Making equity a priority: Anatomy of the York University strike of 1997

Feminist Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 105-118

  Briskin, Linda ^a   Newson, Janice ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0038929467     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3216673     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Almost all universities in Canada are publicly funded and under the jurisdiction of provincial government ministries of education. Boards of Governors (BOG) are the fiscal overseers; the day-to-day running of universities, however, is done by administrations. The current BOG is predominantly white and male even though York itself is a multi-ethnic, multiracial university with a large proportion of female students.
2. In a strike/lockout situation, the employer is not bound by the terms of the collective agreements; however, the traditional stance of university administrations in Canada has been to maintain the existing agreement until a new contract is signed.
3. Prior to the York strike, in spite of two decades of union membership and the increasing managerialism of the central administration, many faculty members and librarians continued to view the administration as part of the collegium-a conscientious group of academic administrators doing the best they could in difficult circumstances with no agenda of their own apart from the interests of the university. Correspondingly, they were often suspicious of the motives of the union leadership and critical of its "adversarial" stance toward the administration. Janice Newson has elsewhere described the shift toward managerialism in universities in some detail. See "The Decline of Faculty Influence: Confronting the Corporate Agenda," in Fragile Truths: Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada, ed. William Carroll, Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Raymond Currie, and Deborah Harrison (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992), 247-60.
4. In telling this story of the York University strike, it is important to situate our own voices. We have both been pro-union activists in the past and Janice Newson was president of YUFA from 1982 to 1984. During the strike, Newson coordinated the Media/Communications Coordinating Group and Linda Briskin was on the Job Action Committee. Although we had daily contact with the official union leadership, neither of us sat on the Executive or Negotiating Committees. Consequently, this story is primarily a picket-line view of the strike. Another relevant story concerns the battles waged to win support for equity within the Executive and Negotiating Committees. The few women on those formal committees were especially instrumental in these battles.
5. When we undertook to write about the strike, we solicited comments through the YUFA newsletter and YUFA electronic mail about significant personal or political moments in the strike that stood out in the memories of striking faculty. The quotations in this article come from these submissions.
6. Although YUFA had not been especially pro-active in organizing women as a constituency or addressing equity concerns, unlike many faculty associations, it had not been actively antifeminist or antiwomen. The impetus toward equity in the strike, then, did not have to combat a long-standing hostility embedded systematically in the practices or policies of the union.
7. In a 1990 York (unpublished) survey conducted by Briskin, 88 percent of women faculty who responded (132 of 150) defined themselves as feminists.
8. In spite of a decade-long "informal" commitment to increase women's hiring, in 1987 the proportion of women in the tenure stream hovered around 19 percent. The 1987-89 collective agreement signaled a shift. Although it did not target specific positions for women, Clause 12.21 required that "in units where fewer than thirty percent of the tenure stream positions are filled by women, and candidates' qualifications are substantially equal, the candidate who is a Canadian or a permanent resident of Canada and female shall be recommended for appointment".
9. In a study of a hospital organizing drive at Duke University, Karen Brodkin Sacks found that women and men exercised leadership in different ways. She distinguished "center people," mostly women, from "spokespeople," mostly men. She wrote that "women created the organization, made people feel part of it, and did the routine work upon which most things depended, whereas men made public pronouncements and confronted and negotiated with management . . . center people were key actors in network formation and consciousness shaping" (79). She concluded that it was "the relationship of these two roles that constituted the structure of movement leadership (80). . . . [T]o expand the term leadership to encompass it [the work of center women] is to make the invisible visible. It valorizes some of the important ways in which women have exerted leadership and moves beyond equating oratory with leadership" (93). See "Gender and Grassroots Leadership," in Women and the Politics of Empowerment, ed. Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
10. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women/Comité Canadien d'action sur le statut de la femme (NAC), a binational (includes Quebec), bilingual organization made up of over 600 member groups, had its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1997.
11. The almost spontaneous guerrilla action involved nonstop chanting for close to two hours by about fifty YUFA members, mostly women, who stopped a meeting of the largely anti-union Senate Executive Committee. The chanting, in English and French, called for the resignations of university President Susan Mann and academic Vice-President Michael Stevenson, both of whom were present.
12. Pam Milne refers to this as "administrative pimping" in "Administrative Pimping for Fame and Profit: pt. 2," Women's Education des femmes 2 (spring 1995): 31-36.
