More than 500 members of six unions that represent workers at the University of Manitoba, and their supporters, rallied outside the U of M’s Administration building at noon on Wednesday February 13t, 2013. They were there to protest the University’s efforts to promote corporatization, privatization, contracting-out, diminished collegial governance and increased workload – efforts they say are having a bad impact in university employees and students.

The six unions that planned and carried out the demonstration are UMFA, AESES, CAW Local 3007, CUPE 3909, CUPE 1482 and UMSU, which collectively represent over 5,200 unionized academics and staff, and over 24,000 students at the University of Manitoba.

UMFA President Sharon Alward said, “We want the administration to know that they are making bad decisions which need to be reversed. These actions are not representative of an employer of choice.”

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Errol Black Labour Chair scholar Lynne Fernandez, herself a graduate of the University, said in a CCPA Fast Facts

“The ability of all the workers on campus to carry out their duties is being compromised by the administration’s push to privatization and corporatization. More and more private-sector companies are doing what university employees used to do, whether it be the teaching of international students by Navitas, a foreign corporation, to having the private corporation Aramark manage the caretaking staff and food services. Caretaking staff has been reduced and too few workers are now expected to do all the work. Employees are berated and bullied and when employees complain, administration replies with a variety of excuses: private sector supervisors do not fall under the purview of university administration and, therefore, are not required to follow university protocols of personnel management; it claims that employees’ issues do not qualify as grievances or that grievances were filed past the required time limits, when in fact extensions had been granted. Morale is at an all-time low; stress, anxiety and sickness are mounting.”

Read the entire article by Lynne Fernandez.