Last week, 87.5% of teaching assistants issued a strike mandate to the Association of Graduate Student Employees of McGill (AEEDEM). This strike vote causes uncertainty: what will happen to undergraduate students’ final grades? The McGill administration responded forcefully, declaring that the session would continue as scheduled and directing faculty to prepare to assume adjunct duties. The right of our student population to quality education would be at stake.
While it may seem logical, this solution aimed at limiting as much as possible the disruption that a strike would cause may in fact degrade the quality of education at McGill. It will generate tension on campus, not to mention that it could be an illegal request. As McGill faculty members, we ask the administration to instead focus on its task of reaching a negotiated agreement with AEEDEM.
Teaching assistants play an essential role at McGill. In large groups, students often develop closer relationships with their assistant than with their teacher. How to fulfill this role with insufficient income or excessive workload? The learning conditions at the first cycle result directly from the working conditions of the auxiliaries.
So far, the administration has not responded to the auxiliaries’ demands. It is limited to proposals which, in particular, are equivalent to a salary reduction if we take into account inflation. Hence the imminent strike.
If this strike were to take place, forcing the teaching staff to do the work of the adjuncts would perhaps solve, in the short term, the problem of submitting grades. But this would be to the detriment of the quality of the evaluation, disregarding the efforts of our students. At McGill, some undergraduate groups are made up of hundreds of students. In the event of a strike, our grades will be expected on the usual date (one to two weeks after the submission of final work), without any reduction in the other tasks of colleagues who work with teaching assistants.
Let’s take the example of a course of 350 students with six teaching assistants. Even if she increased her working hours by three hours per day for 10 days, a teacher marking assignments alone could spend barely five minutes on each! Evaluating our students in such conditions amounts to disrespecting them. In the long term, failing to address the working conditions of adjuncts will compromise the quality of undergraduate teaching at McGill. Why not negotiate in good faith instead?
The administration’s offers also have consequences for higher education. Teaching assistants generally study at the graduate level and use this income to pay for their studies. Their success depends on their ability to make ends meet while devoting enough time to their studies. It also depends on the quality of their relationship with their teachers. Pitting the two groups against each other is detrimental to this relationship and to the harmony on campus.
There remains the question of the legality of the administration’s request. In Quebec, the Labor Code strongly restricts the use of strikebreaking. Thus, section 109.1 prohibits the replacement of striking employees. The applicability of this article to work shared between employees on strike and others who are not on strike certainly merits discussion, but it may be that the performance of tasks usually carried out by auxiliaries constitutes a violation of article 109.1 . If this is the case, professors who correct the work assigned to their assistants risk being fined (article 142.1).
These anti-scab measures were adopted in 1978, not to grant preferential treatment to unions, but because the Quebec government recognized that the use of replacement work in a strike situation was detrimental to the progress of negotiations. It exacerbates conflicts, prolongs strikes and prevents the parties involved from finding solutions to problems specific to their workplace.
The Quebec law has also served as a precedent for similar decisions throughout Canada. In 1993, British Columbia adopted measures to restrict the use of scabs. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada granted constitutional protection to the right to strike (Saskatchewan Federation of Labor v. Saskatchewan) since hindering collective bargaining amounts to violating freedom of association. Legislation limiting strikebreaking has been in the works in Manitoba since the election of a new government.
At the federal level, on February 27, the House of Commons voted unanimously for Bill C-58, which will prohibit strikebreaking by employers under federal jurisdiction. At the moment, the general trend in Canada is therefore to strengthen the right to strike in order to favor the conclusion of negotiated agreements. By asking professors to perform tasks usually assigned to teaching assistants, the McGill administration is moving away from this growing view that the use of replacement work during a strike harms the collective bargaining process and does not has no place in contemporary workplaces.
For our part, we hope that the strike mandate given to AEEDEM will encourage the administration to negotiate in good faith until an agreement is obtained. However, if negotiations continue to stall and a strike is called, we will have difficulty resigning ourselves to carrying out the replacement work that the administration is ordering us to do. Fortunately, there is still time to rectify the situation.
If the issue is truly to protect the right to quality education, a good way to do so would be to negotiate a fair agreement with our teaching assistants.