Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)
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Creative tactics and union politics. Learning from the York University strike / Why have the immense processual potentials brought forth
by the revolutions in information processing, telematics robotics
etc.. up to now led only to a reinforcement of earlier systems of
alienation, to an oppressive mass-mediatization and an
infantilizing of consensual politics?
(Guattari 1995)
Introducing, York University versus CUPE Local 3903
<1> The third-largest university in Canada, York University owes its fame to a long history of labor disputes. Historically, the neoliberal rhetoric and goals of York’s intransigent administration have always clashed with a radical body of graduate students and faculty, who not only deemed it politically and ethically necessary to challenge the employer and reclaim their rights, but also considered it a question of survival. Certified as a union since the mid-Seventies, York’s contract faculty and teaching assistants (then joined in 2001 by graduate assistants) [1] have been periodically engaged against the institution’s trend towards the progressive déclassement [2] of their qualifications and professional expertise, and the casualization of academic jobs (Vercellone 2009, p. 123). A great deal of tenacity and a fast increasing union membership helped them endure often lengthy and sometimes disastrous strikes. Despite mixed results, their union, known today as CUPE Local 3903, neither succumbed to fatigue and loss—using losses and victories equally to its own advantage to improve its members’ salary and benefit package—nor did it morph into a stiff bureaucratic machine and managing its internal conflicts openly and as creatively as possible—refusing to comply to an organizational structure forever frozen into a set of default rules.
<2> Comprised of representatives from all political orientations, young Masters students and partially-funded PhD students, teaching assistants and contract faculty with diverse teaching and research ambitions, the composition of CUPE 3903 membership has had an inevitable impact on the structure and the decision making process of the organization. Such heterogeneity not only forces a continuous negotiation of the priorities and the demands to be made during the contract year (and especially, during bargaining) but it also calls for a reflection on, and a rethinking of, the very processes that regulate bargaining and collective agreement negotiations. Acknowledgement of such heterogeneity resulted in a partial dismantling of certain rigidities inherent in the constituency of the union as a diffused entity emanating from a national coordinating body. CUPE 3903 has developed an ad hoc structure that heavily relies on the recommendations of its membership, rather than obeying the directives coming from CUPE National. For example, it decided to adopt an open bargaining system that would allow the membership to guide and directly support the bargaining team, rather than letting it make important decisions independently and separately from the rest of the membership, which is the general practice dictated by CUPE National. According to a number of commentators (Kuhling 2002; Bailey 2009; McCrairy 2009), this open bargaining process represented in various occasions a great strength for CUPE 3903.
<3> Whether its strength resided in its radical politics, the acknowledgement of its numerous membership, or its adaptability, CUPE 3903 membership has always demonstrated a feisty attitude, fighting and winning a number of battles against the employer. Even the new anti-union sections (ss. 41-42) introduced in the Labour Relations Act in 1995 by the Mike Harris led Ontario Tory legislature (Labor Relations Act 1995) seemed to be unable to weaken CUPE 3903. Whereas these new provisions exploited the fatigue and the internal conflicts caused by a long strike, by allowing “employers to force unions to present an offer to members for ratification (Kuhling 2002 80),” CUPE 3903 emerged victorious on two occasions, during 2000-2001 and 2008-2009 strikes, strongly opposing the offer proposed to its members and subsequently improving the position of the Union vis-à-vis the employer. [3]
<4> In 2001, the successful outcome of the ratification vote (2 unions refused to accept the offer) set the stage for the end of the strike: a new contract was negotiated after a few intense days of bargaining. In 2008, the teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty at York university were supposedly enjoying the “best contract in the sector (Ogilvie 2008),”with a substantial package of benefits (dental and eye plan, parental leave, an alternative health plan) but with a salary that forced them to live below the poverty line and a precarious contract that required them to apply every year (or semester) for a job that could be taken away from them any time. While their collective agreement was still far from being ideal, it was deemed enviable by many universities across Ontario. These smaller and less blessed universities watched CUPE 3903 as labor trendsetters: a victory for CUPE 3903 would encourage other Locals to ask for more. However, a loss would spur a negative trend across the province.
<5> On November 6, 2008 teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty at York University authorized CUPE 3903 to initiate a strike. On January 20 2009, after refusing to come to the bargaining table for over two months, York University called another forced ratification vote (a “rat” vote). Once again, it was defeated. The “…unprecedented win with none of the bargaining units ratifying the offer (Bailey 2009)”energized the union and gave some hope to the other unions representing contract faculty and teaching assistants across Ontario. However, this time York University “called upon the province to bail them out (Bailey 2009):”…and the province did the unexpected….
“We will go all the way” ...or will we?
