OPSEU is Smokin’ in Ontario
Untitled Documentby P.D. Lesko
Just like the lyric from the “West Side Story” song, it’s “alarming how charming” Smokey Thomas is. He has a strong Canadian accent, speaks rapidly and with a folksy warmth. Thomas laughs easily, and doesn’t hesitate when he calls the democratic process in his own union a “pain in the ass”— or backtrack and ask that the comment be striken from the interview. In fact, his demeanor makes it difficult to believe that Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) members sometimes refer the Toronto-based organization as the “Lebanon of the labour movement” thanks to vicious political infighting during conventions and elections. Thomas, a member of the union for decades, is not outsider to the warfare. He is, however, not the least bit pretentious. Warren (Smokey) Thomas was elected president of Canada’s Ontario Public Service Employees Union on April 20, 2007, after serving three terms (six years) as First vice president and Treasurer. The 55-year old registered practical nurse has been an OPSEU activist for 25 years beginning as president of Local 431 at the Ontario Psychiatric Hospital in Kingston, Ontario, where he represented more than 1,000 members. He was elected to OPSEU’s Executive Board in 1993.
Thomas was elected OPSEU president on a simple pledge to put the interests of the union’s 130,000 members first:
“I am a members-first president. That means my priorities rest with delivering strong services to our members. It means strong staff development so that they have the skills to provide good services to the membership. It means being nimble enough that when circumstances and issues suddenly change, as they inevitably do, we have staff that are skilled and well equipped to meet the challenges on behalf of the membership.”
He has participated in countless campaigns on behalf of OPSEU members and at the moment he is engaged in the largest single union drive in Canadian history. Thomas’s union is attempting to organize all of the 12,500 part-time faculty employed throughout Ontario. If the drive succeeds, all of the province’s part-time faculty will be represented by OPSEU, whether the group is placed in a distinct division within the union (kind of a union within a union), or within the existing full-time faculty division remains to be decided by the provincial government. To put the drive in perspective, it would be as if the AFT had launched a drive to organize every part-time faculty member at every community college in the state of Florida.
Smokey Thomas and I spoke by phone.
Q. You were elected President of OPSEU in April 2007. Ninety days later, the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed that collective bargaining rights are protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That court decision opened up an opportunity to OPSEU to organize 12,500 part-time faculty employed throughout Ontario, and increase its membership to 132,000. Six months after you were elected, OPSEU launched the union to organize every single part-time faculty member at every single community college in Ontario. I have this image of someone in the saddle of a thoroughbred horse, preparing to ride, and then the horse just takes off unexpectedly. How’s the ride going thus far?
Well, it’s actually going very well. The drive’s going very well. Out of the thousands and thousands of people who’ve signed the union cards, couple of things….we’ve had to find them one person at a time, because the employer claims they don’t quite know who works for them, and they don’t have offices. They might work eight hours a week, or three. So we’ve had to do on the ground sleuth work to find people, and our organizers—we’ve created 100 temporary organizers—talk to them about the union, what the benefits might be. The drive is growing exponentially.
Q. OPSEU is a union of service, governmental, and full-time faculty community college employees in Ontario. The union represents ambulance paramedics, health are professionals, for instance. Why is OPSEU trying to organize community college faculty when there are two education unions in Canada? What can OPSEU offer that CAUT can’t?
We have always represented the full-time faculty and support staff. When these locals were created, there were very few part-time and sessional workers. But over the years, the employers have increased—year over year over year—the number of part-time workers that they have. They pay them less; they are disposable, and quite frankly have exploited the workers. We’re already in the colleges representing the full-time workers, so in our mind it just makes sense that we would represent the part-time workers. Other unions in Ontario have just stayed out of it. In Ontario the unions work quite cooperatively. I don’t go organizing factories, and they don’t go organizing colleges. So we are the union of choice, in my mind.
We did create an association early on, before the recent Supreme Court ruling, called OPSEUCAAT (Ontario Public Service Employees Union Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology), early on. We wanted these people to at least have a voice, and then frankly it would help us find them if we ever had the opportunity to organize. So in that way things have moved along fairly quickly…..We’ve had the leadership of OPSEUCAAT, Roger Courvette and his crowd, have been traveling around Ontario in a school bus, holding meetings and rallies and media events to draw attention to the drive. This is the largest organizing drive in Ontario’s history; it’s a lot of people. We invested a lot of time, energy and resources into it. I am absolutely convinced it will pay off.
Q. The drive to organize Ontario’s part-time faculty all really began in In 2005. That year, OPSEU convention delegates moved a resolution that “OPSEU will devote the necessary resources to a long-term organizing campaign (which) will have as its goal to bring these workers into OPSEU and the labour movement and to extend to part-time college workers the bargaining rights enjoyed by all other workers.” At the time, however, there was a labor law in Ontario that forbade the organizing of part-time faculty. Why did delegates resolve to devote resources to organizing people the law said couldn’t be organized?
