Instead of responding to the imminent possibility of a TA strike by getting serious about sitting down to negotiate an agreement, the McGill administration has pursued an aggressive strategy to undermine the TAs’ bargaining position by threatening to enlist professors to do TAs’ work in the event of a strike. They laid out their position in an “FAQ” type document posted to the McGill Human Resources website on Thursday, March 21.

Most notably, they relied on an arcane Academic Senate resolution passed in 1981 to warn professors that we had the choice of either doing our TAs’ work or losing our entire salary until we agree to resume all our work (which according to McGill administration includes that of our TAs).

Given that Quebec has strong anti-scab legislation in place, the administration has to justify its position by relying on two legally dubious claims. First, that the grading and teaching that TAs do is part of our “normal faculty responsibilities,” which we just happen to delegate to our helpful graduate students on occasion. And second, that professors are in fact managers, and as such can be ordered to do work normally done by the striking workers. AGSEM disputes these claims, and sent the McGill administration a cease and desist letter on Friday, March 22 demanding that the administration retract the claims made in the FAQ document.

Legal technicalities aside, the fact is that the McGill administration is trying to enlist professors on the side of management against our own graduate students. The Quebec Labour Tribunal will have to clarify whether or not this violates Quebec’s anti-scab law. But beyond the law, McGill’s efforts to undermine our TAs also raises important questions about the erosion of undergraduate and graduate education and training at McGill, not to mention concerns about the professional autonomy of professors and academic freedom.

After the McGill administration circulated an initial version of the FAQ document via e-mail, I wrote an e-mail to my colleagues in the sociology department laying out my concerns about the administration’s proposed course of action. Since the concerns I raised in the e-mail are relevant to faculty members far beyond the department of sociology, I am posting my e-mail below to share with others.

If you are a McGill faculty member with questions about the strike, please don’t hesitate to reach out. One of the key goals of the administration’s FAQ document is to sow fear and uncertainty among different groups of campus, and to pit us against each other. By talking and sharing information, we can better respond to the administration’s threats and support our students, graduate and undergraduate alike.

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March 13, 2024

Dear Colleagues,

As someone in our department whose research expertise is in labour relations, I thought it was important for me to provide some context surrounding the possible strike by our TAs, and some comments about possible ramifications of complying with the course of action that the administration is trying to pursue.

I apologize in advance for the length of this response, but hope that it can contribute to a fruitful discussion of how best we as a department can respond to the current situation with our TAs.

We are all concerned about our undergraduate students, and of course we want them to succeed and get the education they deserve. But by implementing the administration’s plans, which are a clear attempt to undermine the bargaining power of our TAs in their negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement, we risk:

• Undermining the quality of our undergraduate students’ education, 
• Impeding our graduate students’ ability to thrive in the program and complete their studies, 
• Creating unnecessary and lasting divisions between faculty and graduate students, and 
• Undermining our own faculty autonomy. 

Additionally, regardless of what McGill’s legal team may be advising, it is quite likely that we would be violating Quebec labour law.

Undergraduate education: Our TAs perform essential work that is a vital part of our undergraduates’ learning experience. They are not a supplementary “add-on.” On top of the grading they do, they are a first line of contact for students, by e-mail and office hours. They prepare and teach conferences. Our undergraduate students often get to know their TAs better than their professors. But our TAs’ ability to provide a quality educational experience for our undergraduates is impeded when they have to struggle to make ends meet, or deal with workload imbalances, or any number of other matters. As the saying goes, teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

These issues related to wages and working conditions are at the heart of what is at issue in the current negotiations. We are well aware that our TAs are not living in luxury, and have to juggle many competing responsibilities. These negotiations are an effort to address some of the challenges that our TAs face. After months of negotiations, supplemented by a government-supervised conciliation process, the administration has largely not responded to our TAs’ bargaining proposals. As one example, current McGill wage proposals would amount to an effective pay cut for TAs. This is what has led to the current strike authorization vote, and the possibility of a TA strike. 

