This story of striking coincides with so many other stories — stories with themes of dedication, frustration, confusion, hope, joy, fear, and countless other emotions in no particular order.  At this time in my life I am a student (confusion/frustration/joy!), teaching assistant (dedication/confusion/frustration!), educator (hope/confusion/fear!), and barista (none of the above!), writer (joy/fear/dedication/confusion/etc etc etc etc!) — all in a country I was not born in (hope/frustration!) and…  not that you would notice or that you need to know or even that you could possibly care…  but amidst the first long-term relationship of my life (fear/hope/joy/love/bliss/confusion/frustration/mostly joy and love/sorry/no, its my fault/no, I’m sorry/no, you are…  no, YOU are!).

To say there is a lot going on inside of my head is an understatement.

For the past 3 weeks I have been “picketeering”.  I smell of smoke from huddling up next to the oil barrel that contains a rather slap-dash fire pit.  I have a sore back and sore shoulders, from what I do not know — perhaps from carrying the weight of all my growing stories (see above) in my body rather than putting them on paper or unloading them with my voice.  At one point I thought that I would fall into the middle of our counter-clockwise walking circle because the treads on my shoes are becoming too uneven.  Books are sitting on my desk at home unread, and words are not quite being written, because every time I sit down in silence I think and worry about money.  I hope I can pay rent next month.

And yet, I have some fun.  I meet people I otherwise would not have met — including people in my own department!  I watch countless cars pull up to the gate that I lift every 2 minutes, displaying a wide range of human emotions from unflinching support to eye-popping rage (not to mention stone-cold apathy).  I also notice a large variety of rear-view-mirror decorations; the Hawaiian lei, the soccer ball-in-net, rosaries, chains, dice, dice with poppies, tassels, flags…  and there are custom license plates!  Plus, we make up songs — and in the making lies humility, for some people simply are not amused by my lyrics or wooed by my vocalizing.

And yet, when I stop enough to remember why we are on those lines, I return to my confused and often overwhelmed state of mind.

I ask my students every class to find their voice — to represent their unique place in the world, and to sing their lungs out into the machinery of our consumer-based world with the hopes of shattering a few glasses like an opera singer would (okay, I don’t say all that, but I mean it).  I do encourage them to challenge what they already know or expect out of themselves.  Now that I do not have the opportunity to continue our dialogues and share that time that I value so much, I have only been able to reflect upon the meaning of all of my work — specifically my work as a TA, student, writer, and thinker in an under-appreciative, lonely, and challenging environment.

Overly dramatic?  Not at all.

My experience as an undergraduate in the U.S. was unsatisfying; I never had a TA — professors were overworked, lecturers not paid enough and busy with other jobs…  there was no personal connection to help me understand the course material or even help guide the questions that arose in my studies and work.  When I arrived in Canada to start my PhD, I was amazed that so many people were even further into the front-lines of education than I had experienced in my past — there are hundreds of TA’s helping the faceless masses of paying students find a sense of belonging and community despite the isolation that university experience can provide. That work is vital to the name and reputation of York University as well as to the success and growth of both the undergraduate students and the TA’s themselves — the future lecturers and professors, academics and consultants, and policy-makers and researchers who need to recognize and remember that there is a patchwork of human beings (and their stories) behind our paychecks.

And yet…

And yet, we TA’s/students work with limited help from that very same University that owes us so much.  Personally, I find it difficult to understand how my limited access to University resources requires me to pay $12000 a year in tuition. International students like myself greatly increase the diversity in thinking and in style within our teaching and learning communities (or so I imagine); Canada itself is a nation of immigrants!  And YET, what is more unwelcoming than a funding package that is only a few thousand dollars more than the tuition that you must pay?  A stagnant benefits package and ways and means funds that you compete for with an ever-increasing number of students with their own needs and hopes and dreams?  increasing pressure to finish your program without similarly increasing assistance?  a vitally important teaching position that gives you no security or ability to plan for your future?  and… a likely future as a contract faculty that will not be secure even THEN…  a future without retirement benefits or job security or fair wages?

York University has at times shown no interest in bargaining with our union, and our union has reacted at times with patience and at times without the diligence or unity necessary to get the ball rolling…  and yet, I support our rights as workers to withdraw our labor until a fair settlement is achieved.  I do not and cannot support an employer that uses psychological tactics and lockouts to force an upper hand.  The bargaining team and the university must come to a settlement.  I already need financial help.  I already am off-track in my studies.  I already miss spending time with my students.  I already feel an increasing physical and emotional stress as I spend even more time working on the picket lines as well as part-time off campus — all of it talking about or thinking about the mess into which my peers and I continually fall.

