Ontario colleges strike averted
TORONTO (CUP) — Ontario college students breathed a collective sigh of relief this week as the Ontario Labour Relations Board finally announced the official results of the Feb. 10 college faculty strike vote. They are now able to finish their semesters free from the distraction of a looming strike.
But it was a slim victory. Only 51.45 per cent of the province’s 9,000 college faculty voted in favour of accepting management’s final contract offer, according to the official announcement on Feb. 24.
The contract vote, held Feb. 10, was initially declared too close to call, with the accepting majority decided by only 210 votes and over 300 mail-in ballots still to be counted.
But those votes have now been counted, and the colleges are happy with the result.
“We are pleased that faculty saw this offer as fair and reasonable and one that they could accept,” Rachael Donovan, chair of the colleges’ bargaining team, said in a statement after the results were released.
“We will now have a collective agreement in place and we have avoided a strike. This result is good news for our students, our faculty and our communities,” she said.
But the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, who represented the faculty, is not happy with the result, claiming that fear of a strike was what pushed the vote slightly into the majority.
“We did not want a labour disruption, and had a plan to avoid one, but the employer took the stance with our members that it was either accept the offer or be forced out on strike,” Ted Montgomery, OPSEU negotiating team chair, said in an union press release.
Union president Warren (Smokey) Thomas added his concerns that the voting process was mismanaged, saying that they have filed formal complaints.
“There was no advance poll, causing the high number of mail-in ballots. Many voted after already knowing the original results, and some members never received ballots at all,” Thomas said.
The Ontario Labour Relations Board began counting ballots on the afternoon of Feb. 24 and students spent their afternoons refreshing the “Ontario College Students Against a Strike” Facebook page.
Comments flooded the page until results were announced. “I’m so sick of waiting! It has been too long, I just wish they’d hurry up and tell us,” wrote one student.
“I wish they would just put us out of our misery so we can stop staring at this site,” wrote another.
Some students are frustrated that they had to worry about a strike in the first place.
Renee Belanger, a student Georgian College in Barrie, Ont., welcomed the news that there would be no strike, but she fears her semester has already been affected too negatively.
“Since this strike business has come up, I feel like I haven’t put in as much effort into my course as I had last semester. I think my marks will be less due to (the threat of a strike),” she said.
At Toronto's Centennial College, Brittany Fish shares sentiments with Belanger.
“Through out the last couple of weeks at school, we have been going through midterms. It was really hard to focus 100 per cent on these midterms when the whole time (I was) wondering, ‘Is it all going to be for nothing?’” she said.
“I don’t think it was fair . . . to keep voting and keep moving dates. It made me, and probably a lot of other students, on edge just wanting to know what the final results were,” said Belanger.
The colleges and faculty have been negotiating a new contract for the last nine months, and voted in favour of a strike on Jan. 13.
In a statement following the results, Justin Fox, president of the College Student Alliance, urged both the colleges and faculty to put any remaining issues behind them and focus on providing students with the education they need to succeed.
The new contract will be in place for the next three years and will see a 5.9 per cent increase in salary over those years. Faculty were also given more control over their workloads.
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