Brock University Strike Screws Students The Most – And They Are The Ones That Have The Most To Pay

By Doug Draper

 In a March 26 media release, Brock University calls it “a very unfortunate situation.”

Stricking Brock Univesity instructors. Photo by Doug Draper

 It certainly seemed that way – for the St. Catharines, Ontario-based university, for its students, for the instructors who are out on strike, and for those commuters using routes in and around the Merrittville Highway/St. David’s Road intersection where there seemed to be more than enough Niagara Regional Police directing traffic this March 26 than you might find at the scene of a train wreck.

The 30 to 40 strikers – all instructors in ‘English as a Second Language’ program and members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees – began picketing this March 26 in front of the main entrances of this university because, according to a few I talked to on the same date, all they want is some job security. All they want, they say,  is some decent compensations from a university that doesn’t mind paying its highest one per cent well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from our tax funds and debt-ridden students each year.

Keep in mind that this is a group of workers that are ”Instructors in English as a Second Language,” meaning they help students from other countries with the language skills they need to pass their courses, and in that capacity, they are helping students that are a milk cow in terms of funding for the university because they are paying the full cost of tuition, and then some. Yet I talked to some on the picket line with Master’s degrees that are making less than $20,000 a year, with no benfits and no guarantee, given the university’s using these people on a contract situation, that they will have a job next week.

 Now these people are out on the picket lines, blocking entrances to the university and causing courses to close because at least some professors respect what they are fighting for enough to not cross their picket lines.

Photo by Doug Draper

 There are plenty of students, paying through their nose for their schooling, who are missing out on classes over this. There are other events on the campus that would have been of interest of students and public at large that have been cancelled. As a journalist with a background in environmental reporting, I was invited to speak at a ‘Niagara Sustainability’ summit that some very good and caring students at Brock had organized for this March 27, but that has been cancelled. And why?

A good deal of this this mess is a result of some “error” that had been discovered on the part of the university in the wording of the tentative agreement, struck between Brock and the instructors this past Feburary,  according a media release circulated this March 26 by the university.

 One might very well ask why this “error” was not found and corrected earlier, before a strike that disrupts classes for students toward the end of an academic year that costs these kids plenty. Why wasn’t this error found earlier by a Brock administration that is paid one hell of a lot more than the instructors out there this March 26, picketing in the cold air on the street?

Remember that while many of the striking employees are being paid less than $20,000 per year, with no benefits or job security, the latest Ontario ‘Sunshine List’ on wages of public servants in the province shows that the top five earners at Brock University are:

 .  President Jack Lightstone: $333,576
* Past provost and vice-president R. Terrance Boak: $257,849
* Finance, operations and information systems professor Martin Kusy: $254,938
* Vice-president of finance and administration Steven Pillar: $241,736
* Vice-president of advancement David Petis: $225,750

One might thing that one or more of these top five people, or their surrogates, could have found the “error” earlier and prevented a strike that is only hurting the students at Brock the most.

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