“College Part-Timers Closer to Union Rights”

This Ottawa Citizen article on the appointment of Kevin Whitaker to review the Ontario ban on unionization of part-time College workers went out on the CAUT Contract Academic Staff wire today.

The past decade has seen great strides in unionization of part-time (aka Sessional or Contract Academic Staff) university teachers. While some full-time faculty associations have acquired rights for these additional units, many are organized by national unions such as CUPE (which tend to hold rights for Teaching Assistant units as well). The article indicates that the “newly formed Organization of Part-time and Sessional Employees of the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology” is in a drive to pick up workers across the 24 colleges.

A point of interest on this:
Once p-t college workers are under a collective agreement, the laboratory conditions will be complete to compare the trends and settlements of post-secondary sector-wide bargaining (college workers) with those from the university sector where local units negotiate independent of one another. This gets at the tension between general (province-wide) and focused (workplace specific) bargaining.