BY KEITH LACEY
The president of the Students? Administrative Council (SAC) at Cambrian College will not take sides in the current labour dispute which has cancelled classes for thousands of students at Ontario?s community colleges.
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Rob Majury, president of the Students? Administrative Council, doesn?t want students to suffer as a result of the OPSEU strike. |
But he warns there will be significant financial costs to the college system if 150,000 full-time students were to lose an entire school year because of the labour dispute, now in its fourth day.
?I?m not on the side of the union or on the side of management, I?m on the side of students who are caught in the middle of all this,? said Rob Majury, who is completing his first year as SAC president after acquiring his advertising diploma from Cambrian last year.
?We?re on the job right now to help guide students through the entire process and answer their questions and concerns.?
The halls of Cambrian were almost empty and only six people were eating in the cafeteria in the middle of the day Wednesday when Majury took time from his busy day to discuss the first labour dispute in Ontario?s college system since 1989.
?There?s never been a school year lost because of a labour dispute in this province and we certainly don?t want to see that happen this time around,? he said.
If the strike isn?t settled within two weeks, SAC and the College Students? Alliance, representing administrative councils for all 24 Ontario community colleges, would demand the province step in and end the dispute, said Majury.
?The timing of all this is mega-bad,? he said. ?A lot of students are scheduled to begin their annual placements and most of them have been cancelled. The threat of losing the school year isn?t an option in our opinion.
?If this drags on one month, the whole year would definitely be threatened...every student would have to be reimbursed for at least the second semester because students have paid for their education and will not have received what they paid for because of a situation they are not responsible for.?
Both sides agree the strike centres around the issue of workload for OPSEU?s 9,100 college professors, counsellors and librarians.
Majury says his own view is workload issues are particularly troublesome in the bigger colleges in southern Ontario.
?I just graduated last year and I know I never had any problems finding time to talk to my professors,? he said. ?The issue over workload and class sizes is definitely a concern on a province-wide scale, but whether that?s a key issue here at Cambrian and other smaller colleges is certainly a
matter for debate.?
On the other hand, the enrolment numbers, along with record-high tuitions, are steadily rising at Ontario?s community colleges and many professors are getting burned out even though most are very well paid, Majury believes.
?At Cambrian, more than 40 percent of the students are mature students who have been out of high school for more than two years and many for more than 10 years...they?ve worked the crummy jobs for low pay and under terrible conditions,? he said. ?These people made the decision to try and better themselves by acquiring a college education. What I urge is for the union and ministry to sit down and think about these students as this strike continues.?
Majury urges students and parents to visit www.collegestrike.com to demand a resolution as quickly as possible.
When the strike is resolved, Majury also urges a contract be signed that doesn?t expire one month before the end of the school year.
If the two sides want to fight, let them do it preferably in the middle of summer when students would not be affected, he said.
?There needs to be more open communication between both sides on a regular basis and not just at contract time so they can trouble-shoot to
ensure this doesn?t happen again,? he said.