In the event of a strike, doing the work of our TAs would directly undermine their bargaining power. This might “solve” the short-term problem of getting grades handed in on time, but at the short-term and long-term expense of our undergraduates’ learning experience. Short-term, many of the possible means the administration seems to be thinking of getting grades submitted would undermine the integrity of the grades submitted, and/or might involve retroactively changing the grading schemes we have laid out in our course syllabi, something not to be undertaken lightly. Long-term, failing to address issues regarding TA working conditions will diminish the quality of the education we provide our undergraduate students. Perhaps the administration is not concerned about this, but we as faculty should be.

Graduate training: While we are concerned about our undergraduate students, we should also be concerned about our graduate students. As we all know, most of our graduate students support their education by working as TAs. Their ability to succeed in the graduate program depends on their being able to make ends meet, to have adequate time to focus on their own studies and research, to have access to the healthcare they need, to have recourse when faced with harassment, and other basic protections. 

Again, this is what is at issue at the bargaining table. We know from talking with our graduate students that they are struggling. By undermining our graduate students’ bargaining position, we would also be undermining their ability to succeed in their graduate studies. This wouldn’t be good for our graduate students, our department, our university, or us as faculty advisors for that matter.

Graduate student/faculty divisions: While it may seem like doing the grading done by TAs is a means of “muddling our way through” the end of the semester as best we can, the act of doing our TAs’ work would amount to siding with the McGill administration against our own graduate students. That is certainly how our graduate students will perceive it. Again, this might solve the short-term problem of getting final grades submitted for this semester, but creates a variety of longer-term consequences. Most importantly, it will strain the bonds of trust that are the foundation of the advisor-advisee relationship. Many of us have put considerable work in recent years into building up a more welcoming, vibrant intellectual culture in the department. It will be difficult to continue to cultivate such a culture in an environment where our graduate students feel unsupported and betrayed. Longer-term, it may also affect our ability to attract and retain graduate students, as we can assume that news of what happens at McGill will spread to other universities and among current and prospective graduate students.

Faculty autonomy: [Our department chair] very rightly expressed concern that having chairs request access to their colleagues’ myCourses pages is an unnecessary infringement on instructors’ autonomy within the classroom. But more broadly, ordering faculty to do work normally done by our TAs amounts to a much greater infringement on our autonomy.

First, it amounts to a unilateral change in our own working conditions. We are not being consulted about how we think we as faculty should address this situation. Rather, we are simply being ordered to take on significant additional work. The university administration may claim that this is all work for which we are ultimately responsible, part of our “normal faculty duties,” and that we just happen to enlist the help of graduate students to fill in the gaps. But we know very well that this is a fiction. We agree with our TAs at the beginning of every semester on a certain workload, as laid out in the TA workload forms we fill out and sign. The work laid out in those agreements is far beyond anything we as faculty could handle ourselves. We hire TAs to do it because we couldn’t do it otherwise. The only reason to maintain the fiction that the teaching, grading, and advising that our TAs do is part of our normal faculty duties is in order to try and circumvent Quebec labour law (more on that below).

Second, at a practical level, the university administration has not provided any guidance as to how we as faculty are expected to handle this sudden and dramatic workload increase. When exactly in our days are we expected to find the time to do this additional work? What is supposed to happen with our existing teaching, service, and research commitments? Is the university proposing any measures to compensate or mitigate the additional workload?

Third, what kind of precedent does this set for what the university administration can unilaterally order faculty to do? In the event that a strike does happen, that they do order us to do the extra work, and many of us end up doing it, we will essentially have demonstrated to the administration that we can do more work for the university at no additional cost. What other kinds of work might we expect the administration to order us to do in the future, once we have demonstrated the capacity to find time for extra work? What recourse will we have at that time?

Quebec labour law: While McGill’s legal team has crafted an argument based on the fiction described above that TAs’ work is actually just part of our normal faculty duties, we as faculty know better. TAs do work that is separate from and in addition to the considerable work we as faculty put into instruction. While from a legal perspective this is ultimately a matter for the Quebec Labour Tribunal to decide, there is a strong risk that, in ordering faculty to do work normally performed by TAs, they are ordering us to violate Quebec labour law.

Since the passage in 1978 of Bill 45, Quebec has had so-called “anti-scab” legislation incorporated into the Quebec Labour Code. It is one of two provinces with such legislation, the other being British Columbia.

