An Open Letter To Niagara College Teachers – If You Care About Your Students, Please Don’t Risk Destroying What Is Left Of Their Academic Year!

 From Doug Draper

 I was checking out at the service desk of a retail store some three or four weeks ago when the cashier, who has been reading my columns years, asked me what I was writing about that week.

A Student Centre? This campus of Niagara College may have no students at all taking classes on it if the college teachers' union moves forward with a strike in the days ahead. Photo by Doug Draper

“Well, I’m writing about the possibility of a college teachers’ strike,” I said, “and I’m calling the piece – ‘College teachers who strike this time should be fired.’”

At that point, a young girl who was also working at the service desk turned around and told me that she is a student at Niagara College, and that about the last thing she and her fellow students need right now is a teachers’ strike. All three of us – the cashier, the young girl and I – got carried away in a discussion about this until I turned around and noticed a man behind me, weighed down with a couple of fairly heavy items, waiting to check out. I immediately apologized to him for keeping him waiting.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I have a son in college and we are worried about this too.”

Worried indeed!

These are far from the only folks I’ve talked to in recent weeks who feel the same way.

As a columnist who still manages to have some reach across this region and receives a good deal of email from readers, my poll (however unscientific it may be) suggests that if college teachers in Niagara and the more than 20 other college campuses across this province go on strike this February 17^th, you will get almost no public support. If the views your students and the public who pay your salaries and benefits mean anything to you, you are more likely to see any respect you have left as educators creamed if you move forward with a strike. 

 But apparently that doesn’t matter to the representatives of the Ontario Public Services Employees Union for college teachers across this province. They are reportedly urging you to vote this February 10^th against an offer by the colleges’ presidents to accept a “final offer” for a 5.9 per cent salary increase that, over the next three year, would raise the salaries of the most senior college instructors to more than $103,000 a year.

In the real world outside the classroom and off the campus, any raise at all might seem like it was God sent in an economy where many of the rest of us are working longer hours for no raises at all or are agreeing to reductions in our salaries and benefits, just to keep our jobs!

But that obviously doesn’t mean much of a fig to your union.

Your union is demanding a 7.5 per cent increase in wages (2.5 per cent per year) over the next three years, and if the province and colleges don’t cough it up, they are determined to have you out of your classrooms, beating the pavement on picket lines at a time when the academic year of some 150,000 full-time students and more than 300,000 part-time students possibly goes to waste.

 The students, who stand the most to lose, are always the pawns in your union negotiation games, aren’t they? Your union almost always holds a strike deadline for sometime toward the middle or last half of their academic year, when maximum hard will be done to their year. You never set your strike for June or July, and why?

Well it doesn’t take a college graduate to tell you why. It is because the damage you could potentially do to struggling young students who are going into debt paying your wages is your biggest bargaining chip. That is why. And that is obscene. Especially these days when many of these young are finding it hard to find summer jobs and come from families of people who have lost jobs at GM, John Deere, the paper and steel mills around here, etc., etc.

 Does that mean anything o you? As you vote for your union’s demand for a wage increase many others in this region can only dream of, does the significance of that or what it means matter anything to? Or do you just want the raise? Do you see it as a once every three or four year entitlement because, after all, you are sacred. You are a teacher.

That’s the message I got from the email I’ve received from some of your colleagues since I wrote that column I mentioned earlier up about firing college teachers who strike. Instead of any of them showing any concern for might become of the students and their academic year if there is a strike, one of them actually had the nerve to say that their contribution to the community was worth more than that of firefighters or police.

 I challenged that guy to go before those groups and declare that, and I have not heard back from him since. Frankly, I don’t think he could make an argument for placing the value of a college teacher above that of a plumber or the people who, for closer to minimum wage, shovel snow off our roads or collect our household waste.

So let’s get down to basics this time and consider the damage a strike of this kind would be doing to young people who have sacrificed so much for tuition and the outrageous price they pay for your text books – many of them produced by you and your colleagues – at a time of severe economic recession.

Is there any chance you in the teaching profession, at a time like this, could come to a conclusion that you feel the rest of the community’s pain and might even be willing to forfeit a pay raise for one or two years to help relieve the burden on the rest of us?

Apparently not, because the college presidents have put an offer on the table for a pay hike that few others in the rest of this world could dream of. But that is not enough for your union.

This Wednesday, Feb. 10, your union wants you to vote ‘No’ to the college presidents’ offer. They would rather have you go out on strike that potentially does the same kind of damage to tens-of-thousands of young college students that the York University strike did to students last year.

And yah, yah, yah. I’ve heard all the union’s rhetoric that it cares about the students and doesn’t really want a strike. One of my first assignments for a daily paper in this region was a college teachers threat to strike some 30 years ago – I can still see them carrying a fake coffin on the Welland campus of Niagara college – and I have heard all of these talking points before.

But this is not 30 years ago or even four years ago when we naively thought that the economy would just keep growing and growing.

This is a new reality we are living and struggling to survive in and a strike by your union right now, I would submit, could mean the beginning of the end of your union as any kind of credible force in this province.

 If you go out on strike this time, you are setting yourselves up for another Mike Harris to come along and say, ‘Alright, this time I am going to break their necks.’ And this time, you won’t have journalists like me to sympathies with you.

This time, more people are likely to sympathize with the students that would be used as nothing more than a pawn in a strike, and with the ordinary taxpayer than is having enough trouble, as it is, with keeping up to pay your wages.

For all of our sake, show some social responsibility when you vote on the college presidents’ offer this February 10^th and say yes to it. Let the young people you are there to serve get on with their education.

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