How The University Works

McGill grad employees have been picketing since April 8

This is an era of executive license, exemplified by the Bush mob’s trampling on labor rights, habeas corpus, international law and even the remnant trappings of democracy in the U.S. and in its various client outposts across the globe.

Now the McGill administration seems determined to show its continuing alienation from the Quebec mainstream by hitching up its jeans and defying provincial labor law in a great imitation of George W. Bush’s style of executive bullying.

According to multiple sources, including an official Quebec Labor Department report, and the independent reporting of the Montreal Gazette, McGill administrators have illegally pressured faculty, including vulnerable untenured juniors, to do the work of striking grad employees as scabs.

Additionally, they have fired striking unionized grad employees from various additional-income positions that are not covered by the union contract–including positions as exam graders and summer session instructors. A second story on McGill’s emulation of the Bush mob in the Montreal Gazette quotes a grad employee calling these moves “retaliation,” and then rips into the faculty association, which has bleated about the plight of junior faculty forced into scabbing–asking for them to be taken off the tenure clock until they’re done helping the administration to break the spirit of the grad employees:

The McGill Association of University Teachers says it has been “very insistent that everything possible be done to help faculty members who are seriously overburdened by the consequences of the strike.” It has proposed “stopping the tenure clock” for junior faculty unable to complete projects, cancelling committee work and postponing deadlines for annual reports.

But why hasn’t MAUT risen up with a banshee’s wail, if not to decry what smacks of vindictive treatment of striking TAs who wear multiple hats, then at least to complain bitterly about the extra work that has been dumped on them?

Keep up with the story on AGSEM’s shame campaign on Facebook. And I’ll have updates and individual stories in the coming weeks.

Good show, McGill. It’s nice to know that my fellow Americans residing in gated communities have a place to call home when visiting Canada. Maybe you can give Dick Cheney a visiting professorship in labor relations as well.

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