers' FeedbackLeave a comment

…as we prepare for next week’s forced offer vote.

I’m grateful to have received this e-mail at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com, and also grateful that the writer chose to share not just their thoughts, but their thought process with us.

Please feel free to share your own. I may not agree with it; I may not agree with everything published below, but I’m happy to share opinions that are respectful and directed towards an audience of Ontario college faculty.

Well, here we are, staring down the barrel of a loaded gun once more, a forced offer vote.
One thing I can’t tell you is how my colleagues are reacting to all this. The voices I hear certainly seem vocal enough against the offer, but I also know how few I interact with these days. Not too many people have dropped by my office on their way somewhere else in the last 2 years.
I can only share my thoughts on this current offer, and hope that it resonates with you and others.
At first glance the offer doesn’t look like it’s terribly far away from a deal. I think that’s the scariest thing in this round, many of my colleagues may look at this and say “meh, close enough”. There are many things in this offer that don’t excite me personally. The progress on Indigenous participation in our system? Intellectually I can connect that it’s certainly worth having, and from the point of view of social justice I absolutely support it, but I don’t identify as indigenous so … in a contract where I get one vote to represent my point of view, maybe this doesn’t resonate with me.
Hey, they’re going to add medicinal mary-jane to the contract. Again, not something that vaguely excites me. Legalizing pot went a long way to getting Trudeau elected though. Yes I know, medicinal marijuana isn’t street pot, but it’s also not something near and dear to me.
I have to say, as a full time faculty member, a tremendous amount of the “progress” in the offer leaves me nonplussed. There’s the miserly 1% Bill 124 raise, that will wind its way through the court sometime before retirement – still waiting on the challenges to the back to work legislation by the Wynne Liberals and the cancellation of the arbitrator awarded report from the Ford Conservatives to work themselves out.
That last one though … that seems important though. In this current offer there’s the commitment to study a bunch of stuff that might be important to me as a faculty member. I see the word recommend, not the word “will implement”, but we can trust them right? They’re interested in studying the probl…. oh wait, they’re not, that’s why the last one just got canceled as a waste of taxpayer money.
They claim that the intellectual property provisions violate and are inconsistent with the Copyright Act. It seems to me that someone so certain in this position would be happy to have an arbitrator come to the table and slap our noses with a rolled up copy of the Act right? I mean, the Copyright Act wouldn’t have any specific wording in it to manage this situation since it’s so ridiculous? Now, I’m not a lawyer, but section 13(3) “Work made in the course of employment” and the discussion about “in the absence of any agreement to the contrary” is just something for the lawyers to get a kickback from “big printing” kickbacks right? I can trust that I should put my very best efforts into course materials because they’d never be given freely to Continuing Education to be delivered under a different course code by non-union employees right? There’s no chance at all the college would “accidentally” leave a copy lying around with one of these new private-public partnership deals right? I mean surely TriOS and the like have their own course that perfectly matches the learning outcomes of my courses, which allows them to deliver the under the same course code and credential right? There’s absolutely no chance that their non-unionized workforce is taking jobs out of the public system using my efforts…. right? They’ve never, ever, bundled up an entire program and wholesale sold or licensed it to an overseas institution, right? Right? Oh.
I know that their claim about less jobs if they use more partial load instead of part time employees has absolutely nothing to do with part time being classed as non-union and therefore not protected by the Collective Agreement, right? I mean a fully loaded partial load staff member, operating as part of the union, and earning a supporting wage is no more stable or reliable for either them nor for students who will know the instructor has taught the course a few times and knows the ins and outs right? That stability won’t result in less of my work day going to voluntarily training and onboarding new people who rotate in and out every 4 months, right? I mean, just look at the librarian and counselor positions that they’ve created, instead of 1 full time job, we got a bunch of lower paid, more duty, short term contract jobs. That was a big gain, right?
Ok, ok, ok. You see where I’m going. This contract is far less about “what’s in it for me?” and far more about “what’s missing that affects me?”. I firmly believe that the “concessions” made by the CEC in this round would not exist without OPSEU pushing at the bargaining table. Just like last round though, they put the poison pill buried deep inside. Last time they made us walk a picket line for 5 weeks to recover Article 2 protections that they were abusing to high heaven. The result? A lot of full time positions got backfilled the way they should have always been. This is the thin end of the wedge for them. If we don’t force them to come and negotiate then they never will. I didn’t think that the work to rule campaign was working until I saw the bully tactics and the heavy handed threat to dock pay for an illegal walk out. If they really felt our work to rule campaign was this then they could and would seek an injunction in the courts. Instead they go for the scare tactic.
Remember last round when Kaplan released his decision, it was highly critical of the CEC’s tactics. Let’s get another one of those reports. After the strong NO vote last time the arbitrator very largely said that the faculty demands WERE reasonable and awarded a lot of what we were looking for. THAT’S why they don’t want binding interest arbitration. THAT’S how we scare them back to negotiating a contract.

