On March 7th, 2006, 9,100 full- and partial-load faculty members of the Ontario Public Services Employees Union (OPSEU) took to the picket lines to protest pay and the alleged declining quality of education at Ontario’s 24 community colleges. Among the reasons for the strike is the college system’s purported overuse of part-time faculty, who, according to the union, don’t provide the same high caliber of instruction as Ontario’s full-timers. A press release by OPSEU Local 613 sets forth the union’s proposed solution to the problem: convert part-time jobs to full-time. But will this help Ontario’s part-timers (who are not unionized)?

Much appears to depend on who the “part-time” faculty are. In Canada, the term “part-time” refers broadly to three categories of contingent faculty: “part-time,” who teach six credit hours or less each semester; “partial-load,” who teach seven to 12 credit hours per semester; and “sessional,” who teach 13 credit hours per semester and are considered full-time, but are appointed on a sessional, or temporary, basis. Ontario law bars part-time and sessional faculty from collective bargaining. As a result, only partial-load faculty are members of the OPSEU, and only they participated in the now-settled strike. According to David Cox, Communications Officer at the OPSEU national office, 21 percent of the 9,100 strikers hold partial-load appointments.

Those with the most to lose from a reduction in part-time positions are Ontario’s part-time and sessional faculty. Like their adjunct counterparts in the United States, they enjoy no genuine measure of job security and, as evidenced by the OPSEU’s own statements, are considered a threat to the overall quality of higher education. Because they are prohibited from collective bargaining, however, they have far fewer resources to effect positive changes in their working conditions. As in the United States, criticism of part-time faculty tends to focus on their transient presence on campus, and the lack of involvement with students that this transience supposedly implies. The OPSEU Local 613 Strike Committee, for example, asserted in a press release published in the March 9, 2006 edition of SooToday.com (at http://www.sootoday.com/content/news/full_story.asp?StoryNumber=16213) that “[p]art-time and sessional instructors are not as available to students outside the classroom because they do not receive compensation for preparation and evaluation, nor do they receive access to email or offices in which they can meet with students….We want to increase the number of full-time faculty, and decrease the number of part-time faculty teaching our students.”

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