Fanshawe College faculty and colleagues provincewide are poised to strike Friday morning as contract negotiations came to a halt this week.
Fanshawe College faculty and colleagues provincewide are poised to strike Friday morning as contract negotiations came to a halt this week.
Darryl Bedford is president of OPSEU Local 110, which represents about 1,000 Fanshawe employees in London and across the region. He said the union made “one last appeal” to a consortium of 24 college presidents provincewide to agree to binding arbitration, which requires both sides to resolve the impasse through an arbitrator.
“If they enter into binding arbitration, there would be no need for a strike,” Bedford said. “I think it’s irresponsible to not agree to that.”
Graham Lloyd, CEO of the 24-school College Employer Council, said that since March 2021, “management has made numerous attempts to reach an agreement” with the unions.
“The union is claiming it had no choice but to strike because the colleges have refused to bargain and have refused arbitration,” he said. “This is simply untrue.”
The move comes after instructors at London-based Fanshawe College, and at Ontario’s other community colleges, rejected a provincial contract offer last month.
In Southwestern Ontario, OPSEU represents professors, instructors and librarians at Lambton College in Sarnia and Windsor-based St. Clair College, which has a Chatham campus. Staff have been working under terms of a collective agreement that expired Sept. 30.
Fanshawe faculty began a work-to-rule campaign in December over issues including a contracting-out dispute over a deal between Fanshawe and a private Toronto career college. Fanshawe’s partnership with ILAC International College, through which some of the college’s programs will be offered to international students in Toronto this spring, has been a sore spot for Fanshawe staffers, Bedford said.
In an online vote in December, unionized faculty provincewide voted 59 per cent to give the union a strike mandate.