The strike by 150 support staff at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is “disgusting,” “immoral” and has gone on far too long, says the vice-president of Laurentian University’s Graduate Students’ Association.
The five-week labour dispute is forcing students and faculty to cross the picket line of members of OPSEU Local 677 to get to classes, which is “morally reprehensible” to them, said Noa Gang.
“This won’t stand,” she told a meeting of the board of directors of NOSM at the university’s health sciences building Wednesday afternoon.
Gang and about a dozen others left a solidarity rally staged in support of strikers to appeal to NOSM’s board of directors to end the strike against administrative, clerical and technical workers.
They have been off the job at NOSM’s twin campuses at Laurentian and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay since Aug. 16 over issues such as work hours and scheduling.
Protesters chanted outside the locked doors of the board meeting until they were told eight of them could attend the meeting and one representative could speak for 10 minutes at the end of the session.
Three meetings of the NOSM board were held Wednesday afternoon -a meeting of its outgoing board, its annual general meeting and the first meeting of a newly appointed board.
All meetings were abbreviated, largely because support staff are off the job.
Dean Dr. Roger Strasser, speaking from the Lakehead campus via a televised link, said several times throughout the three meetings that only activities essential to “learners” are being undertaken at the medical school during the labour disruption.
Gang and supporters appealed to Dominic Giroux, Laurentian’s president and the vice-chair of the NOSM board, to acknowledge that many Laurentian students other than medical learners are affected by the strike.
She told the board it should be ashamed for turning its back on students who are being affected by the strike and whose tuitions pay salaries at Laurentian.
For instance, some research labs for Laurentian students are not able to go ahead because of the strike.
Four days of mediated talks between the bargaining committees for NOSM and OPSEU Local 677 adjourned Friday in Thunder Bay. The medical school says the union walked away from bargaining table, but OPSEU bargaining Tyler England said it was up to NOSM to respond to language his team submitted.
Both sides have agreed to resume bargaining Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, without a mediator. England said his team is ready to go back to the bargaining table sooner if NOSM’s negotiators respond to the union’s last proposal.
Gang also called on Laurentian University to take back a statement posted on its website that OPSEU had agreed not to delay traffic entering the university campus.
She called the statement erroneous and said it is jeopardizing the safety of picketers when motorists frustrated with the delay of information pickets drive through the lines.
At Wednesday afternoon’s solidarity event, picketers were stopping vehicles, but drivers who insisted upon proceeding were allowed through without delay.
About a dozen members of United Steelworkers Local 6500 attended the rally to lend their support. That local has just gone back to work after an almost year-long strike against Vale Ltd.
USW staff representative Wes Dowsett urged strikers to hang in “one day longer … be assured you won’t be here alone.”
They and others began chanting “Fair Deal Now,” the slogan of Steelworkers during their strike.
NOSM faculty member Stacey Ritz said it was the hard work of many at Canada’s newest medical school, including striking OPSEU members, that made NOSM “an unsurpassed success.”
When NOSM was celebrating the graduation of its charter class of doctors last year, OPSEU members could not have imagined themselves on a picket line, she said.
“I share your dismay and your disillusionment and your disappointment,” said Ritz. “We want a fair deal.”
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