TSSU members,
Over the last weeks our membership has come together and announced, loud and clear, that enough is enough. With a 94% mandate from over 1000 members, our strike vote was an overwhelming success. At the SGM on Wednesday, TSSU unanimously ratified this emphatic vote and formed a Strike Committee. Meanwhile, SFU has requested mediation at the Labour Relations Board in an effort to postpone job action. Our collective power is growing daily, and the Employer is grasping at straws, desperate to delay at all costs.
All members are encouraged to participate in the Greater Strike Committee, which is meeting weekly to get us a fair contract as soon as possible. Get in touch with TSSU’s Organizers at organizers@tssu.ca to find out how we can keep the pressure on while we are paused from commencing strike action.
In spite of the efforts of numerous groups on campus, SFU is showing no signs of effort to implement a living wage for workers on campus—quite the opposite. Outside the Board of Governors meeting Thursday, TSSU, gradCOLA, Contract Worker Justice, and allies jointly protested SFU’s failures to meet demands for living wages, a fair contract for teaching and research staff, bringing contracted workers in-house, and guaranteed funding increases for graduate students. Inside the meeting, the Employer passed a budget hiking tuition fees and allocating the increased income to pet projects. This is yet another repulsive example of how SFU markets itself with a façade of equity and progressive values while undermining workers at every turn. They pass tuition increases to take money out of the pockets of graduate students while these very same workers are skipping meals to make ends meet.
The Employer continues to post surpluses in the millions of dollars, continues to spend millions more on dysfunctional portfolios, and continues to ignore the needs of those who do the work. This is the sign of a public University that is not acting in the public interest.
The new budget directs $2 million of increased tuition revenue toward funding the dysfunctional HR and VP People, Equity, and Inclusion portfolio. President Joy Johnson created the VP PEI portfolio, effectively a VP Human Resources, as one of her main priorities. The VP PEI is paid 30% more than her predecessor and has perks like annual $7,000 car and $10,000 professional development allowances. Those two allowances combined are more than the take-home pay of grad student workers upon whose labour the University is built. President Johnson’s monthly salary is more than the $32,000 yearly funding demand of the gradCOLA campaign.
Mediation is one of the Employer’s last remaining options to delay strike action. TSSU has made an effort to schedule it as soon as possible so that the Employer cannot stall any longer. The first mediation session is Wednesday April 5, a date which TSSU had weeks ago proposed for bargaining. Additional dates have been penciled in for April 11, 25, and 27. After months of stalling, the ball is in the Employer’s court to come to the table and actually make progress toward a Collective Agreement. The behavior of SFU’s HR executives at mediation will determine whether those additional sessions happen or whether the mediator gets asked to “book out” and strike notice is served. Expect updates after the first mediation session on April 5th.
Over 100 years ago, the tireless organizer and workers’ advocate Ginger Godwin put our situation aptly: “the masters can howl: we do not hide our intentions, for we are what they have made us—the dispossessed class that is out to overthrow them.”