The Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU) has set a strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 16 for 12,000 professors, instructors, counsellors, and librarians working at 24 community colleges across Ontario.
Negotiations between OPSEU and the College Employer Council broke off earlier this week and no talks are scheduled.
Students are concerned that a strike, with the accompanying cancellation of classes, would have a negative impact on their semester. In Peterborough, the president of the Fleming College Student Administration Council wondered why no one will tell them when a semester will be lost due to the strike.
“Faculty, institutions and even government cannot answer the questions of when a semester will be lost, what that means for a student’s education moving forward, and what kind of financial situations this will put them in,” Joel Willett said.
But Tony Tilly, the president of Fleming College, tried to reassure students about the effect a strike will have on their year
“Everybody in the college is concerned that you have the opportunity to finish your semester. That will be true for faculty when they return, it will be true for all of us that students don’t have that setback, it’s never happened in a college system, no student has ever lost a semester because of a strike,” Tilly said.
The last strike by Ontario Community College teachers was in March 2006. It lasted 18 days.
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