The Queen’s rumour mill is churning, and our readers are doing an excellent job of keeping QCAA up to speed. Thank you! If you don’t see your gossip here today, it means we’re saving it for another post. Stay tuned!

On the Potential CUPE Strike

Aramark managers and supervisors have been intimidating workers in an attempt to prevent them from exercising their legal right to strike. This intimidation has consisted of:

  • Management’s conspicuous surveillance of employee conversations on their personal time (breaks and lunches) is creating a chilling environment where workers are afraid to speak to each other about job action in the workplace at all, even on their personal time.
  • Managers and supervisors have also been telling international workers that they will lose their Canadian visas if they participate in strike action. This is blatantly untrue. Disgusting behaviour on the part of Aramark and Queen’s. Unsurprising, however, considering their pattern of exploitation of vulnerable workers without full status in Canada.

Aramark is a publicly traded company. Their singular priority is extracting maximum value for shareholders. These actions make this abundantly clear. This is the culture of austerity at Queen’s. Aramark workers’ feelings of precarity and fear – some of the lowest-paid and most exploited workers on campus – are exactly what Queen’s administration hopes to generalize across the whole campus. Unless we all fight back – together.

On TA Budgets in FAS

It has been an “exciting” week of learning about TA budgets for next year. The news is bad. But here’s what I want to share: FAS is taking TA allocations out of departments so that individual departments no longer have a say in how they use TAs. FAS is also taking the TA budget out of the base allocations to departments and calculating it according to this formula: 1 UG seat in 2023-24 (after add/ drop) = 1 TA hour. (Small problem if that does not cover funding obligations, right?) Here’s the kicker: The Dean and Associate Deans have admitted that doing all of this will not save money. So why are they doing it? I think they hope to undermine departments as independent units. But I don’t know. (I do know that some in the deanery do not understand the grad side of the $, some do not understand the undergrad side of the equation, and I’ve got no clue what the Dean does or does not understand).

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