13. One of the first initiatives of the Women's Caucus was The Women's Testimonies Project which promoted its fall 1997 retreat as follows: The 1997 YUFA strike unleashed a myriad of stories from women faculty members about our experiences in hiring, salary negotiations and pay inequities, tenure and promotion, decision-making processes, and harassment. We want to maintain the openness that the strike catalysed and continue sharing those stories among ourselves: to build community among women faculty at York; to use women's testimonies in strategising for structural changes; and to produce materials to share these experiences more broadly.
14. The responsibilities outlined in the constitution include drafting contract proposals on equity issues; analyzing current collective agreement for biases and anomalies; ensuring more diverse representation on YUFA and joint committees; facilitating the resolution of grievances which deal with equity issues; ensuring that equity issues are addressed within YUFA; and educating YUFA members to this end. The union also committed itself to seconding a full-time organizer to deal with "equity work." The call for nominations defined equity work as follows: it addresses and eliminates systemic social inequalities which are reflected within York University in the forms of exclusion and underrepresentation, marginalization, differential treatment, chilly climate, harassment, salary anomalies, inequitable pensions, underemployment, unequal benefits, and discrimination in tenure and promotion.
15. A repeated thread through all the initiatives of union women in the mainstream labor movement-on representation, leadership practices, constituency (separate) organizing, redefining union issues, and collective bargaining-is the call for a substantively different form of democracy: for structures of participation and inclusively rather than simply representation. This focus on democracy is not surprising given women's historical exclusion from decision making. It is precisely for these reasons that Briskin calls for "gendering union democracy" which speaks to making the internal practices of unions more democratic and welcoming and more accessible by taking account of realities such as childcare and domestic responsibilities. It means ensuring that the bargaining agenda reflects the needs of women workers and promoting organizational structures such as women's committees that encourage the participation of women. The language of "gendering democracy" is both useful in moving away from abstractions about democracy and problematic in that it does not reflect the specific visions about, and claims for, democracy that emerge from other marginalized groups in the unions: lesbian and gay workers, workers of color, workers with disabilities. So, for example, democratizing unions for workers with disabilities will involve, at minimum, increasing accessibility. See Linda Briskin, "Gendering Union Democracy," Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 18, no. 1 (1998): 35-38.
16. Whether and how YUFA will take up equity issues for those outside the union, like members of CUPE 3903, remains to be seen. At York University, some of the greatest inequities can be found between the tenure stream and the contract faculty.
17. Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder analyze how the unionization of the academic staff of universities gave expression to an intramural struggle over the control of academic work that falls along four axes: senate-union; administration-union; senate-administration-union; and full-time union-part-time (contract faculty) union. We argue here for rethinking how alliances among these campus constituencies can be usefully constituted in the context of this struggle over control. See The University Means Business: Universities, Corporations, and Academic Work (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988), esp. chap. 4.
18. Magali Larson's important study of professionalism examines this issue in some depth. She argues that the tension and ambiguity experienced by professionals in confronting their "real" condition as employees of large bureaucracies or as servants of the state are not only structurally generated but also are rooted in, and anchored by, their sense of identity. See Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
19. Linda Briskin pursues this argument in "A Feminist Politic for the University: Beyond Individual Victimization and Toward a Transformed Academy/Une politique féministe pour l'université: Au-delà des représailles personnelles et vers une université transformée," CAUT Bulletin, March 1989, 10.
20. For example, a 1995 report from the European Trade Union Confederation identifies four major barriers: family responsibilities, occupational stratification which is reproduced in choosing the union's leadership, masculine union cultures that structure unions in ways that work against women's inclusion, and traditional stereotypes about women and about leadership-often internalized by women and externalized by men in discriminatory practices. See Mary Braithwaite and Catherine Byrne, Women in Decision-Making in Trade Unions (Brussels, Belgium: European Trade Union Confederation, 1995).
21. For more than two decades, union women in the mainstream Canadian labor movement (to which YUFA does not belong) have been organizing to transform unions, successfully challenging their structures, policies, practices, and climate. There are good grounds to believe that a union such as YUFA can also be transformed. See Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy, and Militancy, ed. Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement, ed. Linda Briskin and Lynda Yanz (Toronto: Women's Press, 1983/1985).
22. For more than two decades, union women in the mainstream Canadian labor movement (to which YUFA does not belong) have been organizing to transform unions, successfully challenging their structures, policies, practices, and climate. There are good grounds to believe that a union such as YUFA can also be transformed. See Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy, and Militancy, ed. Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement, ed. Linda Briskin and Lynda Yanz (Toronto: Women's Press, 1983/1985).