As the strike involving 12,000 Ontario public college faculty entered its second week, Collège Boréal third-year child and youth worker student Alice Norquay spent a rainy Monday morning on the picket line.
It wasn't a popular activity — she was the only student out lending support to the striking Boréal professors.
“I'm trying to organize some of my other classmates to come out,” she said, adding that she thought her presence might add some weight to the professors' cause, as she's the past student representative on Boréal's board of directors.
“One of my classmates was with me last week. We came out for about 45 minutes. I've got a few that are going to come out later this week when we do an afternoon.”
Norquay encourages fellow students at Boréal and Cambrian to follow her example — it just might make a difference.
“The more that the administrative staff that are going into the college see us here and telling them to get back to the bargaining table, the faster we're going to get back into school,” she said.
With the strike reaching the one-week mark Oct. 23, the two sides — OPSEU, representing the profs, and the College Employer Council, representing the province's 24 community colleges — have not returned to the bargaining table.
The union is looking for a 50-50 ratio of full-time to part-time workers, better wages and seniority rights for part-time workers and academic freedom all college faculty.
But the College Employer Council said the union's demands would ultimately add more than $250 million to annual costs, eliminate thousands of contract faculty jobs and jeopardize the quality of college programs.
“A lot of what the teachers are currently asking for, as far as having a 50-50 split with part-time and more control or input into the curriculum, that's stuff that we as students have been asking for,” Norquay said.
She said part-time faculty can be difficult to track down between classes because they have other jobs and no regular office hours.
“I think they were saying in nursing, all of their first year courses have part-time teachers, and that's not OK, because you don't have access to your educators, right?” she said.
Cambrian College's campus looked fairly bare Monday morning, presumably because many students have returned home during the strike, but Sudbury.com found a few students grabbing a bite to eat in the cafeteria.
Echoing a popular refrain among students, Krista Lamothe said she hopes the two sides return to the bargaining table soon.
“I'm pretty stressed out,” said the second-year Cambrian medical laboratory technology student.
“I'm really worried about what's going to happen with the rest of the semester. My program is pretty condensed as it is, let alone not having to knock out x amount of weeks and then forcing that work in later.”
Etienne St. Jean, a second-year Cambrian public relations student, said it's ridiculous that people who are older and are supposed to be more mature than he is aren't doing the mature thing by going back to bargaining.
“I feel like if they're not talking right now, clearly something has gone wrong,” he said.
“I understand that some sides may be putting in more effort than the other. I just don't want to start naming names and making accusations. I just think we should be making headway right now, and we're not.”
Nina Naumenko, president of OPSEU Local 655, which represents Cambrian's faculty, said the students her members have encountered crossing the picket lines have been pretty supportive.
The fact that the strike is now a week old, and provincial negotiations haven't re-started, is “demoralizing for both the faculty and the students,” said Naumenko.
She said the College Employer Council doesn't seem to want to come back to the bargaining table right now.
“They just keep saying no,” she said. “We think they're trying to wear us down, especially now that the weather's not very nice, and more students are getting unhappy.”
Sudbury.com also requested an interview with the College Employer Council, but the group had not responded to our phone call as of this article's publication.