Section 109.1 of the Quebec Labour Code states the following (excerpt, with apologies for the gendered language in the law): 

109.1. For the duration of a strike declared in accordance with this Code or a lock-out, every employer is prohibited from 

(a) utilizing the services of a person to discharge the duties of an employee who is a member of the bargaining unit then on strike or locked out when such person was hired between the day the negotiation stage begins and the end of the strike or lock-out; 

(b) utilizing, in the establishment where the strike or lock-out has been declared, the services of a person employed by another employer or the services of another contractor to discharge the duties of an employee who is a member of the bargaining unit on strike or locked out; 

[…] 

(g) utilizing, in an establishment where a strike or lock-out has been declared, the services of an employee he employs in the establishment to discharge the duties of an employee who is a member of the bargaining unit on strike or locked out.” [emphasis added] 

Again, I’m sure that the McGill administration’s legal team will contest this, but it is quite possible that we as professors fall under Paragraph (g). That means that there is a risk that we as professors could be found to be complicit in helping McGill to violate the Quebec Labour Code if we do work normally done by our TAs. The last time that TAs represented by AGSEM went on strike, in 2008, the union did not press this issue before the labour tribunal. While I have no specific information about this, I suspect that AGSEM will be far more likely to seek remedies from the Tribunal under Section 109.1 in the event that professors do work normally done by TAs.

But beyond parsing the letter of the law, we must consider the spirit of the law as well. Quebec enacted anti-scab legislation not as a special favour to labour unions, but rather out of a recognition that employers’ use of scab labour during strikes was detrimental to the functioning of a healthy system of collective bargaining. 

Here it’s important to step back and recall the broader purpose of a collective bargaining system. It is a means of regulating workplace conflict. After decades of trying to regulate workplace conflicts by imposing restrictions on workers’ ability to strike and constraining workers’ ability to form and join labour unions, Canadian federal and provincial governments came to realize that these more coercive approaches usually backfired, exacerbating workplace conflict.

In designing the basic template for what has become our current labour relations regime across Canada, policymakers recognized that, in order to manage workplace conflict effectively, they had to design a system that addressed the structural power imbalance that exists between employers and employees, and placed certain constraints on both parties. A key part of this involved both enshrining and regulating workers’ right to withdraw their labour, i.e. the right to strike. They recognized that, absent a meaningful right to strike, employers simply would not have an incentive to come to the bargaining table and reach an agreement. 

At first, the focus was on regulating strikes by establishing procedures for workers to go on strike, like the conciliation process and strike authorization vote that we are seeing with AGSEM. But over time, certain jurisdictions, including Quebec, recognized that there needed to be certain restrictions on employer action during strikes as well. Employers’ use of scab labour often exacerbated workplace conflict, prolonged strikes, and undermined the ability of both parties to address vital workplace issues. That was what prompted the Quebec government to enact Bill 45 in 1978. British Columbia followed in 1993.

More recently, more Canadian jurisdictions have sought to create a more meaningful right to strike through anti-scab legislation. This is especially the case following the Canadian Supreme Court’s ruling in 2015 in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, which held that workers’ right to strike was an integral part of their Charter (Of Rights and Freedoms)-protected freedom of assembly. The recently-elected government in Manitoba is currently preparing anti-scab legislation, and on February 27 of this year, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously voted in support of Bill C-58 (yes, even Pierre Poilièvre), which would ban use of scab labour in the federal jurisdiction (this was the second reading, the bill is now in committee). So the general move across Canada is towards strengthening workers’ right to strike as a means of creating meaningful incentives for employers to reach agreement.

My concern is that the McGill administration’s current move to order us to do work normally done by our TAs, even if it ultimately passes legal muster, represents a step away from the growing consensus in Canada that scab labour is detrimental to a well-functioning collective bargaining system, and has no place in a modern workplace.

My hope, along with many of you I imagine, is that a credible strike threat coming out of this week’s AGSEM strike authorization vote can create the incentives needed for the McGill administration to come to a negotiated agreement. But in the event that negotiations continue to stall, and there ultimately is a strike, I would have grave reservations about taking part in implementing the administration’s proposed course of action, for the reasons detailed above.

I am of course happy to discuss this matter further with any of you if you would like.

Sincerely,

Barry