<6> Overruling the political victories that the Local had achieved on several fronts, on January 29, 2009, the province of Ontario legislated the over 3000 part-time faculty, teaching assistants and graduate assistants back to work. Months of strenuous struggles, experiments in unconventional bargaining and creative tactics were instantaneously obliterated by an unprecedented measure from above that circumvented all sacred labor rights in favor of a god-like intervention to re-establish the so-called academic order, and to put an end to the many internal conflicts surrounding the casualization of labor and academic hierarchy that the strike had contributed to bringing to light. In one stroke, endless picketing, tireless campaigns to reach the less visible (and often less involved) union members, and creative tactics emerging from small groups of media-savvy individuals were suddenly rendered futile. The Local had no choice but to abide by the new law and negotiate a less than ideal contract stipulated by a provincially-appointed arbitrator. In fact, CUPE 3903's affiliation with a national union organization exposed it to a number of liabilities, including a hefty monetary penalty had this law not being observed.
<7> A sense of powerlessness pervaded the defeated contesters now returning back to their classes and their teaching: how had this happened? Countless reflections focused on the imbalance of forces involved in this dispute: graduate students and contract faculty were impotent in front of an institution-turned-corporate-behemoth, whose reach to the media and the general public had easily overshadowed the Local’s modest reactions. A few commentators pointed to a number of pre-existing weaknesses, namely a lack of clear political goals, poor management expertise provided by a Local run mainly by a handful of graduate students, and the ideological dis-homogeneity of the membership that had undermined the proper smooth functioning of the union since the very beginning of the labor dispute. Some argued that the union had simply overplayed their demands in the face of the 2008-09 economic crisis, thus jeopardizing any future positive resolution.
<8> While the above factors certainly had a role in the negative resolution of the strike, they were not crucial to its disastrous outcomes. One may argue, for instance, that in this conflict, the very lack of homogeneity in political views and the diversity that constituted the Local had contributed to the emergence of a number of experimental forms of resistance, and had facilitated its transformation from mere instance of a well-structured and heavily bureaucratized National union, to a more grassroots-led movement that acknowledged, even encouraged, recommendations and interventions from its members. This format had been key to the legal successes and the endurance of CUPE 3903. However, nobody has yet directed any reflection towards the very structural conditions within which the events unfolded, and the semiotic underpinnings that shaped this last dispute. If we are to find what went wrong during these events, we should better not blame the “unrealistic demands” of the teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty involved, nor the ill-conceived strategic planning of the Local, nor the disproportionate media and institutional superiority of the university. Instead, we should look into the comprehensive system in which both the Local and the university are immersed, and which they ended up replicating (purposely, inadvertently, or in spite of themselves) during the strike.
<9> Whether through the bureaucratic procedures and the operation mechanics followed by the two blocks, through the way in which the dispute was portrayed in the media, or the way in which the strike had manifested by means of various forms of activism, neither the university nor the union departed, or were able to disengage from a given system of governmentality and pre-constituted socio-cultural conventions. In other words, union and university, at various levels and to cope with the emergence of different circumstances, had proceeded within the constraints afforded to them as institutional agglomerates. In fact, they had adhered to, and implemented some default semiotic and institutional models that required the two parties to follow strategies (media outreach and legal maneuvers), action plans, and rulings (picket lines, protests and various forms of police intimidation) complying with the conventional rhetoric proper of any labor disruption.
<10> The nature and the framing of the conflict located CUPE 3903 in a delicate position that forced the Local to actively breach a number of rules and to play the role of blasphemous player in the conflict. Torn between the desire to devise new tactics and strategies to cope with the particular nature of the conflict, and the need to respect the official protocols deriving from its affiliation with a national union organization, the Local never chose to follow either of these directions. It encouraged and, simultaneously obscured most of the creative attempts that had emerged from below. As a result, any departure from a conventional set of rules, any creative activist tactic that departed from the way in which activism “should be practiced,” and the way in which a strike should be portrayed, were tolerated, but either treated as minor, and thus ignored, or reduced to side-shows and re-absorbed into a certain rhetorical routine. Any sign of tactical and political heterogeneity that would pose a risk to the predictable unfolding of the dispute, any internal conflicts that had emerged both from within the university’s and the union’s contexts, were successfully flattened under the rubric of inclusion and cohesion (Guattari 1995), or directed inward, hiding any debate or internal conflict that could have shed a different light on the strike. Thus, despite initially celebrating the potentials of its most innovative and non-conventional actions, CUPE 3903 ended up neutralizing them by re-introducing other pre-constituted conventions into the strike, becoming itself the victim and the perpetrator of the systemic norms it sought to fight.
