So here we are on a fine Saturday morning, looking back on the first week (well, 4 days) of the college strike. OPSEU says it is going to bring a case of bargaining in bad faith to the Ontario Labour Relations Board -- the government has said that it was "surprised" at OPSEU's workload demands, and altogther it's looking a lot like the last two strikes. Why does it take a strike in this system to get people to talk when they've had, what is it, about 16 months to talk so far and have resolved virtually nothing in that period. If you doubt the lack of progress, have a look at the factfinders report dated last July, and then have a look at the positions of both parties (union and management) and figure out for yourself how much progress has been made since July.

We didn't have our Hotdog Day yesterday because it was just too wet and windy to get the BBQ's fired up. So maybe Monday wil bring better hot dog weather. It was neither as wet nor as cold yesterday, but weather like today's would have been a lot nicer! (Note to self -- remember to bring my sunscreen on Monday). This looks like a great weekend to get started cleaning up the detritus left over from the winter and perhaps to get an early start on gardening for the spring! And it's really nice not to be faced with a pile of marking.

It's a shame that the presidents of the colleges have taken such a negative view of what should be considered a standard (although unwelcome) part of the labour relations process. They appear to be spouting the standard Council line to the students (or in some cases, even worse than standard) on their college websites. Don't they realise that when this is over, they will have to work with us again? Why do they want to antagonise their faculty? Why not just leave this to the negotiators? What really amazes me is that our own higher-up administrators have stated that they were surprised that we supported a strike mandate to such a great extent. Hmmm ... I wonder who they've been talking to. Surely not our faculty, who have been getting more and more upset about workload for the last two or three years. Nor to the Deans, as I know several of them were not surprised. But they say they've been talking to faculty "a lot". They may have been talking, but it seems clear to me that they didn't hear the message when it came to working conditions and workload. I just love the argument that we only teach 14 hours per week on average. I would not be surprised that this could be the average figure, but if it is it is because class sizes are too big for 18 teaching hours to fit into the current the workload provisions.

I was in a meeting the week before the strike, where it was suggested to one of our senior management that all adademic administrators should teach just one class section a year, and I would heartily support that: they need some hands-on experience with what it's like to prepare, teach and evaluate in the system as it stands. (Of course there was no response to that.) Our Deans and VPs used to do that -- it really gave them a sense of reality in the classroom.

It also used to be that college faculty needed to do two jobs -- be experts in their subject area and teach it effectively. However in the last 5 years or so around our workplace we have added a third and fourth major task to the job -- mastering the technology and creating learning materials that incorporate technology in the classroom. Ask me how much time has been allocated to do that, other than in the first year of the inception? (You guessed it -- big goose-egg!)

Which brings me to a topic that the morning line were discussing after picketing duty yesterday. Around our college a lot of the faculty do a great deal of "volunteering". We volunteer to staff "welcome to the college" events which are usually held on the weekends or evenings. We work with students to prepare them for such things as the Ontario colleges marketing competition. We volunteer for the endless numbers of committtees around the college. We volunteer to attend student presentations to provide out-of-class mentoring on presentation skills for students. Many of us voluntarily coach and mentor new and part-time and sessional faculty. We volunteer to run sessions for PD days that the administration organises. And so on, and so on. None of this has ever been "recorded" as part of our workload. And in the past most of us have been ok with that, as we see these activities as making a valuable contribution to the overall educational experience for students in the college. But no more. The one thing that we all agreed on was that we would no longer be "volunteering". If it's worth doing, it's going to have to be recorded in the future. This is a definite reaction to the statements that have been made about "lazy" faculty.I'm certainly not suggesting a work-to-rule scenario at all or anything like that, but just that all those voluntary things that have been a regular part of our willing cooperation with college administrators will now have to be recorded or they won't get done. Maybe this is the only way to help administration recognise what we have all been doing. And if they don't want it done, then that's fine, I won't have to waste my time on these unimportant things.

Our college has also had a local agreement for a long time that full-time instructors can simply be paid if they wish to teach in continuing education. We know that some other colleges insist that any such assignments appear on the workload agreement, but our Local has chosen not to implement that, since up until now most of our faculty has felt that it was good to allow full-time faculty if they wished to teach in continuing education as well as teach full-time in their regular programs, as their knowledge and experience would improve the continuing education offerings. However we all agreed yesterday that we should no longer allow this practise to continue. I am sure that a number of us will be speaking to our LEC about cancelling this local agreement.

I have received some materials from other people on "the line", so my next couple of posts will be from other peoples' perspectives, 'cause I'm getting cranky again! And I've got more pictures to post. Am thinking I may put them up on Yahoo or something like that so that those will dial-up will be able to see them without waiting forever for them to load.