Tag Archives: Jeff McCann

Activism, British Columbia, Conservatism, Education, Unions

SFPIRG: We stand in solidarity with CUPE 3338 and oppose the “reprehensible” recommendation to evict SFPIRG

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The following is a quote from SFPIRG’s announcement to students, members, and supporters, posted on its website at www.sfpirg.ca.  It is republished on PoliticsRespun.org in solidarity and to spread the word.

SFPIRG stands in solidarity with and extends our full support to SFSS staff, members of CUPE 3338, who have been locked out of their workplaces by the SFSS Board of Directors. These staff keep vital services (e.g. the Women’s Centre, Out on Campus, clubs’ events, etc.) running for 20,000+ SFU students, including members of the SFSS board themselves. Follow the latest updates on http://twitter.com/#!/cupesfu.

SFPIRG also finds reprehensible the SFSS Student Space Oversight Committee’s recommendation to the SFSS Board of Directors that we be served 3 months’ notice to vacate offices we have occupied for approximately two decades. This was done without consulting us in good faith or considering the needs of students accessing our space and services every day. The Committee also failed to adequately publicize the meeting where this recommendation was deliberated and passed.

SFPIRG is a student-based and student-directed non-profit organization that offers not only community-based research opportunities for students, but also student communal spaces (e.g. lounge, meeting room), a bike tool co-op, training and materials for student organizing, printing/photocopying, outreach/postering support, a wide range of critical academic and grassroots resources, infrastructural support (funding, training, storage) for student groups, and most importantly, a diverse and vibrant student community passionate about social and environmental justice.

Follow our latest updates here: http://twitter.com/#!/SFPIRG, and check out our Programming and Education Coordinator, Setareh Mohammadi, and SFPIRG Board Member Isaac Louie, giving the low-down via CJSF today:

http://www.cjsf.ca/vanilla_archives/2011_July_13_13_00.mp3

 On their website, SFPIRG describe themselves as: “The Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) is a student funded and directed resource centre at SFU. We support environmental and social change through research, education and action.”

Activism, British Columbia, Conservatism, Democracy, Education, Unions, Work

We are “refusing to cross picket lines”: Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Student Union and the SFSS CUPE Lockout

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This open letter was originally written by Chelsea Mackay and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Student Student, published originally here and republished on PoliticsRespun.org with permission.

Dear SFSS Board Members and President Jeff McCann,

The Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Student Union (GSWSSU) has been blindsided by the recent lockout of CUPE 3338 workers at the SFSS General Office, Out On Campus, and the SFU Women’s Centre.

Firstly, we are shocked that you have justified this lockout on our behalf. We were not consulted on this issue, and we absolutely do not find a lockout to be an appropriate solution to the financial issues of the SFSS.

The GSWSSU received $100 in Core funding this semester, and have not requested any grant money so far. While we understand that other Student Unions and clubs use more money than we do, we still do not find the cuts you suggested for CUPE 3338 Unit 5 workers to be acceptable, nor justifiable. Full time staff, according to your website, get paid $30.48/hour, and you argue that they should take a decrease in pay to $26.66/hour. According to our calculations, if staff were to work 30 hours/week, and 48 weeks/year, they would be going from $43,891.20 per year before taxes to $38,390.40 per year before taxes. This is a pay decrease of over $5,500 per year. As a collective, the GSWSSU agreed that this is an unacceptable pay decrease, and that the refusal of this wage is absolutely justifiable. We are offended that the SFSS would suggest such a large wage cut for workers who we greatly respect, and we are especially offended that this has supposedly been done on our behalf.

Also, while we have heard from your office that the cuts were meant to be 12% across all workers from all areas, we have heard differently from CUPE workers. Specifically, we have heard that student part-time workers are facing cuts of 40%, and even 50% for recently hired employees. We have also heard that the staff of the Women’s Centre and Out on Campus on facing higher wage cuts than the staff from the General Office. Please correct us if we have heard wrong, but the GSWSSU does not support these unequal cuts.