<11> With both union and university dismissing new initiatives, any potential change to the structure that supported the “way in which a strike should be led” and “the rhetoric that should be used” was literally gobbled up by the system. Thus, it is the system that failed the union or, better, the failure to recognize that its bipolar swinging between breaking the norm and sticking to the norm was merely reproducing some tired and predictable principles that ultimately led the Local to its demise. In other words, CUPE 3903 never did “go all the way” as the anthem composed during this strike proudly stated (Shipley 2009; Strike Video Collective 2008), but stood in the middle, a hybrid creature with bold ambitions but disable-ing fears dragging it back towards its institutionalized imprisonment.
Like a sponge
<12> Guattari effectively summarizes how today's socio-economic system functions by “affording one legitimation, while cultivating resignation in the other (Genosko 2002, p. 25).” Through the contemporary means at its disposal, be they the media, social networks or advertizing, this system (a territorialized assemblage of enunciation) establishes a semiotic realm that admits the practice of different (deterrioralized) minor subjectivities emerging or manifesting as acceptable exceptions. By understanding them as “complementary segments of subjectivity (Guattari 1995 p. 99),” it promotes an apparently heterogeneous and diverse corpus of subjects and practices in the name of diversity, fluidity and hybridity. However, these practices can be accepted only as long as they comply with, or essentially do not disturb, a comprehensive semiotic order. As a result, these practices are effectively integrated and re-conducted into a homogenized regime (they are re-territorialized) losing those particular differences that might constitute a disturbance to a standardized system, imagined as idealized and, thus, flawless. According to Guattari, unless (or until) “new forms of collective organization and resistance that find spaces in which subjectivity can flourish (p.100)” are invented, any new isolated and independent practice that diverges from this homogenized and silently agreed-upon regime will be actively opposed or re-absorbed into the system. It is as if they were attracted by a sponge, and then dissolved as well as dispersed in the maze of its arrangement.
<13> The system’s tendency to establish a homogeneous non-confrontational order can be also interpreted through what Galloway and Thacker define as the “juncture between sovereignty and networks” (Galloway & Thacker 2007, p.5). While this concept is applied to the logic of digital networks (i.e., the Internet), it also effectively summarizes the competition between, and coexistence of, control and distribution existing within human social networks. Networks, Thacker and Galloway argue, are by definition constituted by a distributed, non-hierarchical bottom-up structure. While their configuration might constitute an advantage to human beings for their ability to facilitate the formation of groups, alliances etc.., they are also arduous to pin down and control as,
“..one’s ability to superimpose top down control on that emergent structure evaporates in the blossoming of the network form, itself bent on eradicating the importance of any distinct or isolated node (p.5).”
Political ambitions are always tied to a drive to direct and plan any action towards advantageous resolutions, a strategy that clashes with the logic that characterizes the decentralized, non-hierarchical nature of networks. This suggests that there is a continuous, and yet unsolved competition between, and coexistence of, control and distribution. Thus, the formation of decentralized and distributed networks will always be contrasted by an equal push to bring them into a pre-constituted governable order.
<14> CUPE 3903 positioned itself in relation to the University as a complex agglomerate, as a network of individuals, whose demands represented its diverse composition. Thus, it manifested as an entity difficult to categorize, or to describe using a few allusive, press-friendly words. At this level, the strategy conducted by the university and the media reflected the attempt to simplify, to essentialize the union’s complicated stance, in order to make it legible as a monolithic block and to control its aleatory nature. In turn, while it had managed its own configuration in the past by making adjustments to the rigid rules provided by its own institutional affiliation, the union itself had great difficulties in projecting its own heterogeneity to the public and the press: CUPE 3903 was not asking for a mere wage increase, but for a number of small improvements in its benefit packages (child care, better job security, provisions for research etc..). Its requests, once translated into the common language of employee/employer relations ended up replicating a traditional rhetoric that effectively flattened any ambiguity or more subtle issue. How to explain a range of complex issues and requests that appealed to different subjects and groups to an external audience? How to dispel prejudices and assumptions by summarizing them into a few brief sentences without returning to the usual rhetoric?
<15> CUPE 3903 actively encouraged the emergence of new tactics that would act independently, unexpectedly, and free from any direction or clear design. Instead of embracing these tactics as an essential part of the struggle, CUPE 3903 preferred to ignore them: how could the Local use them to fit its own goals, when their nature prevented it from anticipating their outcomes? The need to economize time and energy and to produce some tangible and decipherable results to show to its members led the union to avoid taking such risks and to choose verified and certified strategies over unreliable, experimental tactics.
Expected strike, unexpected demands
<16> In the 2008-09 strike, union and university appeared to reflect the above principles. Although belonging to two ideologically distinct blocks, the first certainly drew from the second. Its role was to counterbalance the attempts of the university to seek innovation and restructuring by violating the rights of its employees. All the events that led to the strike were in response to a number of decisions that the university had made, or was about to make, and rose from a general situation that did not characterize York university solely, but most universities in the province of Ontario.
