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In this issue:
•MAYDAY!
•Bargaining Update
•In Solidarity with the Quebec Student Strike
May 1st: International Workers’ Day – Shopping Boycott and Rally at Victoria Park
"It's May! It's May! / The lusty month of May! / That lovely month when ev'ryone goes / Blissfully astray. / It's here, It's here! / That shocking time of year . . . / It's May! It's May!"
As May 1 approaches, I have thrilling memories of watching the musical Camelot as a young whimsical girl, enchanted with the tempestuous love story of King Arthur, Queen Guenevere, and Sir Lancelot (Show-tunes fans unite!).
May 1, 2012 is not your little girl's May Day.
Guenevere's lyrical song praises frivolity and decadence. But since 1886, May Day has had a rich history in labour and social justice movements. In response to the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources across the globe, people will be participating in a general strike for economic justice on May 1. This May Day, the PSAC 610 Executive is encouraging you to think about decadence as well, but not in quite the same way as the Vanessa Redgrave does in Camelot.
We are encouraging a shopping boycott--do not eat out on May 1, do not buy that new swimsuit you've been eyeing, do not treat yourself to that movie you promised you'd watch after you finished marking.
Here are a few reasons why we think a shopping boycott is meaningful--it raises awareness about the role of large corporations in perpetuating economic inequality. It gives us pause about how our products are made and who our purchases benefit.
Here’s a few examples of what you might ponder on:
Caterpillar and the EMD Plant Closure
Target’s Buy-Out of Zellers and Union Busting
Nike’s Use of Sweatshop Labour
The Commodification of Non-Human Animals
And because we haven’t yet thrown every large corporation under the bus, we need this article.
There are many reasons to participate in May Day. View some of them here. We hope you participate in our shopping boycott and that you think about why it’s important--you think about your purchases and their impacts on people’s well-being.
One of the wonderful things about May Day is its diversity--some participants will be anti-capitalists, some will be capital-reformists. Some people will be disciplined for participation. Some people will participate for racial or sexual justice. Some people will be allies of the marginalized. But, we are united in a vision for social and economic justice, for fair wages and benefits, for safe and clean working conditions, for a world in which some people’s gain is made at the expense of the working class, the poor, the marginalized, and the unlucky.
We encourage you also to attend May Day activities in London--our Community Alliance Chair-Elect, Jonathan Giles, will be speaking at the Victoria Park Rally. For more information, please visit this facebook page. And if you don’t have to purchase it, watching Camelot is a pretty nice way to spend an afternoon.
Katy Fulfer, President
Bargaining Update
As you all may know, our current collective agreement (CA) expires next fall and the negotiating committee (NC) has been meeting since November. On June 1st we will serve notice to the administration that we intend to bargain, following which we could be called to the table at anytime. In the meantime, the NC has met with representatives from the PSAC and with our local's negotiator. In a few weeks we expect to informally meet the representatives from the administration.
A few months ago we conducted a survey of the membership and (with an outstanding response) found that there was overwhelming support for an increase of wages, and for reforms to be made to the lump-sum model of protecting wage increases. Historically the administration has used the lump-sum model not only to argue against wage increases, but also to divide our union. For example, TAs in the faculty of engineering lost hundreds of dollars in past rounds of bargaining. The NC takes this problem seriously and no new model will be suggested that cannot benefit each member equally. In addition to protecting wages, the NC along with the survey respondents have made student poverty and issue and would like to push for wage increases that not only keep pace with the cost of living but also with our cost of living as TAs and students. As a whole, the NC agrees with the membership and is working with the PSAC to develop appropriate models to restructure our wages and to protect our wages from minimum funding.
Nothing can be guaranteed before bargaining, everything I just mentioned is contingent. However, I urge the membership to see it as their responsibility to speak up in favour of our collective interests---to work for a living wage, to be free from discrimination, to have reasonable work expectations--- if they want to see these measures adopted by the administration. Loud voices help to ensure that we can get as many of our demands met as possible. Silence ensures the status quo.
Amy Wuest, Negotiation Committee
April 25th Day of Solidarity With the Quebec Student Strike
Across Ontario on April 25th, unionized workers mobilized to show their support for the Quebec students who are on strike to resist austerity and the corporatization of our universities. day. Several of our awesome members helped get flyers explaining the situation out in London and across campus, and distributed red squares for those who wanted to show their support. These are also available in the union office at 1313 Somerville House. A Facebook group which posts images from these actions and up-to-date news coverage can be found at http://www.facebook.com/groups/442630259084773/, and here is the text from the flyer, which was circulated in London and at McMaster University that same day.
AGAINST AUSTERITY, IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE STUDENT STRIKE, WE WEAR THE RED SQUARE
For over two months more than 200,000 students in Quebec have been on strike. On one level, the strike is in protest of the Quebec government’s proposed tuition increases. These are reaching a crisis level. As it is they are so high that, after graduation, many students find themselves reduced to debt slavery for much of their adult lives.
But this isn’t about a bunch of consumers expressing their displeasure over the cost of their education, as the politicians who are referring to this action as a “boycott” keep trying to imply.
Like all their plans to dismantle the funding structures that ensure our collective well-being, tuition increases are a direct consequence of the Canadian government’s relentless privileging of corporate interests over those of the people who live here. These measures indicate their willingness to impose the cost of corporate wealth on the future of the young. Legislating people back to work for refusing to accept two-tier contracts that pay new hires far less (as we saw happen to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers) is another symptom of this cannibalism.
The Quebec student strike is a mass political action, democratically decided upon by open general assemblies of students united across the province. It is guided by commitment to a common goal – to resist the logic of austerity that our governors are attempting to impose on our communities. It is this logic which prompts university administrators to refer to students as Basic Income Units. This same logic prompted the Minister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear, to announce his plan to turn Canada’s National Research Council into a “one-stop, 1-800 ‘I have a solution for your business problem’” operation. It is the logic that is used to justify irresponsible resource development through the fast-tracking of environmental reviews; reductions in public services, mass firings of public workers, and the deterioration the working conditions of those who remain employed; cuts to health care; and punishing reductions in relief measures for the poor, the injured, and the aged.
It is this logic which sparks our dissent. Because we recognize that an ‘economy’ – our communities - are not valued only by how much money can be made out of the people who participate in it.
In Ontario, as in Quebec, student unions are in solidarity with other community, labour, and anti-poverty organizations in their resistance to austerity and corporate rule. The red square is a symbol of our collective struggle and our collective goal – a society which does not allow its members’ value to be measured in the terms of the Toronto Stock Exchange. As our acts here show, it is the society that we already have, and we mobilize now to defend it.
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