The CEC’s Long-Term Vision for Faculty Workload

On February 8, 2022February 8, 2022 By ontariocollegeprofIn Social Distance EducationLeave a comment

So, this post is inspired by a question in last Tuesday’s provincewide meeting organized by the OPSEU CAAT-Academic Divisional Executive, coupled with a member discussion that my teammate Ravi Ramkissoonsingh shared with the team last week.

It’s about the CEC’s long-term goal for system, and what they hope to achieve through bargaining, and what we can predict for the future by the way that they’re setting up the pieces in the current round of bargaining. As team Chair JP Hornick said on Tuesday night, ignore what the CEC says; pay attention to what they do.

So now I’m going to talk about one thing that they did a while back — it was on September 15th. Now to provide some context, management’s proposals had trickled in fairly slowly since bargaining started — a proposal on the Counsellor class definition on August 10 (over a month after bargaining had stared); a proposal on a Workload Task Force; a proposal to limit the ability to create new full-time positions through grievances on September 9…

September 15th is when things got interesting. On that day, management proposed five submissions — the first had housekeeping amendments and the fourth concerned monetary proposals (salary and benefits). What were most interesting — and enlightening — was the “Balance of Management’s Non-Monetary Submissions” that was divided into two parts (numbered M10A and M10B — the “M” represents management submissions).

Let me be clear: Those proposals are NOT the offer of settlement that you’re being asked to vote on in February 15-17. You’re being asked to vote on an offer of settlement that was tabled on January 17, 2022, which is virtually unchanged from the one that was tabled on November 23, 2021.

But back to M10A and M10B — Those proposals were striking. I’m going to attach them here if I can figure out how to do it. But they were really the first time that the curtain parted and provided a glimpse of where the Colleges — through the CEC — truly want to take staffing at the Colleges.

2021-09-15-m10a Download

And generally, it painted a picture of new faculty having way fewer rights than established faculty, and of faculty in some areas having way fewer workload protections than faculty in other areas.

Some “highlights” from those proposals include:

No SWFs for faculty in academic upgrading programs
Up to 20 teaching hours [2 more than the current limit of 18] for faculty in academic upgrading programs
Four additional weeks of teaching annually for faculty in apprenticeship programs
Up to 200 contact days and 880 teaching contact hours annually for faculty in apprenticeship programs [an increase of 20 days and 152 hours]
Zero preparation time attributed for teaching “a purpose-built online course” unless “the College determines that [it] should have augmented or additional materials…”
The separation of “Routine” and “Assisted” forms of evaluation, with a 1/3 reduction in attributed time for grading courses with “Assisted” (i.e., online or mechanical) evaluation (from 0.015 to 0.010)
College approval needed for Professional development, with a new standard that such approved activities “will enhance the ability of the teacher to perform their responsibilities”
Unlimited overtime
Extended length of work day for new faculty and faculty in apprenticeship programs
Expectations to work on weekends for new faculty
Added restriction to the seniority rights of PL faculty over courses they have taught
1008 hours Probation for partial-load faculty prior to which they would not have access to the Partial-Load Registry
Ability to hire sessional faculty for more than 12 months in a 24 month period without making the position permanent full-time, if the faculty is replacing a faculty member on leave

That’s not an exhaustive list. I’m not counting some truly frightening proposals around vacations, job security bumping rights, and ownership of “Pandemic Emergency Conversion Electronic Materials”.

Anyway, that above list of proposals is all about whittling away at the edges of our rights and our membership. Why target apprenticeship? Why academic upgrading? To pick off the outliers — to get a foothold in, to drive in a wedge of inequity. And once you get a wedge in, then it’s all just a matter of time and leverage.

So, what happened to proposals M10A and M10B? They were supplanted on that very same day by an offer of settlement, which CEC Bargaining Team Chair Laurie Rancourt described as “an enhanced three-year collective agreement extension”.

So… rejoicing all around? The bad proposals were taken away and sent to bed without dinner?

Ummm… not quite.

The fact is, you’re now being asked to vote to support some of the proposals on the above list, and to help incorporate them into our next Collective Agreement.

