University of Guelph needs to implement worker reformation

Doug Ford decreased post secondary tuition by ten per cent. However, Ford didn’t replace that lost revenue for universities and colleges. Instead, these institutions accepted more students.

The Begging Bear by Carl Skelton — Guelph Art Gallery. Photo Credit: Kitchener News

Stephen Donnelly is completing a PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph (U of G) and has a four-month teaching assistant (TA) contract. Each semester Donnelly has to re-apply for his position for which he is paid per course, per semester. Yet, a large percentage of the money Donnelly earns is redirected to back to the university to cover graduate student fees and ancillary costs.

Donnelly is also a member of Justice for Workers Guelph (J4WG) and sat down with Small Change to talk about working conditions and student life at U of G.

“Fall semester is probably the most chaotic because everyone is new. There’s a whole new cohort of first year students trying to find their way. A lot of the TA work is emotional labour as well – working out how to put young people at ease,” Donnelly told Small Change.

Students come with the knowledge of how to pass their courses, but Donnelly has observed an automatic kind of tension and concern that students bring with them to campus. In fact, Donnelly has spoken with first year students who just don’t have the energy they need and are actually feeling suicidal.

“That’s been a shocking thing because that’s just not the sort of energy any of us want, or deserve, to be in,” Donnelly shared.

When you’re a TA you go over your contract with the professor running the course in order to divide up the allocated hours. Donnelly is reminded by the union to stick to his assigned number of hours. If he does go over that limit, then he’s to discuss possible solutions with the professor like more compensation being offered or the professor absorbing more of that labour.

“In the last two semesters when things really opened up since COVID, I feel the university said yes to a certain number of students thinking a per centage of them would say no to the admission offer. Instead, all of those students accepted the offer and suddenly you have groups of 300 to 400 in a class to be divided amongst the TAs and everyone in that situation is not getting the most from their professors and TAs. The whole thing gets slowed down and broken up,” Donnelly said.

Donnelly’s observation is spot on. Doug Ford decreased post secondary tuition by ten per cent. However, Ford didn’t replace that lost revenue for universities and colleges. Instead, institutions of higher learning accepted more students – especially, international students – to recoup the lost funds.

This has not only contributed to massively increased class sizes, professor and TA overwork, but an unprecedented housing crisis that has seen working people competing with students for increasingly scarce, inadequate and over priced housing.

Donnelly has been fortunate to work with some really incredible sessional professors who work under extremely precarious conditions. For the most part, they work semester by semester and often this is their main source of income.

“Some of the work they do is quite admirable in terms of keeping the whole system afloat. Then, when sessional positions get cut to save money, you sort of go, well, who is absorbing that emotional labour? Who is absorbing that practical labour,” Donnelly asked.

“All that experience and expertise is just being expunged from the equation. That’s making a bad situation worse by focusing on the wrong part of the equation,” he went on to say.

Donnelly is speaking to the university removing the face-to-face time that students need just so the institution can save money. That contributes to the imbalance being experienced at post-secondary institutions which are supposed to be dedicated to public education and the exchange of ideas.

“That feels like a bad move. That needs reviewing because I’ve learned so much from people who are just killing themselves,” Donnelly stated.

Sessional teachers and TAs work on four-month contracts which gives them access to worker benefits and rights. However, their wages are often not enough to cover most other living costs and the competition element then comes into play when trying to gain those extra positions within the university.

Those additional university positions are important because TAs are allowed to work as many hours as they can within the institution to make ends meet. Donnelly has international colleagues who are working two and three internal university jobs on top of their guaranteed funding and are still stuggling to make ends meet.

TAs are put into a position where they’re vying for the same positions — which hopefully will speak to their trainings and dspecialities — to gain experience on-the-job to set them up for life after graduation. But, keep in mind those jobs are becoming fewer due to public education cuts which makes the competition steep.

Ultimately, that all impacts the quality of the teaching and support TAs are able to offer students as well as the hours that they can put into their own learning.

As an international admission, gaining work from a university is essential for Donnelly. Because he needs to supplement that income in order to survive, Donnelly has to work outside the university. And, that is not without restrictions.

While living and working in Canada, the federal government dictates that Donnelly can only work 20 hours outside of the university. That’s because Donnelly is supposed to be a full-time student.

However, the federal government changes the hourly requirements as it sees fit. During COVID when people didn’t want to get paid $15 per hour to wash dishes in restaurants – or other low paying jobs – Donnelly was actually allowed to work more.

“I’ve worked in kitchens for a very long time. During COVID our ability to earn outside the university changed depending on lots of factors outside of our control,” Donnelly shared.

However, when it comes to working for the university Donnelly says, “feeling like you’re in competition with your peers every four months while you’re all in very similar, precarious positions is not a healthy way of being in a public learning space.”

The first couple of years Donnelly was at U of G he was teaching a subject that he had very little knowledge about. The university felt this arrangement was fine because it kept the labour cogs running and the money coming in from students and donors.

However, Donnelly saw very little concern for people working four or five jobs — as he was — combined a limited knowledge of a topic he was required to teach simply because the people who have more seniority points have better choices and preferential treatment around what they can choose to teach.

TAs are learning about a specific topic on the job as they are trying to teach it. That makes it doubly hard because they have a room full of 30 students that they need to try to navigate.

For TAs and sessional teachers, pay needs to be indexed to inflation in order to reflect what is needed to survive instead of the average of what everyone else in a similar position recently received -- because that’s what mediators look at when they are calculating average pay gaps during mediated negotiations.

Doug Ford has been keeping the average increase down across the board. He used this tactic with midwives, personal support workers, nurses, teaching assistants, and will be trying to implement it again during negotiations with elementary and secondary teachers who are set to walk out.

Managing class sizes at university is an important issue that needs addressing to ensure students get a balance between the exorbitant tuition fees they pay and the environment in which they have to learn.

“There needs to be a genuine attempt to make it about the education instead of profit driven and Americanized,” Donnelly pointed out.

“Theatre students are the most fearless, creative and inspiring that I have witnessed. I was not doing the types of work they’re doing in my first year, but these students are clued in and I’m really interested in how I can keep this space open to allow this broadening to happen. But, when you are squeezed for time, or a distance-education course with limited time, that’s not fair of the energy they’re expending. However, that’s what the system is at the moment,” Donnelly said.

It's interesting to note that private schools have a maximum class size of 16 students while the public school system dictates 30 to 40 per teacher and university TAs have 30 plus.

Ideally, TAs should have 15 to 20 students in order to care for and provide meaningful feedback. Because, as Donnelly asks, “Really, how can you dedicate enough time to each student? Or, give more than four minutes per paper for constructive criticism? How can you help that student that’s struggling or on the verge of something more final?”

And, we haven’t even touched on the exorbitant golden handshakes that university and college presidents command these days that adds fuel to the university workers’ and students’ fire.

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