"The big thing that we do is we fight for fair wages, for respect and dignity in the workplace, for protections around equity, around health and safety, these sorts of things. We are primarily a trade union and we fight for a safe and respectful workspace."
What is your group’s objective?
PSAC 901 is the union for Graduate Student Workers and Post Doctoral Scholars at Queen's University. We represent over 2,000 members. We are research assistants, teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and postdocs at Queen's. We're the folks who do the research work and the teaching work that helps Queen's claim its status as a world-class research and learning environment. Our folks are the frontline people who make that happen. We are the largest trade union of the largest employer in Kingston. While oftentimes folks don't think about graduate student or academic work as work, we are a testament to the fact that it is work.
The university extracts tremendous value from the labour of our members. There's a strong bend towards privatization of this public sector educational institution that we are fighting against alongside other labour unions on campus.
There's also a real issue of exploitation of migrant workers, international student workers and postdocs who come over to begin their careers here at Queen's and are taken advantage of in the same way that migrant workers are taken advantage of across this country and across Empire. We're here, we are a union over 2,000 members strong, and we're here for the collective good of ourselves, our community, and Kingston.
Would you mind talking a little bit about Queen's privatization and what you're doing to fight back against it?
Yeah, what we've seen in the past year or so from Queen's is a real push towards a narrative that public institutions are not sustainable in the academic sector. This is not something that they're coming out and saying, but it's clear in their actions, it's clear in their priorities. The way the university has prioritized its investment portfolio and savings over extracting profits from investments to put towards funding good union jobs here at the university, funding building housing, and building up this community, is shameful. The university has large pools of investment money called pooled investment funds, and they can decide how much they do or do not withdraw from the revenues that come out of those funds, and they choose year in and year out to take out much less than they can. It's a crisis of administration and management, rather than a budgetary crisis, because a budget is a reflection of an institution's values. When you're valuing not withdrawing money in what is supposedly a budgetary crisis, you are valuing keeping money in investments for things like weapons manufacturers and all the stuff that SPHR and QBACC and other organizations are pushing for divestment on. Queen's has prioritized keeping money in the bank, over spending on a rainy day. At the same time, we're seeing the results of that austerity budgeting, and it's having a tremendous impact on the ability of folks in arts and sciences to perform the research work necessary for a functioning society. While we're seeing the decay of physical infrastructure at Queen's, while we're seeing them not invest in the community at large, we're seeing record-breaking private donations to the university that come with stipulations of what that money can be spent on. Right before Queen's announced a supposed $63 million budget deficit, they announced a record-breaking donation of $100 million to Smith Engineering. With that donation came stipulations from the donor of how that money can be spent. Queen's is actively pursuing private donations, while at the same time cutting vital academic services. They are allowing and indeed encouraging private donors to be able to make the calls of what is important in terms of a university's mission and what we are able to build as an academic community. While Queen's is not coming out and saying that they are on a drive towards privatization, it's clear. The proof is in the price of the pudding. The more and more you have private donors calling the shots, the more and more you have a society that caters to the ultra-wealthy.
What kinds of actions does PSAC run?
We're primarily a labour union. We fight for our members' rights in terms of bargaining and contracts. Right now we’re in a bargaining year for both our units. Our Unit 1 members are TAs, RAs and teaching fellows and our Unit 2 members are postdoctoral fellows. So postdocs have been in bargaining for just about a year now. Our Unit 1 members, our grad student workers, their contract just expired, so we're just entering into bargaining with that unit. The big thing that we do is we fight for fair wages, for respect and dignity in the workplace, for protections around equity, around health and safety, these sorts of things. We are primarily a trade union and we fight for a safe and respectful workspace. Historically and presently, the union has considered the community a part of the workspace. People are plants, right? You need to be in an environment, in soil, that encourages you to do your best work so that you can be a productive worker, so you can be a safe worker, and so you can be a person who is happy in your workplace. Queen's University has a tremendous stranglehold on Kingston. It is, again, the largest employer in town. It is one of the largest landlords in town. It is one of the largest landholders in town. In a lot of ways, this is a company town. For many of our members who are graduate student workers, we are being paid by the university for our research work, but then we have to pay that back to our employer by way of tuition. Queen's University is my landlord. It's a lot of members' landlords. We're having to pay that back to the university by way of rent. For many folks who are, I don't know if it's lucky or unlucky to not have Queen's as their landlord, for many of us, the professors who we work for are landowners and homeowners who are renting spaces back to our members and students.