<17> York university introduced itself with a portfolio of poor labor relations with almost every unionized unit operating on the two campuses. [4] It was contrasted by CUPE 3903, whose fame as a strong union, and as radical and belligerent had been confirmed on various occasions, the latest being the “great strike of 2000-2001” (Kuhling 2002). With these precedents, and given the recent restructuring plans unveiled by the university to build a lucrative medical school that would effectively shrink the size and funding of the Liberal arts and Social Science (Brown 2008) a strike was not only anticipated, but also expected. To this factor, one has to add the increasing labor disruptions and labor disputes that had taken place a few months earlier in neighboring universities: the University of Windsor, Wilfrid Laurier, McMaster, Guelph and Toronto had either experienced very difficult bargaining sessions or had initiated a strike. [5] With such a heated situation, a strike at York was certainly in the making.
<18> CUPE 3903 represented an impediment to the fulfillment of the university’s corporate dream that needed to be neutralized. Invigorated by new private resources and alliances in the wake of its 50th anniversary (York Foundation 2009), the university was particularly determined to proceed with a restructuring plan that conformed to what was perceived as an almost natural development: its constituency would be transformed in the name of innovation, efficiency, and accumulation suitable to the neoliberal principles of capital expansion and education on demand.
<19> By choosing to represent the demands of its contract faculty, CUPE 3903 opted to go not only against the university system, but also against the entire system that the university was referencing. Keeping an increasingly high number of low-paid part-time faculty to substitute the positions of retiring full-time professors is not only economically advantageous, but also respectful of those principles of extreme flexibility advocated by the private sector. Where the university interpreted its sessionals as a cheap, disposable labor force, yet indispensable to fulfill the future plans of the institution, CUPE read exploitation of cognitive labor and precarious, unstable employment. Its demands to up a yearly number of long-serving sessionals to a full-time assistant professorship status and to recognize the work of other deserving members by guaranteeing their continuous hiring (and therefore making their positions more secure), found a particularly firm opposition from the university.
<20> Most importantly, CUPE 3903 was found exceptionally guilty by the media and the public at large for the unprecedented way in which it had framed the dispute: rather than presenting it as a defense against a mean employer, that is, as an attempt to maintain privileges that the employer was threatening to take away, it made a proactive attempt to improve the conditions of its membership in light of the degeneration of the labor situation in the educational sector. Its demands included a proposed increase of so-called “conversions” (part-time positions being transformed into full-time, tenure-track appointments), and the provision of child-care for employees in need and single mothers. This exercise of challenging a system that doesn't tolerate well any direct and active undermining of its principles was interpreted as particularly arrogant, especially at a time (fall 2008), when the rhetoric spurred by the incumbent economic crisis encouraged all employees to make sacrifices, rather than proactively trying to improve their own conditions.
<21> Such move was considered outright blasphemous, as the members of CUPE 3903 already enjoyed “the best contract in the sector (Ogilvie 2008).” According to common sense, they should have accepted what was offered to them, [6] even if that meant a de facto erosion of salary and benefits. Following this rationale, instead of welcoming the demands of CUPE 3903 as a legitimate request for a contract and benefits that all workers should be enjoying, the public would blame them for asking too much, as they were not complying with the already eroded (but, to the public’s eyes, more than reasonable) package that all the workers in the province had to live with. Thus, the university was able to turn down, unnoticed, and even justified by the media and the civil society, any bargaining invitation by the union, insisting that any negotiation would be out of the question until the dispute was entrusted to a binding arbitrator, an outside third party that would recommend a “settlement at the level of the median cost of collective agreements in the sector,” which would be particularly disadvantageous for CUPE 3903 (CUPE 3903 2008).
<22> Unlike in previous labor disputes, where the rights of full-time graduate students had been the centre of the attention, CUPE 3903 made the conscious choice to recognize the work of part-time faculty, whose increasing number was the sad result of the general trend to casualize university labor. While this choice also strongly resonated with graduate students, especially those soon-to-graduate students who were facing a bleak future of insecure employment, it couldn’t be defined as a students’ struggle. Thus, in all press releases and official communiqués, the union referred to its members as employees. Had CUPE 3903 framed the struggle as a tuition paying students’ fight, and not as a wage perceiving labor force, a claim it had made in the previous successful strike, it would have probably enjoyed better press and more solidarity from the public at large. However, this time it chose not to. The problem of precarious and casualized labor was too pressing to be dismissed a second time. This, and the aggressive, rather than defensive attitude of CUPE 3903 guaranteed that not only the university, but also the media and the civil society became involved in implementing particularly severe measures to force the Local to stay put.
