The Labour Movement: What is it?

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The labour movement refers to the established practice of waged workers organizing collectively to protect their common rights, which include decent wages, job security, and safe working conditions. The labour movement is based on three fundamental workers’ rights:

 

1. The Right to Unionize: the right to form an association of workers called a union that represents their shared interests and protects against from exploitative working conditions.

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2. The Right to Collective Bargaining: the right to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment with the employer as a union, rather than as individuals.

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3. The Right to Strike: The right for workers to walk off the job en masse when the terms of employment offered by the employer are deemed inhumane, exploitative, unsafe, or otherwise unfair.

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Provincial Austerity & Post-Secondary Education

 

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Canada and Quebec implemented a series of austerity measures to cope with budget deficits. Education was among the public services that had their budgets slashed as part of these new policies. During the PQ’s leadership from 2012 to 2014, the party greatly reduced public spending on post-secondary education, including an initial cut of over $19.1 million dollars from McGill’s budget. Since the Quebec Liberals won their majority, they have accelerated the austerity agenda with cuts to the post-secondary budget. McGill will have a total of 45 million cut between from 2014 to 2016

 

McGill Casualizes Labour to Keep Up

 

As the provincial government has continued to implement austerity measures and cut McGill’s budget, McGill has taken corresponding steps to lower spending. These have included a number of policies aimed at reducing the amount of full-time regular employees with job security and benefits and replacing them with casual, temporary employees with dramatically lower wages, fewer benefits, and limited job security.

 

Another way in which the McGill administration has whittled away at regular, permanent employees is through the hiring freeze policy announced in October of 2014. Represented as a freeze on all technical and support staff hiring, the policy actually only applies to the hiring of regular, full-time administrative employees unionized with MUNACA. Thus, as MUNACA positions are vacated, they are filled by casual employees, unionized with AMUSE. These casual employees are paid distinctly less, have less security, and no benefits. One of the main reasons for the merger between MUNACA and AMUSE was their desire to join together in solidarity against their common opponents: austerity and the casualization of labour on campus.

McGill has further eroded MUNACA’s membership by converting upper level MUNACA positions to low-level manager positions. Because, according to Quebec labour law, managers cannot unionize, these low level “M” positions are similarly stripped of protections and benefits.

The outcome of these austerity measures is that while MUNACA’s membership has been reduced from about 1700 in September of 2011 to about 1200 now, AMUSE’s numbers have continued to grow.
 

Other unions, like AGSEM, have noticed similar trends. Departments are coping with their TA budgets being cut by classifying employees that would have previously been called TAs as Graders. Though they often do the same work, graders have not unionized and are therefore not entitled to the same hourly minimums as TAs.
 

Finally, many of the MUNACA employees that remain report that as the membership contracts, their individual workloads are increasing while their hours and wages remain the same.

 

Together, these changes spell the wearing away of hard-earned labour rights and the institutionalization of casual, precarious labour at McGill.