And yet… I am willing to do what it takes to make sure that we will all sing to our classrooms with booming voices that stand on a fair and equitable foundation — rooted in respect, care, and dedication to our greater causes in teaching and learning.  Until then…  I march in solidarity.

Now, before I called, I knew that it is the business of ‘talk radio’ to  insult the audience to get a reaction out of them to make the show more ‘interesting’. But even with that understanding, I was shocked to hear such a blunt racist statement. I am more used to polite types of racism…

(editor’s note: the following is a transcript of the conversation provided by the radio station)

Caller: I’m a TA at York and I just want to say I’m happy with whatever I’m getting paid right now. So lets just get that out of the table. But what bothers me is the people that are calling and make comments and make judgements and they don’t know what exactly is going on.

LeDrew: Correct us then.

Caller: Because the issue of increase of the pay of the TA is only a very small part of what is happening and is concern of a lot of students and contract faculty.

LeDrew: Daria [sic] .. quickly what are the issues then

Caller: So one of the issues on the table is classroom sizes, why don’t you talk about classroom sizes … and you can say we don’t talk about classroom sizes because of A & B & C

Coren: May I ask you a question? What do you teach?

Caller: Why is that relevant?

Coren: I’m asking you the question … it’s just courtesy … what do you teach?

Caller: I teach … um … health, science course

Coren: OK … I just got the impression … I’m not trying to be rude … but maybe English wasn’t your first language.

Caller: No … it’s not … but why is that relevant?

Coren: Because I think your English should be fluent if you’re teaching kids in the English language

Caller: Well I think you’re very ignorant because my English is perfect … so it is not a problem

Coren: No … it’s not … and you’re also rather rude D’aria [sic] … I was on your side … I was only a question … but if you’re the quality of TA’s and that’s how you speak to people who ask you a question then we have a problem …

LeDrew: So at the end of the day if she’s happy with the money but it haas to deal with classrom size … what baloney … are you now coming over to the right side of the argument … are you agreeing with me that the government should step in to get rid of the strike ….

The caller is no longer on the radio … the topic moves to John Moore who comes into the studio to promote his show coming up after the news …

Of course I was not going to let an idiot’s comments ruin my day. In fact, I burst into an ironic and bitter laughter after hanging up. But not saying anything about it was also not an option for me given we all claim we work for social justice and against racism and oppression. So I am sharing my story with you…if any of you would like to make a comment to the radio, these are the emails you need (editor’s note: I’ve provided a complete list of contacts at the bottom of this post, below the break), or feel free to post a comment on their website though I did not find a blog for that show. I understand people’s busy days and the tiredness after a long day of picketing ( which I haven’t been doing for a few days due to illness)! So no pressure

…and ESL TAs, GA s, faculty, and students, do not let such comments EVER influence your self confidence.

If you want to contact CFRB, here is some contact information:

CFRB 1010 Website

CFRB 1010 Operations Manager, Steve Kowch: opsmngr@cfrb.com, Direct line: 416-323-6847

Astral Media

CFRB 1010 is owned by Astral Media. Astral Media’s corporate values include “respect”:

Respect
Each individual deserves to be treated with dignity and consideration. Nothing justifies a lack of respect, not in the Astral Media culture. We accept individual differences and are open to other points of view. This ensures we work in a company where performance does not mean a cutthroat culture. We can indeed thrive and still be nice peaople.

It’s also interesting to note that Astral Media has a “Guide to Ethical Business Conduct” (section E, pdf link) that outlines that employees of the company “deserves to be treated with dignity and consideration” and “does not tolerate discrimination of any kind.” It would seem as though consumers of their services don’t get such consideration by employees of the company.

Astral Media Radio Contact information:

Mr. Ross Davies, Vice President Programming, rdavies@radio.astral.com

Astral Media Radio Phone number: 416-323-5200

CRTC

The CRTC is Canada’s government agency responsible for regulating Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications systems. Register a complaint about the conduct of this host. Its worth noting that the Canadian Broadcast Standards does not outline racism as an example of ethical misconduct.

Who asked you to pick this life?

I suppose I could have decided to delay having children, although this seems an unreasonable demand to make of all future academics.  In my case, my work would have been significantly different since, as a result of having children, I am working in the field of feminist mothering studies.  As a feminist, I have to ask what would happen if all the knowledge makers were denied the opportunity to produce both children and knowledge simultaneously.  I think this is a very problematic position politically, one that leads to the total devaluing of caring labour (which, frankly, is the argument that leads us to conclusions such as “who asked you to pick this life?”)

