News

After 14 long weeks, the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) staff have ratified a deal, ending the strike. This would not have been possible without the support and solidarity of people of conscience within the labour movement and the York University community. The solidarity received gave us that strength, and means the world to us.

The agreement that ends the strike protects the scope clause of the collective agreement, therefore defending the integrity of the bargaining unit. While YUFA is proceeding with their plan to hire one or more managers, the protection of the scope clause means that they will not be permitted to do bargaining unit work. There are also temporary protections from layoffs for the life of the collective agreement. Other wins include increased funds to support equity in the bargaining unit, and the administration of those funds by the union, as well as modest improvements to leave provisions.

Unfortunately, there are no gains for health and safety. YUFA made it their hard line to refuse to address the harassment and discrimination that their staff face in the workplace. They were willing to keep their staff on strike – and their members without support – indefinitely in order to avoid adding uncontroversial provisions to make their workplace safer. The provisions they refused as unreasonable exist without issue in other similar collective agreements.

It is essential to recall the context of this strike: YUFA hired a union-busting law firm and tabled over 100 proposals designed to gut the collective agreement of the vast majority of its existing provisions. Fighting off these vicious attacks constitutes a win; yet we can’t help but feel that this situation is a net loss for the labour movement as a whole. It harms our movement when unions not only engage in union-busting, but also refuse to bargain for weeks on end and derail various labour spaces, like labour councils and the Ontario Federation of Labour, with employer messaging to shame striking workers.

CUPE 1281 is looking forward. We will continue to address harassment and the toxic workplace with the other tools available to us. Even though the YUFA Executive commenced a hiring process during the strike,we will vigorously defend bargaining unit work and our scope clause. There is much work to be done to make YUFA a workplace that is not toxic to the point of rampant staff turnover. We hope future YUFA executive committees will work with us to make that a reality.

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.

On Wednesday, December 3, striking staff at the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) met with the employer and the government-appointed conciliator for the first time since the strike began on October 27th. Some progress was made, which gave the union hope for a resolution to the strike. CUPE 1281 made a third pass in the afternoon but unfortunately by the end of the day, the parties remained at an impasse.

Job Security Still Under Threat

YUFA has now officially withdrawn its proposals to amend the scope of the collective agreement. This is a much necessary step towards a resolution. However, they have not withdrawn the job they have posted, which clearly indicates that they intend to proceed with hiring managers who would undeniably do the work of the bargaining unit.

Hoping to work with the employer, the union proposed some options to ensure that disputes about managerial positions are resolved promptly and that these hires will not impact job security for the unionized staff. CUPE 1281 proposed stronger language to protect the staff complement, improve layoff provisions, including an order where union-excluded positions will be laid off first.

YUFA did not engage with key elements of these job security proposals.The conciliator advised the union that YUFA had no appetite to continue bargaining after three passes, and the day was called at 6pm.

Health and Safety Remains a Sticking Point

YUFA has indicated that they expect all existing grievances on harassment and discrimination to be dropped to reach an agreement. However, they were reportedly not willing to discuss any of the proposals regarding staff’s health and safety, including harassment and discrimination provisions. Obviously, harassment is a serious issue and those grievances can only be dropped as part of bargaining if real solutions are reached at the table.

The Way Forward

Job security and health and safety remain at the crux of the union’s demands. CUPE 1281 is grateful for the support and advocacy from the labour movement and community activists in pressuring YUFA to drop proposals that would negatively impact the scope of our work. It is in recognition of this move that CUPE 1281 made significant movement to settle the strike so that we can return our joint focus to defending YUFA members’ against York University’s top-down restructuring. It is disappointing that YUFA continues to push top-down restructuring of its own, and leave its staff out on the picket line.

Nonetheless, we see a way forward. The union has proposed that the parties seek assistance of a third party mediator and is awaiting a response from YUFA.

On November 25th, as eight CUPE 1281 members working for the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) entered their 5th week on strike, YUFA posted a job advertisement for an Executive Director and in-house legal counsel position. The job posting confusingly lists two positions that are quite distinct, yet says they would prefer a single individual do both — as well as other specialized work such as communications and facilitation — presumably for the same wage.

What is clear is that the posted job description lists a number of responsibilities and duties routinely performed by striking staff, such as providing legal advice to YUFA Executive officers and members, handling grievances, drafting legal contracts, and dispute resolution, among others.

Hiring non-unionized workers to perform the work of striking employees is using scab labour and marks YUFA’s most aggressive union-busting tactic to date. Strike breaking, i.e. hiring replacement workers to cross a picket line to weaken the strike and a union’s efforts to improve working conditions, is often called scabbing because it is disgusting, anti-worker behaviour.

By actively replacing experienced unionized staff with confusingly defined strike breaking positions, YUFA undermines good-faith negotiations at a time where they have finally claimed that they want to return to the bargaining table as early as next week. This move attacks the very principles of progressive trade unionism that YUFA claims to uphold. In fact, YUFA appears to have forgotten how strongly they condemned their employer, York University, for hiring scab labour as recently as the 2024 CUPE 3903 strike

The labour movement must not hesitate to hold bad employers to account. This is especially true where that employer is a union. If we can’t hold each other to basic respect of collective agreements, how do we expect to hold other employers to those standards? CUPE 1281 calls on labour movement bodies such as the Toronto & York Region District Labour Council and the Ontario Federation of Labour to condemn this escalation by YUFA and its violation of core union principles.

It has recently come to the attention of the striking staff at the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) that they received their regular pay on November 12. Staff received this payment despite being on strike for job security, stronger protections from harassment and discrimination, and to protect unionized work at YUFA.

Given YUFA’s history of blaming their staff for their own mistakes, we feel it unfortunately necessary to state publicly that the union promptly informed the employer, via the government-appointed conciliator, of their mistake.

Payroll, among other financial transactions, is a well-established automatic process that has been in place for years, with which YUFA’s Treasurer is very familiar. It was the executive’s responsibility to pause these payments.

It is also worth noting that this kind of inattention to YUFA’s fiduciary duties towards its members is exactly why we continue to have serious concerns about the employer’s plan to hire expensive managers, as that plan has not been realistically costed. They have not yet explained to CUPE 1281 or to YUFA’s membership how they plan to pay for the two additional positions without laying off the current unionized staff.

CUPE 1281 staff at the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) are on strike. Our small team of 8 workers are fighting for our job security and for a safe, fair, and democratic workplace — the same values YUFA members and our allies fight for across the university.

Our employer is pushing a top-down restructuring model that shifts resources away from frontline staff to hire more managers, undermines job security, and weakens our union. When YUFA refuses to meaningfully address harassment, discrimination, and job security, our employer is not just attacking our working conditions. YUFA is sending a message about what kind of workplace and campus they think is acceptable.

We are saying NO to union-busting, NO to more managers doing union work, and YES to:

• Safe, harassment-free workplaces
• Real job security for front-line staff
• Democratic structures where workers retain their voice and agency

On November 13 at noon, we’re calling on students, trade unionists, YUFA members, and community allies to rally with us on the picket line, outside Vari Hall. Your presence makes our strike stronger and sends a clear message to our employer.

Bring your coworkers, friends, signs, and noise.
Show up. Strike with us. Help us win.

Location Information
Vari Hall is located on York University’s Keele Campus (4700 Keele St). It is a distinctive-looking round beige building with a peaked roof. Exiting the subway at York University Station, it is directly West across the green area. The closest paid parking is the York Lanes lot (75 Vanier Ln).