New study examines reliance on precarious jobs on university campuses; Ontario, Quebec and B.C. have contract faculty rates above national average.
OTTAWA—Canadian universities are relying heavily on precariously-employed faculty on campus, according to a new study released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Employment and labour
OTTAWA – Selon une nouvelle étude publiée aujourd’hui par le Centre canadien de politiques alternatives, les universités canadiennes dépendent énormément des enseignants précaires sur les campus.
Les universités canadiennes dépendent énormément des enseignants précaires sur les campus. Ayant déjà été parmi les professions les plus sûres au pays, en 2016-2017 les emplois contractuels dans le secteur représentaient la majorité (53,6 pour cent) de toutes les nominations d’enseignants universitaires, et ce selon les données obtenues par l’entremise de demandes d’accès à l’information envoyées aux 78 universités canadiennes financées par l’État.
Canadian universities are relying heavily on precariously-employed faculty on campus. Once among the most secure professions in the country, by 2016-17 contract jobs in the sector accounted for the majority (53.6 per cent) of all university faculty appointments, according to data obtained through Freedom of Information requests to all 78 publicly-funded Canadian universities. The findings show that reliance on contract faculty is a foundational part of the system, and has been for at least a decade.
Illustrations by Alisha Davidson
At 11 p.m. on July 5, 2013, a 10,290-tonne train is parked on the main track on top of a hill in Nantes, a village in the southeast corner of Quebec. The night is warm, the air still. The stars shine brightly in a cloudless sky.
In Part 2 of our feature on the state of the economy 10 years after the crisis, the Monitor heads to the bank. With radical ideas for reforming finance's retail, mortgage and investing functions from John Anderson, Michal Rozworski, Kevin Young and Alper Yagci, Roxanne Dubois and Brett Scott.
Here's a sample of what you'll find inside this issue:
With the country facing significant and unpredictable headwinds going into another federal election year, the 2019 Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) shows that Canada can boost competitiveness and encourage innovation by investing in people, not by giving corporations more tax cuts.
The CCPA-BC has a long track record of producing research and policy recommendations on employment standards. We have analyzed in depth the effects of the sweeping changes made in the early 2000s to BC's Employment Standards Act that affected vulnerable workers in particular and we have identified a series of reforms that would address the problems our research exposed.
A decade after the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, a fragile recovery is obscuring threats—some new, some as old as capitalism—to Canadian workers and the broader economy. In this first part of a two-part feature on the fallout of that crisis, the Monitor looks at the financial flows, government revenue shortfalls and austerity plans that undermine our ability to handle another sudden shock.
Here's a sample of what you'll find inside this issue:
Illustration by Katie Raso
Ten years from the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, and eight after the “turn to austerity,” provides a useful vantage point. From here we can clearly see how austerity quickly succeeded the panic-driven experimentation with economic stimulus of the 2008-09 period.