Just before midnight on March 4, 2024, Luke Daccord, Eriks Bredovskis and about 25 members of their bargaining committees were on the verge of a strike. Unfazed by the possibility of taking over 8,000 workers off the job, the presidents of CUPE 3261 and CUPE 3902 and their teams were calm. There were no frantic last-minute bargaining or sidebar conversations trying to cut a deal. They were simply waiting for a response to the joint proposal that they left with the employer earlier that day.
With minutes to spare, they heard the University of Toronto’s response – the wholesale acceptance of the unions’ proposal, as-is.
Daccord, a sport facility operator at U of T and president of CUPE 3261, would describe this moment as “by far the most powerful I’ve ever felt as a union member.”
A week later, CUPE 1230, another U of T local, wrapped up their round of bargaining. Together, the three locals - representing trades and maintenance, academic, and library workers - had negotiated significant gains, coordinated language that level the playing field between the locals, and demonstrated to the university, and to themselves, that three seemingly unrelated groups of workers could unite to improve working conditions for everyone.
Rewind to a few months earlier. CUPE 3261 was preparing for a meeting with the employer and wanted all three of their bargaining units at the meeting. “We explained to them that we have the same managers, the same departments, we should just meet together,” recounts Daccord. “But the employer said ‘No, it’s not going to happen. Your local is historically divided and you chose to organize yourselves this way. So, we’ll do everything separately.’”
With the employer firm in its position, CUPE 3261 decided to control what they could. They prepared their servicing representative, unit representative and president to go in and have the exact same meeting, with the exact same prepared remarks, back to back to back.
With so many different unions at U of T, the administration would set a pattern with one union and use that to bargain similar contracts for the rest. Individually, each of these CUPE locals would have major components of their collective agreements established by patterns set with other unions.
So how did U of T move from refusing to even meet with multiple bargaining units of the same local to accepting a single offer from multiple locals? The CUPE locals at U of T decided that they would ignore the pattern and control their own bargaining. They were tired of letting the employer drive the process. They were tired of letting what other unions negotiated determine their contract. They were tired of leaving bargaining to chance. They focused on organizing their members, coordinating between the locals and banking on open communication.
“Our members wanted a remedy for the years under Bill 124,” says Eriks Bredovskis, president of CUPE 3902, referring to the Conservative government’s wage restraint legislation that capped negotiated wage increases to 1% per year in Ontario.
“We really tried to build majority participation in the local, building up our stewards network and recruiting leaders,” says Eriks Bredovskis.
And it was through increasing member participation that people started to ask, “Why are we separated? In our local, 20% of unit 5 are also part of unit 1 - it’s literally the same people at the same institution doing the same work.”
To increase member participation the locals looked beyond the standard bargaining strategy. “We had been thinking about the ritual of bargaining,” says Alex Jung, president of CUPE 1230, “which is that some people go into a room to negotiate, but there is this taboo about discussing the bargaining table with our members.” To ensure that the university couldn’t play one local off the other, there needed to be a commitment to transparency with members about bargaining.
“It cannot be overstated,” Daccord echoes, “how crucial transparency was in improving engagement and trust in the bargaining process.” Member communication about what was being discussed at the bargaining table increased. Joint communications between the three locals kept the discussions focused on what CUPE, not what individual locals, were negotiating with the university.
Moreover, a bargaining conference was held where members of all three CUPE locals got together to discuss their shared cause. “It was about realizing that we are not alone in the workplace,” Bredovskis recalls. “We all have the same workplace, CUPE 3261 members clean CUPE 3902 members’ classrooms, and we all use services provided by CUPE 1230 members.”
Prior to the bargaining conference, the CUPE locals had never really considered themselves to be the biggest union on campus. “I think there was a lot of what I would call consciousness raising,” Daccord says of the bargaining conference. “Just the realization that we can unite and actually act like the biggest union on campus was uplifting.” This meant no longer feeling like they should take a back seat and have the pattern for bargaining established outside of their control.
The next step was getting the employer to realize that this was not going to be bargaining as usual.
When U of T tried to delay bargaining, the locals filed for no-boards. Instead of taking strike votes early in the bargaining process when key issues hadn’t emerged, the locals waited and conducted their strike votes in the immediate lead up to their strike deadline. This caught the administration off-guard and kicked off a 17-day countdown to a strike for two of the three locals. CUPE 1230 was a week behind to allow for more organizing and discussion before their strike vote. The employer now had to negotiate with the locals together.
“We had a tracker on our website where you could see every single proposal that all three units had in the latest counteroffers from the university,” Daccord recalls.
So, when members voted to strike, they were not just giving a blanket endorsement for the possibility of a strike, they knew exactly what the stakes were. They were indicating to the employer that they were ready to go on strike over a set of specific issues.
By this time, there was very little need for discussion with the employer. The university knew that members were informed about the issues and ready to strike over them. The usual tactics of trying to create a division between the bargaining team and the members would not work. Therefore, the locals focused on preparing their picket lines, and the university had a ticking clock counting down to the strike deadline.
On the eve of the strike deadline, there was little negotiation. The bargaining committees delivered their final proposal in the afternoon, the employer met to review the proposal, accepting it as-is just before midnight.
With a historic deal in place, the members of CUPE 1230, CUPE 3902 and CUPE 3261 learned a valuable lesson about how they can impact the bargaining table.
“We don’t just get this deal because the employer just decides to have a change of heart,” Alex Jung says, of the discussion he had with his members prior to their vote. “We’re getting this deal because you organized for it, you’re part of the momentum, so this is the only reason that a deal like this was on the table.”