<23> While apparently of secondary importance, these two details appeared to constitute a great infringement of assumed behavioral rules that put the university at a great advantage. York Media Relations literally fed the press (Hashemi 2009) with generic news that exclusively focused on the “unreasonable” (YFile Dec.18, 2008) monetary demands of the counterpart, and glossed over more important issues at stake. Nobody dared either to verify such statements, or to attempt a more sustained analysis. There is no doubt that the well-paid Public Relations machine of York University had superior power and authority to communicate with the media, and indeed, it used all the resources and the alliances York could afford in order to defeat its counterpart. However, it is very possible that the media just refused to look beyond the most visible, superficial assumptions. Thus, the attempts of CUPE 3903 to reach out to the media became a useless exercise as words would be misread, manipulated or made to fit the official story. Letters sent by supportive faculty to the editors of the major newspapers tried to rectify incorrect interpretations and tried to explain the complexities of the conflict. However, most of them were either dismissed and misinterpreted or postponed and released only when the strike was over (as was the case of the article written by Berland and Grinspun, which only appeared on the Toronto Star on January 29 2009). By the end of the conflict, the only information that had reached the general public was: a. the “staff” at York University had gone on strike “despite” the economic crisis; b. in doing so they had jeopardized the academic year of 50,000 students (implied: …who were paying a steep tuition to get a service) [7]; c. their demands were merely monetary (implied: how dare they to ask for more money when they are paid more than any other precarious worker in their sector?); d. they asked for job security (implied: arrogant demand! They are lucky if they have a job). This widely disseminated information led the public to conclude that the union was guilty of an act of extreme arrogance.
A partial acknowledgement of new tactics: a missed opportunity?
<24> CUPE 3903 and the university constitute two institutionalized subjects, that is, two entities functioning according to their own well-established rules and semiotic regimes. As a result, during the strike, they followed the procedures offered to them by their system of reference, by employing the means and the strategies that characterize any labor dispute.
<25> At the labor relation/labor dispute level, CUPE 3903 had respected all the rules and prevailed over the employer: its members overwhelmingly rejected an inadequate tentative offer of agreement; they endured long hours of picketing in the frigid Canadian winter and successfully defeated a forced ratification vote imposed by the Ministry of Labor. However, this legal victory didn’t help the Local win the strike. There are many reasons that led the Ontario legislature to enact the back to work legislation: its initial respect toward CUPE 3903’s legitimate right to strike seemed to suddenly come to an end. Would the legislature have stepped in if CUPE 3903 had humbly decided not to pursue its ambitious dreams of job security? The conceptual significance of the strike and the consequences of accepting a victory by the union would have been a precedent in the history of post-secondary education in Ontario and would have encouraged other university Locals to make similar demands. Furthermore, the legislature didn’t have any interest in defending an organization whose good reputation had been compromised by its own bold decisions. With media and public opinion united and actively requesting the end of the strike, and the fear that this strike would spark other disputes around the province, the legislature was more than happy to comply.
<26> In this situation of complete aversion towards CUPE 3903, a question arises: would the use of a different set of tactics have swayed public opinion otherwise?
<27> At the beginning of the strike, the bad press that had plagued CUPE 3903 persuaded a number of its members that the tactics that had characterized previous strikes and that had sanctioned their victory in 2001 were out of date. Bringing classes to a stop by isolating the campus entrances with picket lines was not the only effective option in the face of the media barrage that York University had cleverly created; distributing countless official press releases that awkwardly attempted to explain the real stakes of the strike by contrasting every criticism that York university made was of no use; finally, the issues that CUPE 3903 tried to raise, and the dynamics of power they were trying to solve were far too complex to explain in a few paragraphs. Thus, the fight unfolded beyond the picket lines, mobilizing a plethora of unconventional tactics that mixed the power of network technologies and web 2.0 tools with more performative, theatrical interventions.
<28> While originating from a number of diverse and motivated individuals, these tactics had one element in common: they were all approaching the events with a rather humorous eye. These tactics served several goals: as tools of direct action and counter-information, as instruments of relief and comfort for those strikers who were on the picket line, and as devices meant to encourage a more sustained and creative involvement of individuals who otherwise would have never dared “going political.” Unexpectedly, by targeting different issues and telling different stories, these tactics helped shed some light on the complexity that characterized the composition of CUPE 3903, and its relation with other groups and governmental bodies internal to the university, in a way that the simple press releases distributed to the official media hadn’t been able to do.
