Joint Open Letter Regarding SFU’s Return to Campus Plan: Unsafe, Inadequate, and Inequitable

On Monday, January 24th, SFU returned to full in-person instruction. This mandatory return was conducted amid the highly transmissible rates of the Omicron variant, its overwhelming impact on the healthcare system, and the danger it presents to disabled and immunocompromised SFU community members. SFU’s actions both encourage the spread of COVID-19 and understate the impact it can have on many community members.

The SFSS, TSSU Executive Committee and many undersigned SFU campus groups, individuals and organisational supporters, call on SFU to:

Immediately delay the full return to in-person learning until two weeks following 90% of the SFU community having received a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccination and province-wide transmission rates are reduced;
Strengthen on-campus protection measures by providing appropriate PPE (i.e., N95 masks or equivalent) to all campus personnel and ensuring that infrastructure meets COVID-safe regulations, including ASHRAE guidelines for ventilation;
Provide comprehensive and timely communication with students, staff, and faculty that allows adequate time for course planning;
Expand student financial aid and support to alleviate financial burdens and mental and physical health impacts on students;
Support and assist instructors in providing accessible and flexible course delivery (e.g., appropriate technology and training); and
Immediately initiate and act on a broad public consultation with students, faculty, staff, and the wider SFU community, with emphasis on prioritising the voices of community members who have been historically and continue to be marginalised and their representative groups. SFU must also commit to changing and adapting policy to meet the concerns and needs expressed during consultations.

If you are in support of these calls to action, please sign on to our OPEN Letter

You can also sign on to our email campaign located here

TSSU Childcare Grievance - Settlement Reached!

I am pleased to announce that just one week ahead of a scheduled arbitration hearing, TSSU and SFU have come to a settlement agreement over the grievance filed in 2014 regarding the disbursement of funds from the TSSU Member Child Care Bursary.

As a result of this settlement, SFU will be depositing an additional $310,000 into the Childcare Bursary fund to be disbursed to members with childcare costs. Achieving settlement without third party intervention leads to some optimism about our ability to solve problems with SFU in the future. Attached is a joint statement from TSSU and SFU.

We are confident that this settlement, combined with the recently signed-off TSSU control over the terms of reference for the TSSU Child Care Bursary, will start getting money into the hands of parents and allow the bursary to fulfill the purpose for which it was created. However, these terms or reference will not be in full force and effect until we have our arbitration decision that finalizes our new collective agreement. A survey about the Childcare Bursary's new terms of reference will be forthcoming.

MLA Subconference: Non- Negotiable Sites of Struggle

The second-annual MLA Subconference Is Happening January 7 -8 At SFU Harbour Center (Joseph and Rosalie Segal Room). From http://mlasubconference.org:

"The second year of the Subconference of the MLA will center on struggle as a non-negotiable and constitutive action for responding to ours and others’ increasing contingency. When we say non-negotiable, we mean that the following tactics are no longer optional: Direct and collective action, critical research on the financial and labor structures of higher education, union organizing, collectivizing wages and resources, making knowledge and information networks available by whatever means possible, and rejecting gains for some workers that would mean losses for others. These tactics can no longer be considered nostalgically as actions that belong to the past nor idealistically as something to do in the future. They are necessary tactics we need now as we grapple with higher education as a site of economic accumulation and subjective disciplining. Last year we asked, “Who are the subjects of these vulnerable times?” This year we ask which sites, both past and present, demonstrate that only an uncompromising rejection of austerity and precarity can be successful? In addition, we challenge ourselves to consider how such a politics of non-negotiability needs to influence and reconfigure our reading, visual, interpretive, and pedagogical practices as laborers in higher education."

The conference is free to attend, is a great opportunity to meet activists from across North America and is co-sponsored by TSSU. If you are interested in attending, you can register here.

2015 Subconference of the MLA flyer lists the program of events. See you there!