How? Through the details of the CEC’s current proposal for a Workload Commttee, in the current proposed offer.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, M10A had the following proposals (with proposed new language for our Collective Agreement indicated in boldface and/or underlining) that explicitly targeted the workload protections of faculty in Academic Upgrading programs.

Now we certainly could be relieved that management has ‘set aside’ those proposals in M10A in favour of their current (Jan.17) Offer of Settlement, but before faculty in academic upgrading programs breathe a sigh of relief that their workload protections are secured, it’s worth noting that the current Offer of Settlement includes an proposal for “the creation of a Workload Committee” that “shall discuss and examine” issues including…

Hmmm…. now what on earth might they have in mind? If only there was some way of knowing what the CEC was attempting to accomplish through a Workload Committee.

Oh right. There is a way to know this.

It’s by looking at what they did.

Similarly, if you were in an apprenticeship program, you might be relieved that the CEC has withdrawn the following proposal (in M-10A, with proposed changes indicated in boldface and underlined):

But you might want to hold off on celebrations once you realize that you’re being asked to vote in 10 days to approve an offer that includes a proposal for a Workload Committee that “shall discuss and examine”

Hmmm… changing the workload formula. That might impact… teaching hours? Preparation Time? Attributed time for evaluation of and feedback to students? Time for out of class assistance to students? In short, faculty in Apprenticeship programs could be targeted for an elimination of protections even broader than the increased number of teaching weeks and teaching hours explicitly proposed in M-10A.

But if you’re not in an apprenticeship program or academic upgrading, you’d be safe from the CEC’s proposed targeting of workload protections, right? The CEC is just hoping that faculty in postsecondary programs will vote to target the weekly or and/or annual workload protections for their colleagues in non-postsecondary programs, right?

Wrong. Let’s remember that the current Offer of Settlement also includes an explicit proposal that a Workload Committee examine:

Hmmm… do you think they might be planning to propose giving faculty who supervise field placement courses additional time for preparation?

But… if you don’t teach in academic upgrading or apprenticeship programs, and you don’t teach field placement courses, then your workload is safe from being targeted?

Not quite: You’re also being asked to vote in favour of a Workload Committee that would be explicitly obliged to examine:

In case it isn’t obvious, the dangerous words right there are “programs such as”. This is no longer about targeting the workload of faculty in specific individual programs, but rather wide swaths of a College’s offerings.

And, speaking of targeting wide swaths of faculty — increasing the workload of many faculty at one fell swoop — let’s turn back to M-10A’s proposal to separate the factors provided for Routine and Assisted evaluation, reducing by 1/3 the amount of time attributed for the “Assisted” evaluation of assignments graded online or with Scantron — from 2.7 minutes per student per week (in a 3 hour course) to 1.8 minutes:

Of course, 1/3 less time attributed for grading on the SWF means… considerably more students that can be assigned on the SWF, without putting a faculty member past the 44-hour maximum.

Which is why we should all be… relieved?… that the CEC ‘set Proposal M-10A aside’, and replaced it with the current Offer of Settlement, which doesn’t propose to reduce the evaluation attributions of thousands of faculty by separating the evaluation factors of “Routine” and “Assisted” grading, but instead only proposes to have a Workload Committee examine…

Feel better yet?

But wait! There’s less!

However ~~many~~ few librarians and counsellors may be remaining in the Ontario College system, it wasn’t enough for the CEC to attack their autonomy over their own professional development activities (in M-10A) by adding the following language that would give management the power to veto their proposed activities

Just in case it wasn’t clear, the professional development activities (or “pursuits”) would be subject to managerial approval — it’s only the arrangements for such activities that are subject to mutual agreement.

That’s a pretty staggering attack on the academic freedom of counsellors and librarians, and again, it’s important to caution that M-10A was indeed ‘set aside’ by the CEC. We’re not being asked to vote on it now. Instead, like all other faculty, Counsellors and Librarians are being asked to vote on a CEC Offer of Settlement that includes a Workload Committee to examine

and

In other words, instead of M-10A’s attack on their professional development, Counsellors and Librarians are now being asked by the CEC to vote for an offer that opens up every aspect of their workload — including their professional development activities — by having a Workload Committee “discuss and examine” the application of the entire portion of “Article 11 – Workload” that currently applies to Counsellors and Librarians.

In the earlier days of this blog, I often used the language of addiction to describe College management. It feels like that language remains applicable now.

