Why Are We Called Flying Pickets When I Spent Six Hours Walking?

By Mark Golden, UWFA External Relations OfficerMark Golden at the Flying Picket

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The morning of Friday, October 29 found me walking outside the entrance to Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, wishing I’d brought my winter boots and envying the Sleeping Giant in his comfortable limestone bed. I was one of eight flying pickets, members of university unions from as far away as Fredericton, Halifax and St John’s, who’d come in support of a strike at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM). The strikers, some 150 mostly female technical and support workers at the medical school’s campuses in Thunder Bay and Sudbury (and a few in Timmins), had been out in search of a first contract since mid-August. By the time of my visit, they had already rejected one proposed settlement and were about to enter their twelfth week on the picket line. It’s the longest strike ever for a Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) affiliate.

As is often the case in strikes over a first contract, the main issues involved contract language whichOn the Picket Line reflected the employer’s reluctance — or refusal — to accept workers’ choice to union representation at all. In this case, the workers’ faced more specific and equally serious challenges. Their union, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), also bargains for tens of thousands of Ontario civil servants who face a wage freeze mandated by the government; universities and other public sector employers are urged to go along with it too.  The NOSM administration was therefore under serious pressure to refuse raises. In addition, the splitting of the workforce into two groups many hundreds of miles apart and NOSM’s unusual corporate structure — it is a run by a board chaired by the presidents of Lakehead and Laurentian — means that it is even more difficult than usual to put heat on its administration. (Our own gift to Northern Ontario and Lakehead, the metaphorically and literally unbearable Brian ‘Fat Bastard’ Stevenson, had been conspicuously uninvolved.) Finally, though the executive was supportive and the president took his share of bumps from cars,  the strikers had relatively little help from other members of their own union, the teaching faculty who make up a separate unit and successfully negotiated a second contract some time ago. Professors at Lakehead and Laurentian, who share their campuses, also crossed the picket line every day. No wonder the strikers were so happy to see us — as well as the cheques from the CAUT Defence Fund and local unions which we brought.

What are the lessons from my trip to Thunder Bay? First: always take your winter boots. The importance of solidarity, trite as it is, ranks a close second.  Of course, job action runs risks, both for individuals and for the union, and people of good will may disagree when they weigh principals against possible penalties. (For example, I took the most convenient flight home, on WestJet, but Tom Booth from U of M refuses to fly on a non-union carrier and so took a longer route on Air Canada through Toronto.) But I can’t help thinking that a one-day absence on account of illness, or even the threat of similar action by teaching faculty, would have encouraged the employer to negotiate more productively earlier on. As it turned out, the strike was settled only after the intervention of a senior Ontario mediator and a twenty-two hour bargaining session.