Following the expiry of their most recent contract, teaching assistants and contract teaching-only university staff took to the picket lines. For the TA’s, lack of graduate student funding is the main issue. Contract staff are seeking pay increases and improved job security.
The strikes have been particularly gruesome at York U, where over half of undergraduate teaching staff is contract or part-time. The strike caused classes to be cancelled for the better part of the last two weeks. U of T contract staff did reach a deal with University Administration recently, however TA’s are still on the picket lines.
Though there are currently no plans for a strike at UW at this time, these fundamental issues plague members of our University community just the same. The strikes highlight several flaws in the academic working world, particularly in regards to undergraduate teaching and graduate research funding.
Teaching-only contract staff make up a significant portion of undergrad teachers at many Universities across the country. They are important because they are focused specifically on teaching, and the good ones take that job seriously. Several people in these jobs cited hopes for promotion into research-based tenure-track positions as their motivation for taking contract work, particularly early in their career. However, most have not achieved this goal despite all of their work and were perhaps not aware that contract work was not the optimal path towards a tenure-track position.
Lack of awareness aside, there is no question that these staff members deserve higher pay (many, particularly part-time/course-by-course staff make half of what their tenure/tenure-track colleagues earn), but also, insofar as possible, increased job security. Not knowing if you are going to be employed the following year can make managing life a tad difficult, especially for those with families to support and food to put on the table.
The reality is that contract staff are band-aid solution Universities are using to handle steadily escalating undergraduate enrollment rates on a budget (or simply, a budget they’d rather not spend on having undergrad teaching done by tenure/tenure-track professors). Furthermore, some institutions are also hiring tenure faculty to contracts without a teaching requirement, thereby relying more heavily on contract staff to fill teaching needs.
This reliance extends to graduate students, many of whom work as teaching assistants to supplement their income throughout their studies. Though TA positions do provide opportunities for these students to make a significant amount of extra money (at U of T, they get $42.50/hr), the number of hours they can (and are allowed to) work are capped. The real issue is with their main source of income, consisting primarily of a research assistantship and/or stipend, possibly with scholarships.
Graduate students at U of T receive a funding package of on average $15,000/year exclusive of other sources of funding such as scholarships and bursaries. At Waterloo, this number is even lower. This is nowhere near enough money to support general living expenses, and puts these young academics too far below the poverty line.
Though Universities may feel that they are saving money for research and therefore ensuring they uphold their reputation in the short-term, they are really just shooting themselves in the foot. Treating graduate students badly is treating their future badly. Graduate students do contribute significantly to undergraduate teaching efforts in the classroom, and thereby influence their younger counterparts.
If Canadian Universities want to comply with recent foreign worker legislation, it is in their interest to invest more in happier domestic graduate students. And where did every graduate student come from? An undergraduate program. Besides graduate students, who else has impact on undergrad classes? Instructors. These classes should be taught as much as possible by research-intensive faculty (yes, right now that means tenure/tenure-track) so that students get a real impression of what the University does. Qualified contract staff members should be given opportunities to progress towards tenure/tenure-track positions and these positions should all have a teaching requirement to be taken seriously. Action on these fronts is absolutely critical to the quality of Canadian post-secondary education and to this Canada’s contribution and commitment to research and development on the international stage.
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