Unless, out of sympathy for international labour, you’ve rigged some kind of Rube Goldberg-esque device that delivers the Tribune straight from our printer in Saint-Leonard to your doorstep, it’s safe to assume that you picked this newspaper up somewhere on campus. That means you probably crossed the MUNACA picket line to get to school today. Repent!
What were you thinking? Didn’t you too, immediately upon hearing about the strike, open your laptop to SSMU’s website—it is your homepage, isn’t it?—to see what they had to say about the matter?
In response to the question of what a student should do if a picket line stands between her and class, the SSMU executive decrees:
“As students, we are free to refuse to cross picket lines, but must be aware of the potential consequences … McGill has made it clear that the University wishes courses to continue as usual, and therefore course instructors are free to penalize students who don’t show up to class. Realistically, whether you choose to cross picket lines is a decision you will have to make on a case-by-case basis. We encourage you to ask your instructor what their policy is if you miss their class.”
Had you checked the site, you would have known what to do.
Read again the SSMU statement: what is the meaning of “realistically,” anyway? I was unaware the discussion had been occurring in any other terms. The sentence seems to really mean: “Technically, you’re free to cross the line on the way to class, you’re free to be a bad person, but don’t, wayward constituent, expect our approval.”
Also wonderful is the statement’s preoccupation with punishment, that precious martyr’s prize. Surely some on campus welcome the strike as the perfect opportunity to prove their piety by being penalized for standing in solidarity with workers. The sacrifice feels, and looks, good. It’s as clear as day that the new SSMU team, working class heroes that they are, would ideally have us all joining MUNACA in its strike for fairer pay, and thus would have us miss classes until whenever the disagreement is resolved.
All this notwithstanding, the union’s claim against McGill is one to which I’m sympathetic. According to the Daily, the administration is offering MUNACA a 1.2 per cent annual salary increase to keep pace with the cost of living. That’s abysmal. Even the union’s initial request of a three per cent increase — a starting figure from which they surely knew they’d eventually be knocked down—is just barely more than the 2.7 per cent that Canada’s Consumer Price Index increased over the last year, according to the federal government. That number doesn’t even tell the full story, as it excludes energy costs, which jumped almost 13 per cent in the last 12 months, and food prices, which rose 4.3 per cent.
MUNACA deserves our support, and those students who, when not in class, choose to stand in solidarity with the strikers—and have their friends snap attractive photos of them in a vaguely rebellious tableau—deserve some respect. But Joël Pedneault, SSMU VP External, was only partially right when he told a crowd of strikers last week, “Our struggle and your struggle are the same struggle.” As students, our primary struggle should still be to attend class.
For students to think of themselves as either traitorously crossing or virtuously not crossing a picket line is to consent to the administration’s story that McGill University is a business and students are customers, a concession I doubt the students who care about this sort of thing really want to make.
