On Jan. 12, UW academic workers officially joined the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Around 2000 graduate TAs and RAs were amongst the people who voted on joining CUPE-SFCP, later resulting with 90 per cent in favor of unionizing. This move was preceded by the joining of UW sessional instructors with CUPE around the same time last year, following a similarly overwhelming majority vote in favor of joining. Negotiations on behalf of UW academic workers were able to progress to agreements because of union representative workers, volunteers from the OrganizeUW (OUW) campaign and the graduate student worker community at UW.
CUPE represents around 700,000 workers in health care, education, libraries, municipalities, universities, social services, public utilities, transportation, and emergency services and airlines, making it the largest union in Canada. The organization recently offered support to OrganizeUW, a grassroots campaign by UW academic workers seeking unionization to improve working conditions. According to OrganizeUW’s website, one of the goals was to get TAs and RAs to follow the sessional instructors’ path of unionizing, as done before, with the assistance of CUPE and the UW academic worker community.
The campaign workers contributed immensely to the realization of this agreement, providing support, status and active involvement with UW. This particular development has been a longtime coming, since the non-unionized UW grad student community was one of the last such collectives amongst Canadian universities. As mentioned on their website, OUW aims to address the lack of health and safety protocols, unclear hiring processes, workplace harassment, and other ways in which their environment suppresses the ability to reform one’s working conditions.
Eleanor McGrath, one of the leaders of the OUW initiative, said in the official press release by CUPE that the community strives to use their voice in the quest to improve conditions for academic workers at UW, as well as improving quality of education by considering policies around worker-to-student ratios and other positive reforms.
Imprint heard from Seth Winward, a UW grad student and one of the members of OUW who had been working behind the scenes on the campaign almost since its inception. Highlighting the major issues that OUW community have wanted to tackle throughout their journey, Winward explained TAs’ and RAs’ low income relative to other academic workers at universities, unfair workplace policies due to unpaid overtime and a culture of overworking, lack of transparency in hiring processes, and lack of sufficient benefit provisions in terms of mental well-being and challenges faced by international students. Going forward, Winward expressed that “OrganizeUW and our supporters at CUPE will focus on organizing a democratic, worker-run union local that can begin the process of collective bargaining with the university administration and work towards addressing these issues.”
