TORONTO, Jan. 8, 2025
/CNW/ - After over six months of negotiations, the bargaining team
representing over 15,000 college faculty across Ontario signed a Memorandum of Agreement today
with significant benefit gains – particularly for their most
precarious members, making up 75% of the workforce. While the two
sides otherwise remain at an impasse, the parties have agreed to
send all outstanding items to mediation-arbitration. As a result,
Ontario's 24 public colleges will
narrowly avoid a strike this term.
"Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions, and
with a historic strike mandate and province-wide organizing,
faculty sent the clear message that we're ready to stand up to
protect both," said Ravi
Ramkissoonsingh, chair of the faculty bargaining team. "
OPSEU/SEFPO, the union representing college faculty, and the
College Employer Council (CEC), the bargaining agent for
Ontario's 24 public colleges, met
in downtown Toronto over the
course of January 6-7 in mediation. A
new contract for college faculty will be ruled on at a further date
by Arbitrator William Kaplan.
As cuts to programming and frontline staff are announced at
college after college on the coattails of federal restrictions to
international student visas, the union says that faculty's fight to
save our colleges isn't over – and it won't be limited to the
bargaining table.
"College students are reduced to walking dollar signs for the
same reason that 75% of faculty are precarious, working
contract-to-contract," said JP Hornick, President of OPSEU/SEFPO.
"It's a corporate model of education that funnels student tuition
away from their education and towards the ballooning salaries of
ever-multiplying college administrators that will never step foot
in the classroom, or vanity projects to attract investors."
In the prelude to an anticipated provincial election, all eyes
are on Doug Ford for his starring
role in manufacturing the crisis in our colleges. A 2021 report by
the Auditor General determined that the Ministry of Colleges and
Universities had "not developed a strategic plan for the sector to
help mitigate the risk of a sudden decline in international
students and the impact it could have on the college sector,
students and government."
"This is the end game of Ford's two-step agenda: starve our
public colleges of public funds and engineer a dependency on
revenues from international students, who are faced with
price-gouged tuition rates and Ontario's affordability crisis on arrival,"
pointed out Hornick. "And when the plan goes belly-up, get workers
and students to eat the cost."
"The same government that proudly declares that every
$1 invested in post-secondary
education has a $1.36 return for
Ontarians, has put Ontario dead
last amongst the provinces for per-student funding," added Hornick.
"It's not just illogical, it's irresponsible – Ford is
gambling away Ontario's future. It's time we bet on a better
future for our colleges, one that's not rigged against students
from the outset."
SOURCE Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO)