<29> The first interventions came after a few weeks of tiring picketing, when frustration and internal disagreements over organization and coordination of the strike seemed to have taken a toll on the protesters and leave no chances of future success: a series of videos started making their appearance on YouTube. Appropriating the popular Mac vs PC commercials, these short videos were instead featuring fictitious CUPE vs York University confrontations:
<30> “Hi I am CUPE” “Hi I am York University.” Journalist: “ hello, York university, can you please tell our viewers how you feel about the CUPE strike?” “sure, CUPE wants to live above the poverty line….(journalist laughs) but why is there a poverty line? Somebody has to live below it, it’s just common sense!” Journalist: “…and CUPE, what do you think?” “our position is…” “so you agree with York!” “no, our position is…” “so, you don’t agree with York” “no, I am not agreeing or disagreeing, I am just trying to say that…” “well, that’s all the time we have! Thank you both for stating your cases, and now, cutting edge report is coming up! (Strike Video Collective 2008, AD-1)”
<31> Lasting a mere 40 seconds each, the time of a commercial, these mini-videos not only addressed the continuous misunderstandings that the media were perpetuating, but also tried to re-dress the issues that the media hadn’t captured. The above video, for instance, in addition to commenting on the low salaries that CUPE 3903 employees received, (despite being the best paid in the sector), was able to reproduce the difficulty of CUPE 3903 to characterize in a few words the nature of its own struggle. Conversely, it captured the paternalistic and dismissive attitude of the media, whose spokespersons were more preoccupied with disseminating their own default narratives than listening to what CUPE had to say. As these videos multiplied and started circulating among union members, supporters within and outside the university, and among undergraduates, other groups felt encouraged to produce their own alternative material, writing songs or staging theatre and puppet shows that narrated their own side of the story. A number of people invented imaginary characters and mascots (the York Bunny and the “kultur kritik” LuLu), which often performed during protests and made their appearance even during general membership meetings.
<32> While appreciated, these interventions were neither fully recognized by the union as legitimate tactics, nor did they make it into the mainstream media. The Local appeared to be anchored to some assumed principles that simply did not see the role of these practices beyond providing relief to their favorite heroes, the picketers, and their preferred tactics, protests and sit-ins. In addition, a number of union executives had difficulty approving the content distributed through these practices, and recognizing it as legitimate. In fact, unlike any official press release, these interventions were mostly improvised or produced occasionally, and thus, they were neither verified nor properly monitored by any authoritative body that could validate their legitimacy. Despite the support of a limited pocket of individuals, who actively encouraged the intensification of these interventions and urged a more sustained promotion of similar practices, they were merely considered a welcome, yet frivolous divertissment that amused union members while they were tending to more serious business. Here is when the “infamous Xfile” began.
<33> Xfile was born by chance as part of an intervention of counter information à la Yes Men [8] titled, York Is Us. This clone of the York University website aimed at jamming the news with the release of fake satirical information. Although displaying a structure identical to the original site, the clone never became the indistinguishable copy of York University’s website. In fact, it became its satirical double, featuring a modified animated logo that read, “York is Us: negotiating is possible” and “defying the impossible” (YorkIsUs 2008) instead of the trite (and trademarked) York motto “redefine the possible” (York 2007). Its revamped color coding rejected the popular York red to adopt a more suitable CUPE mauve shade. As part of this satirical project, the authors, who signed themselves as professors with fictitious names (Prof. Basta, Caree Routsider, Joan of York, Prof. Marginati and other evocative names), decided to publish a weekly satirical pamphlet modeled on the daily official newsletter distributed by York University’s Media Relations, the Yfile (Yfile 2008). The name chosen fro the satirical pamphlet was, incidentally, Xfile (YorkIsUs Collective - Xfile).
<34> If Xfile had featured innocuous satire to be strictly distributed among CUPE 3903 members for their own enjoyment, its fame would have only lasted for the duration of the strike. The first three issues consisted in re-worked news from various official sources, usually the Yfiles or the local newspaper (the Toronto Star), a rant by an imaginary precarious professor posing as Michel Foucault (YorkIsUs Collective, Xfile 6 2008), and news of a mysterious epidemic that threatened to turn quiet and submissive sessionals into rabid revolutionaries (Xfile, 4 2008). Thus, the publication, despite its success and the impatient expectations it produced in the picketers waiting for their periodical dose of satirical news, would probably have followed the fate of any other non-normative tactics that had emerged from initiatives of minor groups or individuals: it would have been directed towards the exclusive consumption of CUPE 3903 members as a form of entertainment, and the support of the picketers’ morale. The dismissal, although subtle, was palpable, as some union captains, on various occasions, would instruct members to distribute only “adequate” material, disregarding any non-official and inappropriate information such as that disseminated by Xfile.
<35> However, when the publication started to reach a wider audience, a leakage of information came from a number of faculty supporters. An intimidatory letter signed by various “distinguished” professors (YorkIsUs collective 2008-finding), who were members of YUFA (York University Faculty Association), the full-time faculty union, was passed to the editors of Xfile. The letter had circulated among internal department mailinglists, inviting the full-time faculty to stop supporting CUPE 3903, urging YUFA to return to “its stance of dignified neutrality (YorkIsUs collective 2008-finding).” The event not only turned the content of Xfile from innocuous to controversial, but it also opened a new painful full-time versus part-time faculty debate, an issue that was implicit, but had not been discussed thus far. The decision of Xfile to publish the letter in their Christmas issue accompanied by a gift certificate addressed to the signatories “in recognition of your dignified neutrality” (Xfile 6 2008) initiated a harsh contention. This laid bare some well-accepted discriminatory practices of some “deserving full time faculty [9] ” to actively relegate their part-time colleagues to the margins, as second class scholars and as cheap teaching work force.
