A solidarity request from the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903

CUPE 3903 represents the contract faculty, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and research assistants at York University in Toronto. With almost 3,700 members, CUPE 3903 is the largest trade union on campus. Our local is a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Canada’s largest union with over 740,000 members across the country. CUPE represents workers in health care, emergency services, education, early learning and child care, municipalities, social services, libraries, utilities, transportation, airlines, and more. CUPE has more than 70 offices across the country, in every province.

This post and this post will help you understand why Local 3903 is on strike.

A recent bargaining tream report from Local 3903 reports the following:

Since we began bargaining in June 2023, the Employer has repeatedly attempted to unilaterally define what bargaining is and how it works. Early on they told us that they would not engage with our monetary proposals (such as wages and benefits) until we had given them all of our non-monetary proposals. Now they have reversed their position, communicating via the Conciliator that they will not come to the table to negotiate other proposals until we lower our wage demands, while publicly pointing to “the advice of the provincially appointed conciliation officer” to justify their refusal to come to the table. Today the bargaining team met with the Conciliator and reiterated that we are ready to bargain at any time. We also pointed out that the two sides had reached substantial agreement on important equity and other proposals before talks broke off nine days ago, and that we could be meeting to resolve these non-monetary issues. The CUPE 3903 bargaining team intends to present unit-specific and all-units focused proposal packages to the membership at the next Strike SGMM. Meanwhile, we will continue to signal our willingness to bargain and call on the Employer to come to the table this week.

We can all help by hitting this link and sending our support message.