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Activism, British Columbia, Christy Clark, Class War, Conservatism, Education, Unions, Work

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose”; or, how to ideologically re-structure your student society: a beginner’s guide: the SFSS CUPE Lockout

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By Joel Blok, originally published here. 

This summer five years ago, the Board of Directors of the SFSS suspended its office staff, barring them from entering their offices and sending them home.  This past Thursday, a different board issued a lockout notice to its office staff, preventing them from work.

In 2006, the rhetorical justification was fiduciary responsibility to the society.  This summer, it’s financial responsibility to the student members.

The arguments will be different, and the current board will undoubtedly do its utmost to disassociate itself from 2006.  The outcome has yet to be seen.  But the goal, invariably, is the same.  The board of directors of the SFSS have unilaterally decided to re-structure the student society, and will exhaustively work to rhetorically cloak their own ideological efforts as being in your best interests.

Here’s the structural reality: the SFSS cannot exist without its staff.  None of the many services it offers could be accomplished, none of the important campaigns it mounts could be undertaken, none of the advocacy that it does could occur without the honest and sincere labour of the staff of the student society.  So how do you radically alter the direction and orientation of your society, with no transparency, accountability or consultation?  You replace your staff.

The important lesson that this board apparently learned from 2006 is to undertake this project under a more “legitimate” (though no less antagonistic) means.  As there is no contract in force between the SFSS and its employees, the board can, legally under the labour code, lock its workers out.  The last time draconian staff re-structuring was afoot, the board was much less sophisticated, and much clumsier, in its approach.  This time, you will hear arguments about how student unions and clubs will not be funded, how the membership is being taken advantage of by the “shamefully” high cost of providing fair employment to SFSS staff.  You will of course be told of the “intransigence” and “unreasonableness” of the union, who, as of course you all know, are simply unrealistically greedy individuals exploiting the system, and through it, you.  You will be told that, in spite of the board’s best intentions, this is the only way the society can fulfill its “constitutional” duties to its membership, and that the “fiscal reality” of the situation is that either you will lose resources and service, or staff will have to be cut.

All of which carefully distracts from the real imperative of the board in a clever sleight of hand.  The question really has nothing to do with the fallacious and reductive “staff vs. students” antagonism that is being presented, but rather with the ability of the board to exercise unchecked executive power over the society. Again, there’s a clear manipulation of the market discourse. While employing the staff causes “financial problems”, the real “market value” of their labour is never honestly discussed or disclosed when the management goes after the union.

Anyone who has worked in, for, or with the student society knows categorically the importance of the staff to the organization.  Not only does their labour ensure its continued functions, but their expertise and experience, their institutional memory, guarantees that it continues to exist beyond the whims of a one-year-term board.  The staff at the SFSS not only actually provides the services that this board will argue they are threatening, but ensures that those services exist in a meaningful way, that students can depend upon them as they undertake their studies, from year to year.  Without the SFSS staff none of the services their continued employment is purportedly threatening would exist in the first place.  Without the serious responsibility and care they feel towards the students they work for, there’d be no student society to speak of.

The ultimate goal here is not to ensure the “financial viability” of the SFSS; there were plenty of options open to the board both on and off the table before they decided to lockout their employees.  The goal is to remove staff from the equation as much as possible so that decisions of the board are increasingly unchecked, to consolidate executive power, and to allow the unfettered re-construction, or more ominously de-construction, of the society as a whole.  Like those directors of 2006, this current board is undertaking a project of “staff-restructuring” to re-organize the society as they themselves see fit, without membership input.  But don’t worry, this is in your best interest, just trust us.

Joel Blok is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, the Chief Steward of the Teaching Support Staff Union, and was a graduate student representative on the Board of the Simon Fraser Student Society once upon a time.

Online activists can join a solidarity group on Facebook, supporting SFSS staff here, or can tweet using #SFUlockout as a hashtag.

Activism, British Columbia, Education, Unions, Vancouver

A no longer radical, now reactionary campus: The SFSS CUPE Lockout and SFPIRG eviction

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There’s an almost mythical status to the label that Simon Fraser University used to promote itself in 2005 during its 40th anniversary celebrations: the university was a “radical campus.”  The term comes from student activism that used to flood the campus, once called Berkeley North, student activism that established one of the first Womens’ Studies departments in Canada, student activism and sit ins that created a coop daycare, student activism that resulted in SFU being the first university in Canada to elect students to its senate.

