November 6, 2021

PSAC555 Stands in solidarity with UOITFA and supports their right to Strike.

Ontario Tech University needs to start recognizing that it is the faculty who delivers the quality education that they are selling. While Ontario Tech University is making record-breaking profits, the Faculty Association and our own Sessional Instructors are struggling to negotiate fair workload language, job security, pay equity, and fair pensions.

Ontario Tech U needs to start treating its educators and academic labourers with dignity and not like workhorses.

We have heard from Ontario Tech U governance how well they made the transitions from in-class learning to online learning.  But it was not the Ontario Tech U governance that made these transitions successful.  It was the workers: faculty, staff, and support workers of Ontario Tech U. Workers with the most precarious of conditions, like Sessional Instructors and Contract Faculty, who support students and ensured that the University was able to keep running. Now, Ontario Tech University is treating us like we are expendable. They are not meaningfully engaging in the collective bargaining processes for their workers and this is shameful.

It is not fair that the administration of Ontario Tech U is riding the wave of success and profit during a pandemic, in yachts, while the workers are on buoys. They keep telling us we’re all in this together, but our conditions are very different.

PSAC555 stands in solidarity with the UOITFA because the ability to deliver quality education, fair workloads, job stability, pay equity, benefits, pensions, and the expectation of being treated with dignity and respect should never be a fight.  These things should just be provided to the workers of Ontario Tech U, because without us the University would not be able to deliver the quality education they are selling! Precarious educators in the Faculty Association and in our own membership deserve to be treated with fairness and respect. We are not expendable and Ontario Tech U needs to realize this.

In solidarity,

The PSAC555 Executive