Faculty have spent most of the last two years trying to keep the College system afloat (and, apparently, more profitable than ever). And all that the CEC can do is, on the one hand, spout platitudes about their respect for the “hard work and dedication” of college faculty, while on the other hand working to increase the hours and days that faculty could be assigned to work each week and each year.

As their formal tabled proposal M-10A uncontrovertably indicates, CEC’s long-term goal is to attack and erode workload limitations that currently offer protections to:

Faculty who teach in academic upgrading programs
Faculty who teach in apprenticeship programs
Faculty who teach field placement courses or supervise field placements
Faculty who teach in Aviation programs
Faculty who teach in specialized programs
Faculty who evaluation includes online or Scantron grading
Counsellors
Librarians

And the CEC’s short-term goal?

To get us to do it to ourselves.

On February 15-17.

Ten things Ontario College students should know about their professors’ current bargaining with the Colleges

On December 15, 2021 By ontariocollegeprofIn 2021 Ontario College BargainingLeave a comment

1. The faculty union represents over 15,000 professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians at the 24 Ontario public Colleges.

2. Because College management refuses to present an offer that addresses faculty’s main concerns in this round of bargaining, faculty will begin “work to rule” in January. That means that faculty will do their jobs exactly as outlined in their contracts and work assignments. For example, they may stop volunteering extra time or working outside of regular hours.

3. The amount of time that faculty are given to prepare classes and evaluate students hasn’t changed since 1985.

4. Right now, this workload formula gives faculty a maximum of 5.4 minutes per week to grade the work that you submit. Faculty are asking for that maximum to be increased to 7.2 minutes.

5. Faculty are asking for more time to grade students, but the College Presidents are saying that faculty are asking for a reduction in workload. (We don’t understand it either. We wish they would stop lying to you.)

6. A professor typically receives less than two hours to prepare a three-hour class each week, even if it’s online.

7. Bargaining doesn’t need to keep going: The faculty union has already offered to have an arbitrator decide all issues on which the two sides can’t agree

8. Over 70% of all professors and instructors in the Ontario College system are on 14-week contracts. Some have been doing their job for decades, but their Colleges will only hire them for 14 weeks at a time. These faculty members have fewer rights than full-timers.

9. Professors are given as little as four hours each week to help students out of class – that includes both office hours and e-mails.

10. If you would like management to resolve bargaining without labour disruption, please let your college President know, at: https://www.collegefaculty.org/write-your-college-president/

A GTA Prof Recollects Our Last Two Years…

On December 10, 2021 By ontariocollegeprofIn 2021 Ontario College Bargaining, Profs' Stories, Social Distance EducationLeave a comment

In a recent provincewide meeting, a question came in about why workload had become a major issue in this round of bargaining, when it wasn’t as prominent in, say, 2017.

Now, at some level that’s a simple question — it was the membership that determined that workload was the #1 priority. They did this via pre-bargaining surveys, 24 Local demand-setting meetings, and the provincewide final demand-setting meeting (that delegates of each Local attended). So the simplest answer to why workload was the new top priority in this round of bargaining is “democracy”.

The question of why faculty determined that workload was the top priority is a bit more nuanced, and a Zoom chat boxes wasn’t necessarily the best place to provide thoughtful analysis, but I speculated that the issue was set up for crisis by the increasing tendency of supervisors to max out the SWFs of full-time faculty to the 44-hour limit, coupled with the (obviously related) increase of class sizes, and that the switch to emergency pandemic learning tipped workload into a crisis situation, generally.

I received an e-mail yesterday that supported that interpretation (and that highlights the little-discussed concern regarding academic integrity during emergency remote teaching). I’m happy to share it below — I’ve edited it for length and clarity, and to remove potentially-identifying information.

