By Onosholema Ogoigbe, News Team Editor
Organized as a summer kickoff event to get members acquainted with one another and commemorate International Workers’ Day, the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) held a Summer BBQ Welcome & SFU Labour Walking Tour on May 10.
According to Yi Chien Jade Ho, a PhD student in education as well as an organizer/member of TSSU, the event was put together as a summer semester equivalent to the socials that the TSSU often holds as part of the Spring and Summer Week of Welcomes organized by SFU.
The event was put together and run by the TSSU’s membership mobilization committee. Starting the day with a barbeque, hot dogs, burgers, pizzas and drinks were served.
Then, the SFU Labour Walking Tour began. Led by Ho, the tour started off with a land acknowledgement. Ho provided a quick history of SFU’s former reputation as a “radical campus” and its relationship with the TSSU, before offering an outline of the places of interest on the tour.
The tour discussed historical events in Freedom Square in Convocation Mall, Residences, the SFU Transportation Centre, James Douglas Safe Study Area, the Education Building, and Strand Hall.
The theme of the walking tour was “collective action gets the goods,” and each place visited had at least one history of collective action that was mentioned during the tour.
The first stop on the tour was Freedom Square, where Ho told the story of how it got its name due to the number of rallies that occurred there.
The second stop was at the top of Convocation Mall, overlooking the residence and the bus loop, because the tour route was modified due to construction. According to Ho, in 1977 the bus loop hosted the SFU site of a province-wide student protest against tuition fee increases. SFU students set up a picket line at Curtis and Gaglardi Way, a main intersection through which buses access SFU.
As for Residences, in the 60s, the oil company Shell had a lot of financial influence on SFU campus, and SFU, in a bid to thank Shell for their financial contributions, decided that they would name Louis Riel, a subsidized family housing on campus, the “Shell House.” This did not go over very well with students, and they reacted with a lot of demonstrations around the Shell House that were against the proposition.
Ho’s tour then moved to Douglas Study Place, which saw the birth of the 2018 Tuition Freeze Now movement. Next came the Education Building, which inspired the Mould Campaign of 2013 that resulted in its renovation.
The last stop on the tour was Strand Hall, where TSSU members in the past taped postcards around the building as a protest against the senior administrative meetings. According to Ho, the senior administrative staff was “not bargaining in good faith at the time [and] they were also not having the right person at the table as well.” .
The TSSU is the union which describes itself as representing all “Teaching Assistants, Tutor Markers, Sessional instructors and Language instructors at Simon Fraser University.” They make sure all teaching support staff have good working conditions.
“Good working conditions allow [support staff] to be good educators,” says Ho, who has been a teaching assistant for five years.