<36> The retaliation that followed the publication of the letter was fierce: calling the whole publication “sophomoric, [10] ” a number of signatories YUFA members started harassing various CUPE 3903 executive members, ordering them to find those responsible for this criminal action. While the anonymity of the Xfile editors was never given away, the union did not defend Xfiles. Denying any affiliation with the publication, the Local promptly bent to the pressures of the faculty and temporarily deleted the link to Xfile from the CUPE 3903 website. Xfiles continued its publications undisturbed. As a response to the harassment, YorkIsUs compiled and published a mash-up of the offensive emails that the faculty had sent since the certificate was disseminated (Xfile 7 2009). However, the battle had now completely shifted its focus, moving inward. Rather than directing its efforts towards gaining more media visibility and, thus, becoming an organ of counter information that served the union in its battle against the employer, Xfile had turned into an instrument that introspectively addressed the internal conflicts unfolding inside York University. Thus, while its value can be appreciated for speaking to unresolved and normally hidden issues, it never received any encouragement to expose either these internal power dynamics, or more general issues to the public domain.
One lesson, many questions unanswered
<37> On the night immediately after the ratification vote, hopeful CUPE 3903 members gathered at a packed pub in the west end of Toronto. After hearing of the successful results of the vote, they thought they had won the battle against York University. To some, this final victory “… proved that with strong and resolute leadership and unity within the union the workers have great power (Bailey 2009).” Some individuals reflected on the plethora of small interventions that had characterized the strike. They claimed, with a certain satisfaction that the Local, from union affiliate and ideological monolith, had morphed into a more fluid entity, coming closer to a social movement than to an institutionalized and rigidly structured organization. In other words, the Local had morphed into an entity whose members were able to direct their diverse efforts coherently to fight united, yet independently, for the same cause. Unfortunately, CUPE 3903 never reached that stage, as fears of disapproval from more conservative members, and from CUPE national organization forced its constituency to maintain a moderate and more conservative position.
<38> One year from the end of the strike many questions remain unanswered. Radical members of the union and other activist groups accused CUPE 3903 of “caving in” for deciding to “fold rather than defy the authorities.” According to these groups, “Despite the rhetorical militancy and leftist politics of some of the union’s leaders, the CUPE 3903 executive pursued a timid, legalistic strategy (International Bolshevik Tendency 2009).” In other words, CUPE 3903 betrayed its own aspirations by deciding to play by the rules. For McCrary “CUPE 3903 had criticized and eschewed traditional union processes, maintaining an uneasy relationship with CUPE’s national organization…” In fact, it had maintained “…an open bargaining process, wherein the bargaining team reports back to the general membership and relies upon the membership for guidance throughout bargaining (McCrairy 2009).” However, it ended up neutralizing this progressive move by deciding to follow a more authoritarian approach regarding other issues.
<39> In addition, fears of being abandoned by CUPE National and its own less militant membership prevented CUPE 3903 from acknowledging and supporting a the proposed tactics devised by its fringe groups and creative individuals. Inadvertently, CUPE 3903 projected its own potentials internally, rather than externally. Had CUPE 3903 allowed its new tactics to flourish, had it allowed them to develop further, had it promoted them and considered them a legitimate part of union activism, instead of relegating them to the margins, would the strike have reached the same outcomes? Would the use of guerrilla picket lines instead of traditional ones, or the use of clown fighters, or direct university occupation have constituted more effective tactics? Or would they have rather caused CUPE national to terminate its support of the Local? With CUPE’s decision to stand in the middle, and effectively dismiss any unconventional initiative available, any potential change to the very structure that supported the way in which a strike should be led, and the rhetoric that should be used was neutralized and absorbed into the system to which CUPE belongs.
I never knew the power that
I held inside my palm
until I joined the union and
we marched each day at dawn
cos’ joined at hands we're stronger than
I ever thought we'd be
be wary, o employer, of
3903
cos we'll go all the way
we'll go all the way
(Tyler Shipley, Sentinel Road, 2009)
References
Berland, Jody, and Ricardo Grinspun. 2009. Part-time workforce imperils universities. The Toronto Star, January 29, 2009.
http://www.thestar.com/article/578782.
Bailey, Chris. 2009. Lessons of the York University Strike. Fightback. The marxist voice of labor and youth. March 3. Available from http://www.marxist.ca/content/view/426/1/
Brown, Louise. 2008. Health minister supports new med school plans. The Toronto Star, February 21, 2008.