Each of these now-mythical points that gave SFU the ‘radical campus’ label came from student activism: students petitioned and demonstrated to get the right to be on the senate of the university. Students staged a sit-in in the faculty lounge to start the daycare.  Students staged a strike to demand the right to have a say in how the president of the university was chosen.  Student activism was the basis of the label of the radical campus, and student activism was found in the campus student union, the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) and the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG).

Sadly, today the SFSS seems to have shoved off the more than 4o-year history it could have once proudly claimed as student activists: the Board of Directors of the SFSS, led in “what can only be interpreted as an ideological move” by president Jeff McCann, internal relations officer Jordan Kohn, treasurer Keenan Midgley, and others issued a lockout notice to its unionised staff members, with staff being locked out effective 2:13pm on Sunday.  Late today, a committee of the same board voted to begin the process of terminating the lease of the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG), a student-driven and student-funded group that conducts research and organizing on student selected issues.

These moves are purely ideological, and they’re incredibly disappointing.  They show a mindset that opposes unions simply because they exist, and a right-wing reactionary current that seeks to kill off ‘progressive’ organizing no matter how they have to do it. The lockout of the union and the beginnings of the SFPIRG eviction show that the issues at play aren’t purely financial, as the SFSS does not pay outright for the space that SFPIRG occupies, and many of the key players in attacking the workers of the SFSS have been central in attacking SFPIRG in the past.

The lockout of the staff union comes after two years of negotiations on a collective agreement and after the SFSS board broke off mediation with the Labour Relations Board.  Right-wing reactionaries claim that the workers of the SFSS are paid too much, or have ridiculous benefits.  Neither of which is overly true – staff are paid fairly for the work that they do, and their benefits are below average.

But the argument that comes from many of the right-wing reactionaries is absurd in its hysterics.  Staff are paid well! They shouldn’t be paid this much!  I used to work for the Simon Fraser Student Society, and while I no longer work there and do not speak for the union or its members, I can tell you it wasn’t a walk in the park.  The last project I worked on was the ill-fated K’Naan concert at SFU, where arts director Kyle Acierno was actively involved in bringing K’Naan to perform at SFU, despite not knowing the costs or infrastructure requirements that would go into such an endeavour, resulting in the eventual collapse of the concert, an embarrassing no-show by the star, and an international media story that saw blame bounced around from the star to the students involved.  My role, while I took up graduate studies mid-way through the planning process and had no direct input into the processes, was to try and limit the exposure of the student society as much as possible, and prevent as much of a disaster as possible.  I was involved in legal discussions, insurance discussions, liaisons with university administrators and RCMP, and on and on and on.  When staff have this kind of responsibility in their job requirements, they should be paid well. I, as a staff person, did my best to keep the organisation running smoothly, and I gave a lot of my time and energy to its projects.

But according to the right-wing reactionaries, this is too much.  Always paid too much.

It’s a strange argument that surfaces here.  Jobs that students apply for and want are too much? How is that possible?  I participated in the hiring of three staff over my time at the SFSS, and we had hundreds of applicants for each position.  Students want jobs like what the SFSS offers when they graduate.  Why are the reactionaries not calling for CEO salaries to be lower? Management salaries to be lower? Politician’s salaries to be lower?

It’s a strange and perverted argument that sees right-wing reactionaries spewing hate against people who work daily to see student events work.  A perverted mindset that hates unions because they get better working conditions for their members.  A strange view that wants to destroy unions because they help people get paid fairly.  A vindictive mindset that wants the SFPIRG shut down because they enable students to work on projects that don’t agree with Stephen Harper’s Conservative mindset.

And it’s infected the radical campus.

It’s time to show solidarity with CUPE 3338, and demand that the SFSS lift its lockout and negotiate fairly with its union, and cease the eviction of SFPIRG.