Faculty at all of Ontario’s publicly funded colleges will go on strike Friday if management does not agree to binding mediation, the union that represents them said Monday.
Ongoing negotiations for a new collective agreement between the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and the College Employer Council stalled last year.
OPSEU bargaining chair J.P. Hornick said faculty want to avoid disrupting classes.
“Our members are fighting for the best education for students,” Hornick said in a statement.
“We haven’t made any unreasonable demands, and everything we have asked for is easily achievable.”
The CEC, which represents the college presidents, have until 12 a.m. on Friday to enter into voluntary binding interest arbitration.
“It is the colleges that have brought us to the brink,” Humber College Local 562 President Milos Vasic told Humber News on Monday.
“Faculty have consistently offered a way out, the arbitration process takes a couple of days,” he said.
Vasic, Hornick and other union leaders have insisted since bargaining started last summer that they wanted to avoid a strike.
Despite getting majority approval for a strike mandate in December, faculty engaged only in a form of job action known as work-to-rule that has union members only working their contracted hours and not going over as they would regularly often do.
Now, the labour landscape appears poised to change with the academic year coming to a close.
“There is the possibility if the colleges don’t do something now, the semester might be lost,” Vasic said.
Michel Johnson-Figueredo, a fourth year Bachelor of Public Relations student, blamed the colleges for the threat of a strike.
“This escalation towards a strike can only be put on the college’s handling of this crisis,” Johnson-Figueredo said.
“The college needs to commit to solving this situation if they plan on providing the best experience for students, as they have often said.”
Professors, counsellors and librarians part of OPSEU last went on strike in 2017 for a record-breaking five weeks before binding arbitration was imposed by the then-Liberal government.