Let’s call this the “University Admin Causes More Chaos with a Strike” edition

If understaffing, over-filled classes, and digital surveillance weren’t enough of a challenge in our workdays, the university has now forced our grad student workers into a strike. This first-ever academic strike at Queen’s is one more thing to add to the legacy of the current Provost.

A few quick points to start:

  • The defining purpose of a strike is to disrupt.
  • The more widespread and bigger the disruption, the faster the strike will be over.
  • The Financial reports presented to the Board of Trustees last weekend showed that if the university actually accounted for its investment income, the operating budget would show a surplus of $11.5 million. That figure would be closer to $28 million if not for continued accounting shenanigans. The university has now created a new budget category – “transfers to capital fund from capital reserves” – that charges the operating budget for capital expenditures. This is the second time the administration has created new budget categories that inflate the deficit in public reporting. 
  • Budgets are political. They demonstrate the values of those who design them. They are designed to furnish stories that institutions tell about themselves. The deficit that was designed into the Queen’s budget now supports a story of financial constraint that the university’s bargaining team used to set the stage for bargaining and for the public communications that arise from it. 
  • TA pay, which is the main issue in this strike, is part of a grad student’s overall funding package. Funding packages at Queen’s are among the lowest in the province and Queen’s graduate programs routinely lose potential students to other schools that pay more. For instance, the minimum funding for PhD students at UofT is $40,000. At Waterloo, it is $27,000. At Wilfrid Laurier it is $24,000. At Western, it is $23,260. At Queen’,s it is stated as $23,000, but we have evidence that some students are still receiving the previous $20,000 minimum package. 
  • One of the aims of austerity and restructuring programs is to weaken the power of organized labour.

1. There is a lot going on at the university right now besides the strike. The Principal recently released a first draft of his Bicentennial Vision of Queen’s in 2041. He is looking for feedback. A number of people have shared their feedback with QCAA, which you can read in our Reader Responses to the Principal’s Bicentennial Vision series: Post 1, Post 2 and Post 3. If you would also like to share feedback, we would love to get it. We have set up a dropbox that will allow you to do so anonymously.

2. In the Faculty of Arts and Science, restructuring and cuts continue unabated. For instance, many departments are facing significant cuts to their TA budgets for 2025-26 and are scrambling to adapt. There are only so many ways to do this. Courses that currently have tutorials may lose them; courses that currently involve labs, writing assignments, or other forms of assessment that require humans to mark them will move to multiple choice exams; courses that require TA support may not be offered. It’s hard not to consider the relationship between these cuts and the decision that seems to have been made by senior administrators not to bargain for a reasonable new contract for TAs.

3. Congratulations to members of USW who reached a tentative settlement this past weekend. The success of USW and CUPE locals is a real testament to the cross-campus solidarity and the combined bargaining strategy developed by the Unity Council that involves all bargaining units at Queen’s. The work of building cross-campus relationships and collaborative structures will be a key legacy of this year’s bargaining.

4. In the spirit of solidarity, there are a number of ways students and other workers on campus can support striking PSAC workers.

  • The basics: refuse to do work that is normally done by PSAC members, and do what you can to let the strike disrupt business as usual at Queen’s. If you have examples of how things on campus are being disrupted, you could share them on this form. Good examples can help motivate more people to act.
  • You could also join PSAC on the picket line. Take your class, take your lab, take your officemates, take your friends and colleagues. Take signs and treats. Read PSAC’s materials. Sign a petition of support. Contribute to the strike pay top-up fund if you are able.
  • Write to the Provost and Principal and other administrators to tell them you want to see them back at the bargaining table. If it is relevant, explain how their failure to achieve a contract is affecting your work. Here is a starter pack of emails: provost@queensu.ca, principal@queensu.ca, trustees@queensu.ca, fro@queensu.ca.  If you are in an academic unit, copy your department head and your dean. Please also copy QCAA at contact@qcaa.ca. Make sure other people know you have written; don’t let your letter disappear into the ether at Richardson Hall.
  • If you are a member of a lab, research centre, community group, or other organization that would like to show support, but you need some help to do so, you can find a template letter here.

