A tense marathon meeting saw upwards of 2,000 union members debate a tentative agreement with the university late into the night on Friday. CUPE 3902 represents 7,000 sessionals, teaching assistants and other contract instructional staff at the University of Toronto.

Wayne Dealy, Chair of CUPE 3902 said, "Bargaining a collective agreement is never an easy task, but the best settlements are the ones that are achieved through the hard work of both parties to come to an agreement that both sides can live with."

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.

LONDON, ONT. - It was a loud and boisterous scene outside the massive Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) factory on Jan. 21 as more than a thousand trade unionists joined the picket line in solidarity with 465 workers who have been locked out by the company for the past three weeks. With a punk rock band blasting music from a makeshift stage by the front gate, hundreds of workers disrupted traffic by crossing back and forth across the road regularly. A lone London police officer pleaded with them to keep things moving. It was the second show of support that day; earlier, an estimated 7,000 workers from across Ontario and the Midwest United States rallied at Victoria Park in downtown London.

It was a sweltering afternoon in late July 2002 when the armoured vehicles of the Toronto Police Emergency Task Force pulled up in front of our building. Quickly we started barricading the door with an old desk, if they were coming to kick us out we weren't going to make it easy for them. We waited tensely as the cops approached the door with submachine guns drawn. Our crime? We dared to take over an abandoned building in the middle of a housing crisis. We all survived that early raid and were eventually allowed back into the building where we lived for the next three months -- dubbing it the "Pope Squat" as we occupied it during the pontiff's visit to Toronto.