We consider Queen's University workers not separate from Kingston in any sort of way. We are the community. Our members are 2,000 people strong. 2,000 people who live and work and play and love in Kingston. We have taken an active approach in trying to help with community initiatives, whether it's showing up for things like May Day or Labour Day, whether it is going to events like Pride, being public, and being a space where folks know that they can do some organizing, where they can come by the office and do work. We've always had a very clear mission and mandate to be a hub of social justice and activism in the community, not just for our members, but for the community. In terms of some specific initiatives, one of the biggest things that we worked on in the past year was our food security, our emergency food fund for members. Queen's does not pay graduate students a living wage. When you subtract the amount of money you get in funding, and that's through your TA ship as well as through awards, when you subtract from that the cost of tuition, oftentimes folks are making half and less than half of what they would make working full-time at minimum wage. Before I came back to grad school, I was working in kitchens, and I was making two or three times as much as I make as a graduate student worker. I'm in a job right now as a PhD candidate where I am required to have a master's degree to be in this job, and yet I make half and a third of what I made when I was working in kitchens. With that context in mind, we've been seeing more and more members facing acute and immediate food insecurity, not being able to feed themselves, not being able to feed family members. Many, many, many of our members are migrant student workers who are coming here with young families, who have stipulations on how much they can work outside the university, who have stipulations on how much their partners can work outside, and people have to make really tough choices about paying the rent, paying the bills, feeding themselves, feeding their kids. So we set up a system last year which paid out over $80,000 in, I believe, 10 months to members by way of gift cards. We did it by way of gift cards because, while there are food bank services and things like this available to community members, gift cards allows people to access the food that they want with a little bit more dignity. You're not reliant on what somebody else thinks a meal ought to be.
What is the biggest challenge for you right now?
The biggest challenge is always reaching everybody. When you're looking at a group of 2,000 people and trying to get everybody on the same page, that's a very difficult thing to do. The best thing that you can do in organizing is reach people one-on-one. I'm very fond of the idea and the motto that the most powerful words in organizing are: “are you coming with me?”. When you're trying to reach this many people, it can be so much easier to simply set up email blasts and put up posters and those sorts of things. Those are important tools for getting information to members. But when you're talking about getting people ready to come on board to take action, whether that is job action in a contract year, potentially withdrawing their labour, or whether that's showing up for each other at a protest, signing onto a petition, doing any level of thing that puts yourself at a bit of risk but puts everybody else around you at a bit less risk and helps share that burden. That's a challenge because people are busy. People are hungry. People are facing very real and acute poverty. People are experiencing homelessness.
Why are you proud to be part of PSAC 901?
It's community. It's imagining better futures.
It's in the words of, I think it's Angela Davis, to do the work, you have to wake up in the morning and believe and act as if it can get better and you have to do that every day. On a personal level, being involved in communities where folks are coming together with that mindset of this isn't working, how do we fix it? That's energizing, that's recharging. By virtue of the system we live under, we're forced to be at work, but that doesn't mean that the ultimate goal is to build a better workspace. The ultimate goal is to build a better community and a better life for everybody. Being in spaces where people want to build joy together, build community together and change things for the better, that's energizing and that's why I'm here.
How do you handle fractures in your group and what are your thoughts on fractures in the Kingston activist community?
I think anytime you have a group of people working together, they are not always going to get along. The first line of action, when issues arise, is to solve things through dialogue between folks who are having the issue, through mediated dialogue. This is not always something that is possible, but it’s something that we strive to do first and foremost. I think we try in our organizing work to always come to a consensus as much as possible. I think that's the best way to move forward, but when you're an organization of 2,000 members, there's not consensus on the majority of things. What you have to do is you have to build democratic decision-making processes. You have to ensure that you're tapped into the wants and the needs of the membership because the membership is what sets the priorities of a union.
We're not all going to get along together, we're not all going to be on the same page about absolutely everything, but there are common issues that we all face, and the more we learn about each other, the more we have in common. The more we're in community together, the more we break down those barriers between us, the more we see the need to push forward together.
What is the point of what you do, why do you fight, why do you keep doing what you do?
We're in a crumbling society that is deeply inequitable, and deeply unfair, not only in terms of within our own community where the balance of money and power is so clear, but when we talk about a global community, the incredible imbalance between the global north and the global south, the incredible imbalance between the wealthy class and the rest of us. I think what kind of keeps me going is that even among all this, and even as every single day I meet new people who are facing tremendous odds that are stacked against them, every single one of them is able to put a smile on their face at some point in the day, right? I deeply, deeply believe that the most powerful tool we have in our fight is collective joy. And that is what kind of makes it all worthwhile.