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A more than monthlong strike of faculty at Ontario’s 24 public two-year colleges will continue after 86 percent of union members voted to reject the College Employer Council’s contract offer. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union reported Thursday that 95 percent of the 12,841 members on its voter list cast a ballot.
The union's bargaining team had called on members to reject the offer, having objected to various provisions including those relating to faculty workload and academic freedom. The colleges' offer included a 1.75 percent wage increase in the first year of the contract, followed by 2 percent increases for each of the next three years.
The Ontario Labor Relations Board had scheduled the vote on the offer at the colleges’ request. Faculty have been on strike since Oct. 16.
"No one is surprised that college faculty rejected the council’s forced offer. It was full of concessions and failed to address our concerns around fairness for faculty or education quality,” J. P. Hornick, the chair of the union bargaining team, said in a statement.
“It is unfortunate that [the] council extended our strike and kept students out of class for an extra two weeks by calling for this vote,” said Hornick, “but now that it’s over, it’s time to move on.
“With cooperation from [the] council at the bargaining table, I believe we can settle this strike in short order.”
“Ontario college faculty have exercised their democratic right and by rejecting the offer have chosen to continue to strike,” Sonia Del Missier, the chair of the bargaining team for the colleges, said in a statement. "This is a terrible result for the 500,000 students who remain out of class. I completely sympathize with our students who have been caught in this strike for more than four weeks. This strike has gone on for too long -- and we still need to resolve it and get our students and faculty back in class."