5. Kingston District Labour Council has launched a letter-writing campaign to show community support for PSAC 901.

6. All signs during the university’s (limited) negotiations with PSAC suggest that the union was treated with incredible disrespect. As an example, take the $200 signing bonus that is meant to mitigate the wage suppression caused by the (unconstitutional) Bill 124. We could also look to the employer’s (petty) refusal to show up on time – one day last week they were 9 hours late – and failure to read PSAC’s proposals before meetings. The assumption is that the employer wanted a strike. To divide students and weaken the TA union? To cut costs? To put even more pressure on our grad programs? Recall that earlier this year the “senior leadership team” was making plans to eliminate the Queen’s Graduate Award (QGA) for new Master’s students in September 2025. What is the future of graduate programs at Queen’s?

This is the first academic strike at Queen’s. Once upon a time, the university cared so much about our ‘stellar’ reputation as a stable bastion of elite small-c conservatism that a strike would have been unthinkable. Strikes were for radical 1960s schools like York. The current Provost and, it seems, the Board of Trustees, seem not to care much at all about our reputation. The worry now is that their negotiating team is settling in for the long haul.

From their point of view, a strike late in the term is almost as good as a strike in summer (where it is hard for academic staff to exert pressure). If the admin can let the strike drag on long enough, they have a better chance of weakening the union, as TAs’ individual contracts with course instructors will expire and the TAs themselves will need to finish their academic work and get out of here – perhaps to do their next degree at another institution or to a job.

The simple message one might take from this is that it is not the employer who will be working hard to bring this strike to a speedy end. If we want to support our students and their work as TAs – and if we want to support our undergraduate students – we need to try to get this strike finished before the end of term. We need to maximize the disruption caused by the strike earlier rather than later.

In other words, cancelling classes or otherwise adding to the disruption of the strike now is the best way of making sure 4th-year undergrad students graduate on time, that they actually get more or less a full term of classes, and that they (who started their degrees online during COVID) can enjoy the end of term activities that lead up to a celebratory graduation and convocation – without having to worry about how their term will wrap up or how their grades will be produced. The end of 4th year is supposed to feel exciting and wistful and celebratory – a lengthy strike will wreck that. If I were a student who had started my degree during COVID and ended it during a strike, I’d be pissed off and probably less inclined to support my alumni association or send any future charitable donations to Queen’s.

It can seem counter-productive that the way to support undergrad students is to reduce our service to them, but they (and their parents) are the people with the power to pressure the administration. Fourth-year students are in a particularly strong position. And pressure on the admin is the only thing that will bring the strike to an end.

The purpose of a strike is disruption. The more disruption there is, the better chance of the strike being short. The shorter the strike, the better, including for the university, the administrators of which can’t seem to get enough of dragging this place down.

On Monday I held my 4th year seminar on the picket line. PSAC members gave the students an impromptu lesson about how a strike works, PSAC demands, bargaining, how grad students support themselves, how they are feeling about the strike. The undergrads asked a lot of questions. A good number of them will be in grad school next year. For a lot of the TAs, yesterday’s picket line was the first “demonstration” they had ever attended. They are not campus ‘radicals,’ whatever that means. But they definitely understand that a lot of what they are trying to achieve is for the people who come after them.

7. QCAA is looking for a web designer and for someone who can assist with social media. If you can help, please be in touch: contact@qcaa.ca.

Please circulate this newsletter to your grad students and colleagues. 

If you are receiving this newsletter but are not a subscriber to the QCAA website, I strongly encourage you to subscribe. When you do so, you will receive notices of new posts that go up on the blog (which this now very intermittent newsletter cannot keep up with).

Thanks for reading and thanks to everyone who helped get this issue out. 

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