Thousands of SFU summer students might not get their marks this summer because of a labour dispute between the university and its Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU).
Union members, including teaching assistants, tutor markers, sessional instructors and language instructors, endorsed strike and picket action in a vote last week and issued the university a 72-hour strike notice last Friday.
The union launched job action Tuesday, announcing members would withhold grades and opt out of group marking outside of SFU business hours effective July 21.
“There’s over 10,000 students up here,” said TSSU spokesperson Derek Sahota, a master’s student in the physics department, “and we teach actually the majority of the classes in the summer because a lot of the professors don’t teach in the summer. A substantial number of SFU students won’t be receiving their grades … There may be more dramatic things coming, but the initial stages will look a lot like what was happening previously, so withholding the grades.”
The union launched the action after months of unproductive talks with SFU administration, according to English PhD candidate George Temple, another union spokesperson.
“We’ve been bargaining for 15 months, and the employer in our last bargaining session, said that our core issues were either not going to be addressed or they just told us they weren’t really issues,” he said.
The union, whose contract expired April 30, 2014, is demanding seniority rights for sessional instructors, who represent 25 per cent of the university’s teaching positions but have little job security, according to Temple.
Other demands, according to Temple, include protecting teaching assistants and tutor markers from overwork and underpay, giving grad students more access to teaching-assistant and tutor-marker jobs, extending SFU’s standard benefits package to continuing language instructors and guaranteeing union members the basic protections of B.C. law for health and safety training and payment of wages.
SFU agreed talks between the two parties have been unproductive but blamed the union for the impasse.
“Since June of 2014, nearly all proposals presented by the university remain on the table and unresolved,” SFU communications director Kurt Heinrich told the NOW in an emailed statement. “We remain committed to developing a new collective agreement that benefits SFU students, as well as TSSU members and the university. To move forward, we requested mediation through the labour relations board earlier this month, but the union declined to participate and instead held a strike vote.”
Heinrich said the best way forward would be to enlist the help of a mediator.
The union, however, has argued SFU’s administration has refused to bargain on most of the union’s core issues, so there was no reason to expect the employer would respond favourably to mediation.
