First Stop: Centennial College

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting with the intrepid members of Local 558 at Centennial College.  Centennial has five campuses throughout greater Toronto, and our meeting took place at the Ashtonbee campus, just off of Eglington.  Building 930 at Ashtonbee houses Centennial's automotive technology program, and we held our meeting in a classroom right off of the main automotive shop.

 The impressive automotive technology shop

Thankfully, Local president Jacques O'Sullivan met me in the hallway before I had a chance to get horrendously lost, and introduced me to the other Local officers: 1st Vice President RM Kennedy, 2nd Vice President Derrick Thomson, Chief Steward Patricia Steger, and Secretary Julee Joseph.



Jacques and RM getting the meeting room set up

The officers at Centennial were holding their first Local Executive Committee (LEC) meeting of the year at 5pm, and were welcoming a number of new stewards to the committee.  Between 4 and 5pm I talked with the officers about a number of challenges facing their members.  A significant issue mentioned by officers and stewards in several areas was the growing amount of part-time faculty.  Several programs at Centennial are being run with no full time faculty at all, a situation that makes it difficult to maintain the program's coherence and consistency. 

The lack of full time staff had an impact in other ways.  Due to budget cuts, some programs in business and engineering have decided to not hire any partial load faculty and instead have relied on large amounts of part time and sessional faculty.  Partial load faculty teach between 7 and 12 hours per week, receive a decent hourly rate of pay, and are members of the union with benefits.  In contrast, part-time faculty teach 6 hours per week or less, are paid at a lower rate than partial load, and are not members of the union.  Sessionals teach more than 15 hours per week and receive a daily pay rate.  This rate is also much lower than the equivalent per-hour rate paid to partial load faculty, and sessionals are also not members of the union.  As non-unionized workers, both part-time and sessional professors have no benefits and no job security. 

A steward from engineering related the negative impact that the "no partial-load" policy has had on their programs.  Sessional appointments were being abused, with professors teaching 20 hours per week, 3 different courses, at multiple campuses.  This is an incredibly difficult workload for someone who is not paid for prep, development, evaluation or travel time.  In addition, growing numbers of part-time and sessional faculty place significant strain on the smaller number of full time faculty, who often have to provide considerable support to non full time staff.  One steward remarked that another problem is that, without job security, part time and sessionals won't complain about being over-worked and having insufficient resources.  In addition, they are much less likely to report bullying and harassment of faculty by students or administrators.

RM and Patricia describe working conditions





Another issue facing professors at Centennial are steadily increasing class sizes.  This trend is especially worrisome in hands-on labs, in which students are learning complex skills and need intensive supervision by professors to monitor correct procedure and to ensure health and safety.  Automotive labs have been increasing in size, pharmacy technician lab sizes have also been expanding, and some computer labs have grown to a size that they have become, in the words of one steward "basically unworkable."  In super-sized computer labs students have to wait between 30 and 40 minutes to have a question answered, and faculty members have taken to covering each other's labs to provide support.  The work is simply too much for the assigned faculty member to deal with it alone.

The LEC gets down to business



Despite the challenges in staffing and class size that Local 558 members have been facing, president O'Sullivan and his team remain committed to supporting their members and fighting for the maintenance of academic standards.  The Local has reached out to its membership, created new steward positions, rotated meetings to different campuses, and hired a former chief grievance officer to work in the union office as a member liason.  Their Local newsletter, Unfettered, is also a great tool used for outreach and member engagement. 

Like other academic locals, 558 have got a tough fight on their hands.  It was hard to hear the difficulties they've been facing, but also inspiring to see the creative strategies they have been enacting to deal with budget shortages and a declining full time workforce.  If only they didn't have to spend so much energy making up for a chronic lack of post-secondary funding!

Tomorrow I'll be meeting with the members of Local 673 of College Boreal, in Sudbury.  This will be my first trip to a northern college, and I'm excited to see what they're up to!

'till then,

Kevin