Why job security?

At York, my position is secure since, as part of my Ph.D. admission, I was guaranteed six years of funding as a TA.  As a course director elsewhere, however, I am keenly aware of the precariousness of my position as a contract faculty member.  In order to keep my family afloat, I need to make plans and assume I have a stable income, but this is impossible when I am hired on a contract by contract basis.  On a purely logistic level, I am hired in July to teach in September and am usually given two weeks (unpaid, since I am only paid when I teach) to produce a syllabus.  My daycare asks me to select my days and hours in April, at which point I have no information about when, and how much, I will be teaching.  I know there are many people in my department who have assumed they would get hired for the same two courses, only to abruptly be offered only one.  Finding out in July that your income in September will be half of what you expected is extremely difficult for anyone, but especially frightening for me given my family constraints.

But you only work ten hours a week?

Leaving aside the fact that I work many, many more than ten hours per week for wages, I think some history on the nature of graduate funding is in order.  Historically, graduate students were viewed as apprentice academics and as such were supplied with funding (which was not tied to labour) in order to ensure that they were able to devote time to their studies.  This is still the case in many places, including in most private U.S. universities.  At some point our funding became tied to our work.  Most graduate students I know are not unhappy that we work for our funding– we enjoy teaching and want to have teaching experience in order to become good profs.  Having said that, this move to tie our funding to our teaching made invisible the full time work we were doing as graduate students.  In point of fact, our funding should really be tied to our degrees, NOT to our teaching.  Where generous funding is offered, good work is done.  My colleagues in the U.S. who are able to only work ten hours a week and devote the remainder of their time to their Ph.D. research are producing better work.  This is totally depressing to me.  It is also the reason that Canadian universities are becoming uneasy about employing Canadian-trained academics.  If we are angry about nothing else, we deserve to be angry about the fact that York refuses to allow us circumstances that lead to a quality of education that they themselves consider acceptable.

But I’m a student and no one pays me!!

I know that a lot of undergraduate students probably read the paragraph above and got angry at the idea that any students should have guaranteed funding.  First and foremost, I think it is extremely important to note that CUPE has been very involved in the fight to waive tuition fees for everyone; most of us agree that ALL students should be amply funded.  Having said that, I think there are important differences between undergraduates and career academics who invest 12+ years as students.  If we consider this idea of apprenticeship, we can find parallels with other professions.  Medical residents, for example, are still considered students and are affiliated with universities.  They do not earn the full wage they will receive as full-fledged doctors, but they =do= earn a living wage (around 46K, going up to about 60K in year three, I believe).  Similarly, law clerks are affiliated with universities and, once again, get apprentice wages.  I reiterate:  medical residents and law clerks are considered students– advanced professional students, but students nonetheless, paying tuition and doing work toward their educations.  Their wages reflect the fact that they have invested a great deal of time and work into their professions.  Their incomes, however, also reflect the stage of life that people in time-demanding professions are at while still apprenticing– basically, that the average family physician is close to thirty before leaving residency, with specialists taking much longer.  This is sounding oddly reminiscent of something…

If we expect quality people to become academics, we need to acknowledge the financial (and emotional and physical) demands that long term education require, in exactly the same way as other professions.

Who asked you to be a grad student?

On the picket line, I hear a lot of “If you can’t afford it, then get a job.”  I really wish that students would think through this train of thought and realize that allowing wealth, rather than merit, to select their future professors is a grave error.  This whole strike is a quality of education issue above all else.  It diminishes the degree of every person who leaves York if those of us who are asking for a living wage give up, drop out and allow ourselves to be replaced by rich, dumb folks.

A final note:

A fellow Women’s Studies graduate student brought a sign to the line saying “I love my students”.  And we do– we love our students, we love our work and we want, very badly, to continue to do what we’re best at.  Right now, I, at least, can’t do anything remotely like my best work because I’m exhausted, deeply overworked, stressed and because, unless I work on my dissertation between 3-5 AM, I am actually out of hours of childcare that aren’t promised elsewhere.  This is a shame.  I am not greedy and I am not lazy.  I care deeply about my students and work my ass off to ensure that they get an exceptional academic experience.  But I can’t martyr myself to the university either; I can’t do good work without that work being valued, financially and sincerely, by the university that employs me.  Recently, my five year old son said “Why can’t you just ask your bosses at York University to be nice with you?”  I think this is an excellent question.  Despite the energy you may see on the picket line, none of us WANT to be there– we just want to be granted circumstances that let us do our work and live our lives.  Thus far, this is not what we have been offered.

