THUNDER BAY — The bargaining team representing 208 faculty members at Confederation College and their counterparts at 23 other public colleges in Ontario now has a mandate to call a strike.
About three-quarters of eligible voters cast ballots in a vote conducted last week by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and 79 per cent of them authorized a walkout if the Ontario Public Service Employees Union determines it's necessary to achieve their goals in a new collective agreement.
According to the union, this is the largest college faculty strike mandate in a generation.
"We'll utilize this mandate to reinforce our key demands and fight back serious concessions tabled by the College Employer Council (CEC) that would make our working conditions, and by extension the students' learning conditions, undoubtedly worse," OPSEU said in a statement.
The CEC, however, said a strike is unnecessary because it has proposed mediation-binding interest arbitration as an alternative.
"This mechanism would provide a path forward to settle differences without disrupting student learning," it maintained.
CounciL CEO Graham LLoyd said mediation followed by interest arbitration provides a win-win solution for both parties and for students, explaining that it allows the two sides to continue working through areas of common ground and for a neutral third party to step in to assist.
OPSEU said the bargaining teams remain apart on the key issues of wages, workload, and the increasing number of faculty being hired on short-term contracts with little-to-no benefits or job security.
A conciliator entered the bargaining process earlier this month, a step the union said has fostered increased discussion, but it's concerned the CEC has not dropped "significant concessions which risk increased employment instability, real time cuts to wages, encroaching on our vacation, and further destabilizing workload."
The gap between the parties seems broad, as evidenced by Lloyd's statement that "Students don't deserve to have their semester interrupted for demands the union bargaining team knows the CEC can never agree to."
