By: Anthony Houston, SFU Student
As an international student, I tend to stay at the edges of certain aspects of Canadian life. I’ve strayed away from having an opinion about politics, healthcare, or worker’s rights, not because I don’t care about any of those things, but because whatever weight my opinion might carry feels inconsequential once my student visa expires. But, two weeks ago, I wrote an article for The Peak about the TSSU strike. I did my best to stay as unbiased as possible, but by the end of the piece it felt impossible not to feel anger towards SFU. I went over four years of events, and dozens of statements from both TSSU and SFU, only to discover how little the current administration cares for their workers.
Just this past week, on June 14, SFU sent a mass communication regarding TSSU’s picket lines asking students who feel uneasy about the impacts of a TSSU strike to connect with SFU Health and Counselling and MySSP. Girl, (AKA Joy Johnson), where’s the support for the workers whose health benefits you’re threatening to take away? What about those who depend on those benefits, what do you think that’s doing to their mental health? Not only their mental health — but physical health!
SFU claims to champion equity, diversity, and inclusion, but instead further marginalizes students who rely on healthcare benefits just for their right to strike. It has come to a point where SFU’s vagueness, contradictory statements, and actions can only be called hypocritical. They take away health benefits but worry about the mental health of those who are less affected by the strike. SFU “aims” to become a living wage employer but refuses to acknowledge hundreds of RAs as employees.
Even with three jobs, four on the occasional semester when I also have to TA, I still count my money at the end of the month just to know if I’ll be able to afford my living expenses next month. I’m physically and mentally exhausted from working my ass off just to barely scrape by, and meanwhile, SFU is posting annual operating surpluses in the millions. Girl, just take some money out of that surplus and give it to your starving workers — surplus in an organization whose workers are starving might as well be called stolen wages. It’s us — the workers, RAs, TAs, teachers, researchers, and the students — who have brought prestige to this institution, but to the eyes of SFU’s administration we might as well be vandals.
On June 15, another mass communication from SFU directed students to resources for “inappropriate behaviour, such as intimidation or vandalism.” We are asking for a living wage, not destroying the university.
There may be the rare instance where protestors have a negative impact on unrelated parties like undergraduate students, and I’d like to think TSSU would take appropriate action to reduce it to the best of their ability.
But, intimidation? Vandalism? We are workers and students. SFU framing us as vandals for enacting our legal right to strike is appalling. Their refusal to act on agreements, their efforts to not recognize RAs as employees, their portrayal of the strike as potential “vandalism,” their weaponization of students’ mental health, their failure at tabling proposals that reflect actual living conditions, is beyond unacceptable. These actions don’t reflect what SFU’s foundations and commitments of “building a robust and ethical society” entail. Rather than wasting time on useless emails, and conveniently omitting all the ways in which they’ve contributed to this strike (such as delaying bargaining) — they should be bargaining with TSSU instead of tabling the same dusty-ass proposals they have since 2020.