I could write about this all day, but I’ll stop here.  If you have further questions, please comment and I’ll do my best to reply.

So what is life like after graduation? Did I walk into a cushy job with great pay and lavish benefits? Of course not – it’s a myth that a graduate education is an automatic ticket to the good life. Like in many professions, we put in hard time at the lower rungs of the professional ladder, building our CVs and our seniority. For me, this means that for the academic year of 2008-2009, my salary from teaching three courses at two universities will be about $20,000. I live in a basement apartment in the Junction with my partner (a PhD student at York), my 9 year-old daughter, and our cat. I don’t own a car, and although I don’t mind taking the TTC and Greyhound, life gets a little complicated commuting to two different places with two different schedules when you have a small child to pick up from school everyday.

We’ve been getting by working as many jobs as we can manage, groveling for an ever-shrinking pool of bursary money, borrowing ridiculous amounts of money from the government, winning scholarships when we were eligible, and accepting occasional gifts from family.

When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a graduate student, so here’s a few things that I learned:

After the first year or so of coursework, a graduate student is a full-time researcher as well as a teaching assistant and/or graduate assistant. This research is not solely for our own individual academic purposes; rather, the conference presentations, journal articles, reports and book chapters that we write are part of the whole university’s academic production. York gets credit every time one of us presents our research or gets published. We help build the university’s international reputation, secure grants and other funding, and attract students and faculty. So even though we pay full tuition fees long after we finish course work, we are effectively working for the university in our capacity as researchers. It’s a myth, then, that we “work” a mere 10 hours a week – this number only includes our officially paid teaching duties.

Being a teaching assistant at York is hard work. Undergraduates have a right to complain that some of us may not be great TAs, especially when we first start out – let’s face it, we were not trained as teachers before stepping into the classroom. But, the university clearly feels that we are good enough to teach you (the undergrads). (My implication here is that if undergraduates don’t want to be taught by graduate students, they should be asking why the university puts over 50% of teaching in the hands of grad students and contract faculty.) What’s it like to be a TA? I could go on for pages, but I just want to emphasize the importance of the out-of-classroom work that TAs do. TAs grade and comment on student work (the professor does not even see student work in many cases). TAs are the first point of contact if a student is ill, having trouble coping or keeping up, dealing with a learning disability, or in need of any other assistance. TAs help to ensure academic honesty by being vigilant about plagiarism and cheating. TAs seek out additional learning resources like films, pictures, maps, newspaper articles and so on to facilitate our students’ learning. TAs provide feedback to the professor about assignment topics, test questions, and lectures. TAs write reference letters when the professor doesn’t even know the students’ names. These are just some of the dozens of things that we do outside of the classroom, many of which are not officially counted as part of our hours of work and are largely unacknowledged. I loved being a TA, and I wouldn’t change anything about that experience. I just want the university, the students, and the community to value that work, and to understand that it’s just one small part of our “jobs” as graduate students.

Now that I’m fresh out of grad school and working as contract faculty, I’m seeing that the work of Unit 2 members is also devalued here. Once again, I will make the point that the university hires us and thinks we’re good enough to be professors, but not good enough to be paid even a third of a tenure-track professor’s salary, or to have any job security. This is not because I or other Unit 2 members are “second-rate academics.” Another myth! We research, publish, do activist work, serve on committees and so on. What is not really visible to undergrads is that the university is quite happy to provide them with underpaid and undervalued professors, because it is way cheaper for them. Let’s all ask why everybody’s university education is being cheapened in this way?

So how does the future look to me? If we as a union accept the so-called 9% pay rise, I would make a whopping $600 more per year. That is, IF I still have these contract jobs, because the university considers me temporary and will make me reapply for these jobs every single year. I’m applying for tenure-track jobs but these are pretty scarce and highly competitive. Despite a nice publication record and good teaching evaluations, there is no guarantee I’ll be hired. I’m hoping to put my kid in snowboarding lessons, but I’m not sure I can afford it this year. We’d really like a new bed (ours is 14 years old) but to get one we’ll have to ask our families to give us money towards it for Christmas and Hanukkah. Otherwise, it, and many other things, will have to wait until I am better paid. If this doesn’t happen within academia, I will take the amazing skills and knowledge I gained here and put them to use elsewhere, without any regrets. It’s just a bit of a shame that I might never get to use this incredible education in the service of, well, education.