CUPE 3903. A Note on Binding Arbitration. Available from http://tao.ca/~cupe3903/web/?q=node/794
CUPE 3903 Factbook. 2009. Available from http://cupe3903.tao.ca/?q=node/920
Galloway, Alexander R. 2007. The Exploit: A theory of networks, ed. Eugene Thacker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Genosko, Gary. 2002. The party without bosses; lessons on anti-capitalism from Felix Guattari and Luis Ignatio da Silva. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishers.
Guattari, Felix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Blomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hashemi, Gita. 2009. Notes on a strike. Fuse Magazine. 32.2
International Bolshevik Tendency. 2009. On the CUPE 3903 strike. Picket lines mean don't cross. 13 April.
Kuhling, Clarice. 2002. How CUPE 3903 struck and won. Just Labor. 1: 77-85
Labor Relations Act. 1995. Available from http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_statutes_95l01_e.htm#BK47
McCrairy, Tim. 2009. Tough union, tough lessons. Learning from CUPE 3903 strike defeat at York University. Canadian Dimension. April 23.
Ogilvie, Megan. 2008. Strike cancels classes at York university 3,350 teachers walk out over wages, job security. The Toronto Star, 06 November, 2008. http://www.thestar.com/article/531644.
Shipley, Tyler. 2010. We’ll go all the way. Sentinel Road. Lyrics available from http://tylershipley.com/lyrics.html
Strike Video Collective. CUPE 3903 AD 1- press. Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ynDLmRIA4&feature=related.
Strike Video Collective. CUPE 3903 rally December 3. Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LYYwO9En0c&feature=player_embedded
Vercellone, Carlo. 2009. Cognitive Capitalism and models for the regulation of wage relations: lessons from the anti-CPE movement. In Edu-Factory Collective (Eds.), Towards a Global Autonomous University. Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. New York: Autonomedia.
York foundation. York 50. 2009Available from http://www.yorku50.ca/about.html
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http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/ViewIssue.asp?IssueDate=11/06/2008
YorkIsUs collective. 2008. Confessions of a tenuous professor. XFile. 6 -22 December.
———. 2008 Enemy combatant posing as TBA Professor at York arrested by YSF. XFile. 4-15 December.
———. 2008. Findings from Latest Research on Faculty Conduct in Times of Strike. 22 December. Available from http://yorkisus.opinionware.net/research/yufa-anti-cupe.html
———.. 2008. XFile Archive. Available from http://yorkisus.opinionware.net/xfilearchive.html
———. YorkIsUs. 2008 Available from http://yorkisus.opinionware.net/.
———. 2009. Bargaining Worth All Your Balls. XFile. 7-8 January.
Notes
1 Three units (part-time faculty, teaching assistants (TAs) and since 2001, graduate assistants (GAs)) have negotiated their collective agreements jointly since 1975 as the Graduate Assistant Association (GAA), then as part of the Canadian Union of Educational Workers (CUEW, 1980), and as Local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
2 “…a devalorization of their conditions of remuneration and employment compared to the competencies they actually put to work in their professional activities (Vercellone 2009, p.121).”
3 I am grateful to Ryan Toews for sharing his research in progress on the history of CUPE 3903 Collective Agreements, and for directing me to key literature on the previous strikes.
4 CUPE 3903 operates on the main Anglophone Keele campus and on the Francophone Glendon campus
5 For more information see Wilfrid Laurier strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srRKghbAMEA;
Windsor strike http://www.truveo.com/Univ-of-Windsor-Strike-Rally/id/2229877425; McMaster CUPE3906 reaches tentative agreement http://cupe.ca/education/a48529c93cbde9; Guelph strike averted http://www.cupe3913.on.ca/; University of Toronto TAs vote “Yes” to strike mandate http://www.cupe3902.org/cupe-3902-strike-vote-media-conference/
6 York University framed its offers exclusively in terms of wage increases, offering a 9% increase over a three year contract, misleadingly conflating CUPE’s benefits demands by adding them to the salary increase and thus accusing CUPE of greediness. Allegations regarding CUPE 3903’s demands listed wage increases fluctuating between 30% and 70% as opposed to the 7% and 4% over two years requested by CUPE (CUPE3903 FAQ).
7 The 50,000 students rhetoric was disseminated by Media Relations, despite the fact that York university had decided to cancel all classes once the strike broke. It was immediately picked up by the media and became a persistent refrain that appeared in almost all press articles published between early November (the beginning of the strike) and early February (the end of the strike).
8 http://www.yesmen.org A U.S. based duo of culture jammers/tactical media activists who became popular for the cloning of GATT and WTO websites, and for posing as members of said organizations at corporate events and conferences.
9 From an undisclosed correspondence between a member of the YorkIsUs team and a YUFA member.
10 Another statement form an undisclosed correspondence between a member of the YorkIsUs team and a YUFA member.
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