A fellow faculty member has been looking back at some of the issues specific to our situation at our college, and has the following comments. It should be noted in our context that our Local asked on several occasions to have our picket lines moved back from the intersections where it was perceived that there was significant danger to picketers, and, according to them, these requests on all occasions were refused by management. This naturally made management claims that our safety was of utmost importance something of a sick joke in our eyes. In addition, our VPA (based on quotes in a recent edition of the college newspaper) suggests the strike was a situation where faculty was unreasonable. "My personal opinion is that the strike was not justified," she says. "I think that the management proposal was a reasonable response to the issues given the financial circumstances." In addition, a morale survey done many years ago was basically supressed at that time by the then-management, and in the intervening years no further surveys have been taken (nor, from our perspective, have any actions been taken to address the issues that were identified by that survey).

Here is the comment from my fellow faculty member:

The strike was merely the most recent symptom of an "US (faculty) and THEM (management)" situation that has been building for more than ten years. Several years ago, the infamous “morale survey” revealed similar problems and pressures to those of today. Since then, there has been no real opportunity for faculty to express their views collectively.

In this context, the strike provided an unusual opportunity for faculty to get together and discuss their perspectives and concerns. The following is a synthesis of a great number of points that arose during these picket-line discussions, in which “WE” are the faculty and “THEY” are the senior administration and Board of Governors.

WE feel that diminishing resources have forced US into an increasingly frustrating struggle to maintain the integrity of OUR excellent "tried and true" college programs that it took US years to build and which benefit large numbers of students, while

THEY make our job more difficult by under-budgeting OUR college programs in order to provide funds for THEIR priorities such as applied degrees and research, which generate neither net revenues for the college nor benefits for the vast majority of OUR students.

When WE went on strike over Ontario’s under-resourcing of the colleges, the colleges could have said that THEY sympathized with OUR concerns, and regretted that given their inadequate level of funding, they were unable to address those concerns.

Instead, THEY spent large amounts of money to publicly accuse US of being lazy and greedy, whereas:

THEIR salaries had increased more than three times as fast as OURS over the past 4 years.

In this context, the squabbling over specific tactics involving picket lines can be seen as a relatively inconsequential symptom of much larger issues.

The comment from the VPA is, in my view, a telling one. The issue may or may not be "the financial circumstances" in toto, but certainly at the faculty level it has everything to do with spending priorities, which we can all observe.