Hi One College Prof,
Your recent post resonated with me and I thought I’d share my experience over the last 2 years of online education.
As the pandemic opened, none of us expected to still be in this situation, including administration. Mistakes made in the early days of this can easily be forgiven. As March became April, and the Winter semester became the Summer semester it became more and more obvious that this was not going to be a quick pivot back to the classroom. At this point, I turned to my department leadership for advice on things like delivering assessments that we could have some confidence in. There was a stunning lack of support for doing any sort of proctoring or attempting to enforce integrity standards. It is indeed a thorny issue, but that’s why leadership was needed, so that we didn’t have ad-hoc solutions being deployed. The advice I received was, “Don’t proctor, it’s not worth it”.
I suppose in a short term crisis we can accept this, and support the notion that we want to reach the students we can, and those that choose not to engage honestly will bear consequences when we return to face to face or when they reach industry. Smacks of kicking a problem down the road, but again, short term crisis measures can be forgiven.
In those early days there were many requests to overload the number of students beyond the typical 40 per section. Without physical limitations of the classroom, and with potential layoffs being discussed, many felt they needed to do their part to help out. The budget savings were found by not renewing part time contracts and by minimizing factors such as total contact hours on the SWF by increasing class sizes instead of opening and staffing new sections. Once more, crisis measures can be forgiven for their aggressiveness, and we certainly felt the pressure to make this work. One side effect of this increase in students was an increase in email support for panicked and disconnected students. That was volunteer work. We stepped up to be professional and support our students as much as possible because we do indeed care.
Enough history, however–let’s get back to the present day! These conditions still exist. Some students who have never faced a proctored assessment are nearing graduation and lack the skills their diplomas claim they have. Contract cheating is running rampant in many classes. There is still no solution for delivering assessments online being promoted by “leadership”, indeed permission must be given to proctor, and then only for the largest assessments. While some students have done well in their studies and have learned a great deal, these are often the self-motivated students we know would do well regardless of the format. My experience doesn’t suggest these are the majority of students. These students are worried that when they graduate, their diploma will be looked at with skepticism. They are worried that their cheating classmates who have obtained higher grades may edge them out of jobs. They are discouraged and frustrated with the institution of higher learning’s abdication of its responsibility to assess learning …. and they are justified in their feelings.
As always, the faculty are bearing the brunt of this, and what do we do about it? We counsel, we listen, we suggest things like out of class projects that they can put in a portfolio to set themselves apart, or practicing their interviewing skills so that employers will be able to perceive the validity of their education from their answers. We certainly don’t shrug our shoulders and walk away.
[. . .]
What about those in the middle? Many are floundering. Many are getting the fully reasonable consequences of not being diligent students. Yet with whatever compassion we have left in our bag of tricks we are working with them, trying to support them, trying to keep them away from further depression and anxiety, trying to cram those essential bits of learning outcomes into their heads so they can try to pick up the pieces of their semester. It’s that time of year where the emails are normally a deluge, and with increased class sizes, it’s become a tsunami.
In the midst of all this, Doug Ford says we don’t have the right to bargain for a wage increase above 1% as inflation soars around us. (Probably not going to buy the teacher’s vote anyway, better to find a few bucks in the budget on the backs of the public service to pander to “the base”.) The CEC says, “Everything’s fine, here’s our offer–take it or leave it”, but lacks the backbone to force a vote on it … they know full well that the system is running on volunteer labour.
[. . .]
It seems once more that there’s an attack on the people who actually do the work that the institutions provide – be they nurses or professors. Organized labour has always been the enemy of management that wishes to take advantage of workers because employers have always wielded a disproportionate amount of leverage on individuals. As management asks us to be compassionate towards our students, and towards their challenges at maintaining their budgets, it’s about time they turned their gaze back to the front lines and recognize that we are tired and we are fed up with demands from both students and from administration to make this online environment work with the modicum of support that’s been given. Stop trying to figure out how we’re going to go hybrid in the fall, or offer half the classes online through Continuing Education until you figure out how to restore the quality, in collaboration with faculty. Come down out of the Ivory Tower and strike a fair deal that recognizes the value of the work that is being done to support your lifestyle.
I encourage everyone to endorse the strike vote and send a clear message that we’re tired of “figuring it out” month after month without support. Send the message that we’re tired of being asked to demonstrate compassion without some acknowledgement of the cost of that compassion. Send the message that it’s not ok to keep trying to find ways to use non-union workers to do our work by contracting out and skirting the rules
As sure as god made little green apples, if they impose a contract, it will lack article 2 that protects the creation of full time, meaningful positions.
Give the union [members] the power to say, “When we’ve hit our limit on administrative hours, we’re forwarding the emails to management to deal with”. Give them the power to find many, many creative job actions other than a picket line to make the point that we are worth every cent [the colleges] spend on us.
A very tired [. . .] College faculty member.

One Meeting Attendee Responds

On December 9, 2021December 9, 2021 By ontariocollegeprofIn 2021 Ontario College BargainingLeave a comment

The following was sent as a comment to the previous video by a meeting attendee who teaches at a college in the GTA:

It was a good meeting. Over the last two weeks I’ve had the chance to gather more information on the issues. We have been starved for details. The position I had two weeks ago that I was going to vote “no”. I cast my “yes” vote today. I hope a majority do the same.