Sheridan College faculty, along will hold a strike vote in two weeks, between October 15 and 17, 2024, along with staff from all Ontario colleges.
The vote could authorize labour action should a fair agreement fail to be reached, says OPSEU, leading to a stike among college staff province-wide.
It comes after no renewal agreement was reached for over 15,000 college faculty across Ontario – including full-time and partial-load professors and instructors, counsellors, and librarians.
The OPSEU College Faculty Bargaining Team and the College Employer Council (CEC) entered into contract negotiations earlier this summer, on July 15, 2024, with all faculty proposals on the table as of September 1.
If called, a strike would impact the full time staff and professors at all 24 colleges in Ontario, including Oakville's Trafalgar Campus of Sheridan College.
However, the union says that hopes of reaching an on-time, renewal agreement have been undercut by numerous concessions proposed by the employer.
“For months, we have highlighted the need to modernize our contracts to meet today’s student and faculty needs,” said Michelle Arbour, Acting Chair of the College Faculty Bargaining Team. “Quality education isn’t supported by reducing student evaluation time or advancing narrow conceptions of ‘teaching’ which exclude supporting students outside the classroom.”
Arbour notes that the Colleges are in a period of historic profits, with have accumulated a system-wide surplus of $1 billion this year alone on top of the recent $1.3 billion provincial investment.
“Those funds should be readily invested in quality education,” added Arbour. “Instead, we’re seeing uncertainty on the rise, as partial-load faculty hiring outpaces full-time faculty hiring. Three-quarters of teachers, counsellors, and librarians working in Ontario colleges are on short-term contracts with little to no benefits or job security and no redress for workload concerns.”
If a strike is called, it would take place almost exactly seven years since the last strike affected both Sheridan and all provincial colleges in fall 2017, which closed schools for over a month. Another strike was averted in 2022 with only an hour remaining before the deadline.
Read more here: Strike averted at Sheridan College, school to remain open
Union staff say this has been a problem for years: In 2022, an award issued by Arbitrator William Kaplan mandated the creation of a Workload Task Force to comprehensively review faculty workload. The Workload Task Force Report – the results of one of the largest known workload studies in Canada – was released for public review on September 3, 2024.
"The report confirms that faculty concerns have standing in raw data: all modes of instruction delivery have resulted in workload increases, on top of increased time needed for student supports; partial-load members are performing work duties outside their contracts; and counsellors and librarians report unpaid overtime without mechanisms to address workload," says a news release.
"College faculty currently have a ceiling of 5 minutes and 24 seconds per student, per week for evaluation – as true today as it was in 1985. Data from the Workload Task Force Report indicates that only a quarter of faculty are even allotted that time – most have less, and overall, faculty have nearly an hour less weekly for evaluation than 10 years ago."
"Our proposals invest in hands-on, job-ready education that trains Ontario’s future," added Arbour. "The reality is that the Colleges are rapidly expanding a corporate, for-profit model of education on the backs of the most precarious workers and students."
"Any student or parent can tell you that quality education starts and ends with the frontline faculty training to prepare them for entering the labour force," added OPSEU President JP Hornick, faculty at George Brown College.
"As the workers in college classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and offices working directly with students, we’re fighting for a better college system – because we know firsthand that student and faculty futures depend on each other."
The strike mandate vote will be conducted by the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) and will begin on Tuesday, October 15th at noon and run through Thursday, October 17th at 3 p.m.
Once ready, results of the strike vote will be communicated to all College Faculty members and made public by OPSEU at that time.
Sheridan College did not respond to Oakville News' request for comment on this story.