I am the one responsible for starting the blog, in part because I’ve been disappointed in the way that our demands have been represented in the mainstream media and the paucity of individual voices from the union to explain why what we’re asking for is so important to us. So, rather than getting caught up rhetoric about 30% wage increases (which, just to clarify was a demand at one point in time, but has been off the table for weeks), I want to explain what it is like to be a graduate student who earned $16 353 in 2007 (I just looked that up on my pay stub).

My financial life

As far as day-to-day expenses are concerned, I have little to complain about. I live downtown and share an apartment with my partner who is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. Sharing my expenses with her is key to my ability to afford being a graduate student: I would be in significant financial trouble if I had to do this all on my own. I don’t live a lavish lifestyle: we have high-speed internet, but don’t have cable. We eat out two-three times a week, but will go for the cheaper lunch specials rather than dinner. My partner and I got a dog during my PhD, so we spend money on dog food and the odd toy for him. I’ll buy the odd Xbox 360 game for amusement.

I can cover my day-to-day expenses with the support York University provides me. Right now, my monthly fixed expenses clock in around $1200. A typical pay-cheque in the fall and winter is $1500. So, I have $300 discretionary income each month. In the summer, I get less a month–last August my cheque was $1070 (part of the pay package is you get less in the summer while you’re not in a classroom). During these months, I earn less than what I owe and so have to find that money elsewhere. In September, January and May I owe York tuition. Last September’s amount was $1823; part of a previous CUPE 3903 settlement means that my tuition is indexed, so I also get $590 credited to my account (to take account of the difference). That means that I owe about $3700 each year in tuition.

Now, what I have to do to get this money is part of the reason why I’m walking the picket line. I do have student loans, but I’ve also worked throughout my time as a graduate student. Most recently, I was the director of an outdoor centre last spring & late summer. I work outside the university to try and earn the $3700 to pay for the following 12 months of school fees. Taking this extra work, however, is not allowed as a condition of funding from York University. I have to do it anyway.

The “get a job” argument

Part of what’s frustrating with what people have been saying about our position is that if graduate students have a problem with what we’re being paid, we should get a job to make up the difference. That is fine in theory, and in practise it is what I’ve tried to do. There is little doubt that working has meant that I’ve taken longer than I would had I not been working–the irony here is that because I work, I need take more time to pay my way through grad school, meaning that I have to find more money to pay tuition. It’s something of a vicious circle.

Working, in some cases, is not always possible. During September-April, I feel like my number one job is being a graduate student: moving through the PhD process, writing my own work, travelling and presenting at conferences and being a part of my faculty’s community (sitting on committees, going to meetings). These are all “unpaid” parts of my job as a graduate student, in addition to my 10 hours a week as a TA or course director. Teaching and my unpaid graduate work take up my time. And I would be sacrificing the quality of my teaching or research to also work at the same time–something I have refused to do thus far. So extra work only works in certain situations at certain times.

The “get a loan” argument

Another position that people have regarding our wage is the suggestion we should be getting loans to cover the difference. In fact, I have had to take out student loans while a graduate student. I was lucky because I before returning to do my Master’s degree, I worked full-time for two years. Over that span, I managed to save enough to pay for the expenses associated with that degree. Since I’ve been a PhD student, I have had to borrow to cover expenses. And, while I have student debt, by working, I’ve managed to keep it to (in my mind) a manageable level. I’m especially luck, though.

The whole student debt argument goes that this kind of debt is good because you’re “investing in yourself.” I think that many think that once you have a PhD, your move to a secure tenure-track position is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case, then accruing significant student debt could be seen as a good investment. The reality is somewhat different: as I approach the end of my PhD, I have to come to terms with the reality that there might not be a tenure track job available for me when I graduate. This is the case for a number of reasons–two factors combining at the moment are more students in graduate programs and less tenure-track hirings (and, coincidently, more contract faculty jobs–right where Unit 2′s concerns come in).

Why wages are important

My experiences as a graduate student are just that–mine. I’ve worked hard to move to the end of my PhD and I’ve appreciated the financial support that the University offers. At current funding levels, I have had to take extra work and go into debt to make my education happen. And this happens at the expense of my speed though my program and the quality of my own work.

Wages are an important issue not because I’m some academic loafer who want to live a lavish lifestyle while working “just” 10 hours, rather getting paid a wage that lets me focus on my teaching and research responsibilities allows me to do both, better. And this is where all of this should matter to undergrads: if your teaching assistants need to take jobs to pay their bills, then they’ll be doing less of what you’re coming to that lecture, lab or seminar for. The quality of your own education suffers as well.