For the latest update on this story please see: No strike today as mass meeting sends U of T agreement to ratification
A tentative agreement was reached early in the morning between the University of Toronto and CUPE 3902, the union that represents 7,000 sessionals, teaching assistants, and other contract instructional staff.
However, it appears the union's bargaining committee was split on accepting the deal and two of its members, Chief Spokeperson James Nugent and Recording Secretary Ashleigh Ingle, have resigned from the committee in protest.
"We were given our last offer from the employer last night. It didn't have anything substantial on any of our major proposals." said Ingle. "The chief spokesperson and myself resigned, we were unwilling to go to our membership and speak in support of a contract that is clearly not what our members sent us to achieve."
A major issue in bargaining has been on tutorial size. According to a Jan. 31 bargaining update from CUPE 3902, the union asking for a cap at 60 students and more TA support for students in labs and tutorials. In response, the administration offered to create a working group to study the issue but would not agree to take any concrete action. Union members rejected that previous tentative agreement on Jan. 30 with a 96 per cent majority and set a strike deadline of Feb. 24.
Members of CUPE 3902 will vote on sending the new tentative agreement to ratification today at Hart House at 5 p.m.
A group called Undergrads for 3902 published an open letter today calling for a no vote on the tentative agreement. Part of the letter reads:
"When we contemplate a strike, each of us feels the pressure of immediate personal needs and obligations -- family, bills to pay, relationships, health care, work of all kinds. Avoiding a strike won't diminish these challenges. But winning a strike will. CUPE 3902's members and supporters are the union's strongest bargaining chip, and we're mobilized right now. The current groundswell of support for the union can be used to lay the foundation for future victories. After all, the union will be renegotiating in just a few short years. When you vote tonight, please remember that the stakes are high for all of us. Please vote NO."
Ingle said, "I think our membership is intelligent and know what the issues are. They're the ones that are actually experiencing it. We are unprecedentedly mobilized and I think there's a very good chance that this contract will be voted down. Bottom line, this is not what our members sent us to get. This is not what our members told us very clearly at our last membership meeting that they wanted us to achieve."
James Nugent was reached by phone but declined to comment before the meeting.
If the vote to send the agreement to ratification fails, the workers will be on strike at midnight with picket lines expected to go up on Monday morning.
Stay tuned, this story will be updated with more details as they emerge.
Can anyone please explain what this means:
Who's voting, and who will ratify? I don't get it.
This article was published before union members even had a chance to see the tentative agreeement. With all due respect for these dissenting bargaining team members, their arguments would be a lot more convincing if they made their case to the members of the union before leaking the collective agreement to non-union members and the media. It makes me question if they really understand concepts like solidarity and democracy and whether they could be trusted to responsibly lead a strike.
Sorry, but the claim that details of the agreement were leaked to the media before the meeting by former bargining committee members are patentely false. My article cites, and even links to, a public release by CUPE 3902 of the last tentative agreement published on the CUPE 3902 website on Jan. 31, 2012. That information has been public for almost a month.
Here's the follow up story on the meeting last night: No strike today as mass meeting sends U of T agreement to ratification
Mick, in an article published before the tentative agreement was disclosed to members through the union's democratic process, you quoted a group of undergraduate supporters who were telling members to vote no. Someone clearly did leak the contents of the agreement to these non-union members, who produced a public statement yesterday which you reference in your article. Whether or not you were privy to a separate leak is immaterial - the information was put into the public domain. I think it is reasonable to assume that the folks who instigated this preemptive no campaign were the dissenting former bargaining team members. That was their prerogative, but it seems a strange way to win supporters to their cause.
@critical thinker: Just to be clear, your "reasonable assumptions" about me are simply not true. Mike makes it clear where his information is coming from, so I'm not sure why there are so many comments around that?
More substantially, the "open letter" cited by Mike in this article, which I just read for the first time, does not actually include any details about the tentative agreement. It does ask our membership to reject working groups as a solution to the problems created by the admin, since working groups were what the employer proposed in their late-January offer, and it was also what they proposed during the last round of collective bargaining to address tutorial size. From how I read this open letter, it is encouraging members to not accept this model of solving problems (because they often amount to little and only delay real concrete action from being taken). So I just don't see any leaked information in this open letter at all.
Seeing as you are so upset about my perfectly reasonable assumptions, please, do state explicitly for the record that you and your fellow no campaign collaborators did not distribute the tentative agreement outside the bargaining team/executive committee before our democratic meeting. That would be very reassuring to know.