24 January: In The Sheaf (part I)

I've been meaning to do this since I got the last sheaf (the student newspaper at my university), but the end of the week was busy and the weekend found me away from home. Hopefully I'll be able to do this weekly.

I'm sure everybody in Saskatoon and Regina knows about the strike last semester that left both universities without support staff for over a month. I think this was widely accepted as "not cool" and one expert found it to be "kind of retarded." I myself don't really get strikes. It always comes off to me as more of a tantrum than a justified method of bargaining. During the month that they were away the university of course became progressively less livable. The first day of the strike coincided with a midterm for me. Unfortunately I had decided to go out the night before and didn't come home. I woke up halfway across the city from where I wanted/needed to be. My friend gave me a ride but neither of us had a pencil (the midterm was all multiple choice and so I needed a pencil to fill out the answer sheet). "Oh well, I guess I'll buy one at school. Can never have to many pencils, right?" Well, it didn't work out that way. Where do you buy a pencil when all the pencil store staff are not at work? Also, where do you buy a coffee when all the coffee store staff are not at work? (I was also in dire need of a coffee, for reasons already outlined. Yes, I could have went to the coffee shop across the street, or in retrospect even Browsers and Treats on campus should have been open, but they were both out of my way and I was in a slight hurry) I ended up getting a vending machine coffee, which everybody knows is probably the best coffee anyways so why didn't I just start with that? and borrowing a pencil from the prof.
And many other strike related problems:

• Buses wouldn't cross the picket line (for no good reason) and so I couldn't wait inside Place Riel like I normally would. I had to wait across the street in the cold.
• Bathrooms were not incredibly clean (see below).
  
• Sandwiches were much more scarce.
• Most importantly to me, all my biochemistry labs were canceled during the strike. I should have had two biochem labs a week. We couldn't because apparently some of the people in the biochem undergrad labs are CUPE? Of course we still had to be evaluated. We were all given the same data and required to write our scheduled lab reports.

And that's just me. Everybody has their own share of sucky strike stories. Even the strikers. Which is one of the reasons strikes bug me. These people don't necessarily want to go on strike, or if they do, they don't really know if they should. But they have to, because they're in a union, and the union says "strike."

Back to the point, Corey.

The front page of the January 24th Sheaf declares "University promises students $25 for services lost during strike" and below is a pretty wicked picture of the president of the university on a twenty.

Laura Keil wrote an article giving details and reactions. Josie Steeves, the USSU member who talked to university officials about this deal sees the offer as a "goodwill gesture" and I tend to agree. I mean, twenty five bucks is bupkis compared to what most students lost, but what's the university going to do about it? Give everybody a full tuition refund for last semester? As Keil reported, the university says they made no money, or very little, off the strike. Maybe we should be asking CUPE for some cash. In the meantime I'm happy to get twenty five bucks, which apparently I can spend on goods and services at the university bookstore, the campus pub, the computer store, or another campus service. Who wants to come to Louis' the tuesday after we get the money? By my calculations I can get seven pints (would be eight if they hadn't started charging a cover, grumble grumble)

Some students, however, are not pleased. Levi Nicholat apparently thought the offer was a "slap in the face." For some reason Levi thinks the strike lasted two months, which Levi points out would be two-thirds of our semester. It didn't. Strike notice wasn't served until the 26th of October, and they didn't actually walk out for a few days after that. A tentative agreement was reached on the first of December.

Still, a few other students raised some reality based points. Books couldn't be taken out of the libraries, costing Grad students research time. A rec hockey player points out that he missed a handful of games that he payed to play.

I think the highlight of the article would have to be Michelle Brock's statements. She is also not pleased with the offer, feeling that the university mismanaged the strike and are now making an insincere gesture. She had a list of things students had to cope with similar to mine, but see if you can spot the difference.
"She says students had to cope for several weeks with bathrooms strewn with feces and tampons, classrooms overflowing with coffee cups, and library services that were largely inaccessible."

Okay, second place in this article I guess goes to the fact that the U of R has also made an offer to it's students, albeit 1/10th the size.
I wanted to make this a review of the sheaf, but I guess I had too much to say on this, so maybe I'll get back to the rest later.