York community members have recently been invited to reflect upon the legacy of Rhonda Lenton on the occasion of her retirement from her post as President of York University.

Under Lenton’s leadership, the neoliberalisation of post-secondary education has proceeded at York University with profoundly deleterious effects. Shortly following the announcement of Lenton’s retirement from York, the YUFA Executive called out the destructive nature of Lenton’s leadership, including financial mismanagement, job loss, and tumultuous labour relations on campus.

Leaving with Lenton is Assistant Vice-President Labour Relations, Dan Bradshaw. He has been central to supporting Lenton’s agenda in relation to difficult labour relations at York.

Striking YUFA staff bid farewell to Rhonda Lenton and Dan Bradshaw, two key architects of the neoliberal, anti-labour agenda at York University. (Right-hand picture credit: Richard Wellen)

At this critical juncture, the YUFA Executive had an opportunity to work with its staff and other campus partners to demand new leadership at York University, a leadership that is more consultative, more democratic, and more fiscally responsible.

Instead,YUFA has spent the last eight weeks fighting its own staff, seeking to restructure itself in a manner that mimics what York has done to its workers.

In the eight weeks since October 27, striking YUFA staff have been information picketing and knocking on doors at the various York campuses. We have engaged with students, community members, YUFA members, and members of other unions at York. We have heard from workers across York about how the restructuring project at York, spearheaded by Lenton at the behest of the Board of Governors and supported by Bradshaw, has intensified work, transformed secure jobs into precarious jobs, and changed functional workplaces into unhealthy and toxic workplaces.

We have heard from union siblings about how the labour relations regime has changed under Lenton and Bradshaw, where instead of resolving workplace disputes, the Bradshaw labour relations approach has consistently pushed issues to expensive litigation.

Normally, YUFA staff work alongside the Chief Stewards and JCOAA Co-Chair to protect the YUFA contract and YUFA members’ terms and conditions of work. We attend meetings alongside YUFA elected officers to discuss with members the multifaceted challenges to collegial governance. We explain, alongside elected officers, how it is necessary to protect the Collective Agreement – and we also help explain how grievances alone are, in many cases, not sufficient as a response to the restructuring Lenton and Bradshaw have spearheaded.

Instead of doing this important work over the last two months, staff at YUFA have been walking a picket line while the YUFA Executive has blamed its staff for outcomes that are firmly the result of the actions of Lenton, Bradshaw, and the Board of Governors.

YUFA staff are not the progenitors of neoliberal restructuring at York and we are not the architects for how that restructuring has been articulated. The proof of this lies in the many conversations we have had with other unions on campus who have all identified the same dynamics and issues that YUFA faces: increased litigation costs, increased workload due to increasing issues flowing from restructuring and rationalisation, and the work of addressing the concomitant pressures on the union.

YUFA staff know that the only possible way to fight back against the ongoing restructuring project at York is for unions to pull together, to educate, to mobilize. This involves a lot of hard work, and a lot of hard conversations. We have always been invested in trying to connect, where possible, defending YUFA’s collective agreement and labour relations issues with support for the political projects with which YUFA has chosen to engage.

The time to start this work is long past due. YUFA members: why are you allowing your elected leaders to waste your union’s resources fighting us, when we could be fighting York together?

YUFA staff have called on YUFA to engage in mediation with a 3rd party mediator. We also continue to work with the Ministry-appointed conciliator.

We want a fair deal and we want to get back to work. We look forward to supporting, as best we can, YUFA’s efforts to organize and mobilize its members, and to connect with other unions on campus.

We look forward to YUFA redirecting its energy towards the cause of the issues – its employer, York University Board of Governors.