Well, because we wanted to change the law, and one way to force legislators to change a law is to demonstrate that there is support for that change. So, we thought that if we helped the part-timers organize their own association—the law didn’t forbid them from forming an association, it just forbade them for unionizing–so we thought we’d help them do that. Then, we could work with that group of workers to go to the government and lobby for legislative change. That change came quicker than we thought it would. Ironically, another union won the fight for us, in a case out of British Columbia. The Ontario government has said that it needs to change the law. They have undertaken a review of the Colleges Collective Bargaining Act and related legislation to determine what changes need to be made to allow this group of workers to organize. So, some things happened that sped the process up, and that is why we started getting them to sign union cards in anticipation of the law changing.
Q. OPSEU’s attempt to organize Ontario’s part-time faculty is unprecedented in North America. You have a bus organizing tour going from college-to-college around the Province. The organizing is done under the umbrella of a program called “It’s Time.” Can you talk a little bit about “It’s Time?”
Well…OPSEUCAAT chose the catch phrase. It’s time for the government to do the right thing. It’s time for the colleges to do the right thing. It has really caught on.
Q. In the United States, the education unions have coupled the organization of part-time faculty with a drive to ask state legislators to fund more tenure-stream positions. The exploitation of part-time faculty and the falling numbers of full-time faculty are seen as opposite sides of the same coin, as one union representative put it. OPSEU’s drive has not coupled a drive to fund more full-time positions with its drive to organize the provinces part-time faculty. Why not?
Well, as the president of the union, I recognize that not everyone wants to work full-time. That doesn’t fit every person’s lifestyle. Not every course needs to be a full-time course. There are some course I recognize that doesn’t justify a full-time faculty member—20 people want to take it…..We run the gamut, so the needs are varied. In time, when OPSEUCAAT group organizes, however they get organized, they will then determine their destiny on what they lobby. We are a member-driven union—I ran my campaign on that. We’re here to help them get their wants, needs and desires met. In my view, and in the view of the Executive Council of the full-time faculty division, that group of workers should determine its own destiny. If the group wanted to lobby for more full-time positions, that would be a group decision, to put that on the bargaining table, something something they would bargain for. As the president of the union, I would then go with them and lobby the government to do just that. It’s a members’ decision in my mind….
Q. Tell me a bit about the relationship between the Organization of Part-time and Sessional Employees of the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology and OPSEU. Will the relationship change when the part-timers formally join OPSEU, or will the OPSEUCAAT and its president, Roger Courvette, represent the part-time faculty within OPSEU?
In my view, initially Roger Courvette and the leadership would represent that group. They would hold elections of that group. We would hold a founding meeting for them of a division. We’ve brought in whole groups of workers from one sector of the economy in the past. There is usually a transition period. I would envision Roger would be the leader of the group until they actually have a founding meeting, and decide who then is going to be their president. But there is a wrinkle in this, depending on what the government decides to do, these workers could be absorbed into the two existing bargaining units. The government’s not made that clear yet. The part-time faculty may end up in the full-time faculty group. I am not sure what the government is going to do yet. We have to wait and see…..If they are separate, we will bargain a first contract for them. If they are absorbed, we’ll go back to the table and bargain the provisions for the part-timers within the full-time division.
Q. How much money do you expect the unionization drive to cost OPSEU when all is said and done?
We’ll probably spend between $2.5-$3 million when we’re done. If we have to go to court and fight something out, it’ll probably be a bit more. Lawyers don’t come cheap.
Q. Some college officials have made an effort to thwart OPSEU’s drive on their campuses. Some have written letters to part-time staff. At other colleges, OPSEU literature has been removed. At St. Lawrence College officials told OPSEU the organization couldn’t distribute its newsletter to the college’s part-time faculty members. How widespread is the resistance?
It’s not widespread. There are few colleges still stuck in the 50s, but we take them on head-on. We take them to the Labor Board. They can get away with quite a bit, but most are taking a hands-off approach….Some of them just do not want to give up a group of workers they can use and abuse and underpay at will….If they’d have been paying these people well, treating them fairly, guess what? They wouldn’t have seen a need for a union. And they are signing–almost to a person. It tells me that the right thing to do is to organize them. It tells me they want a union. They want to be treated better….
Q. In March of this year, you asked college’s throughout Ontario to begin bargaining prior to the certification of the union, and you also asked the province for voluntary recognition of the union. You struck out with both proposals. How long do you expect the organizing drive to go on? When can Roger Courvette expect to be let off the bus?
I am hoping to get Roger off the bus in four to six weeks. It may take a bit longer. Roger will be finished when we decide to take the cards to the Ontario Labor Relations Board and say we want a supervised vote, that would be a group decision. It really is a group effort.
Q. The president of Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty Association, Dr. Judy Bates, said her union is working toward pro-rata pay for contract faculty. Will OPSEU have the same goal?
Sure, but that comes at the bargaining table, and how they approach it. We really are a democratic—it’s a pain in the ass sometimes—but we really are a very democratic union. It is member driven. They have a demand-setting meeting and they determine their demands, elect a bargaining team. The bargaining team prioritizes the demands and they go to the table and bargain. It works well, very well. We settle almost all of our contracts without a strike….Some of them are at the 11th hour and all the theatrics that go along with that, but most are settled just through good honest negotiations at a table.
