BURNABY—CUPE support workers at Simon Fraser University will be holding a one-day strike at the main Burnaby campus tomorrow (Thursday) from 8am-4pm.
Tomorrow’s picketing of buildings on Burnaby Mountain will be followed by a one-day walkout at the SFU Surrey campus on Friday and a shutdown of SFU Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver on Saturday and Sunday. The Burnaby campus daycare will not be picketed.
CUPE 3338 president Lynne Fowler says the escalation in job action follows a meeting with SFU president Andrew Petter and senior university executives on Monday. “We received no indication from the administration that they are willing to return to the bargaining table to negotiate a settlement,” says Fowler. “That leaves us no alternative but to ramp up job action to pressure them to bargain in good faith until we have a deal.”
Fowler says the union members are fully behind the strike action. “They have seen inflation eat away at their wages, while senior executives enjoy big increases in compensation. After more than two years, our members are fed up with SFU’s stall tactics.”
The CUPE Local 3338 members have been without a contract since 2010. CUPE locals at several other BC universities, including UNBC, UBC, Royal Roads, and Thompson Rivers have all recently reached new collective agreements. Fowler says, “what we want to negotiate is in line with those other settlements.”
The 1,000 members of CUPE Local 3338 include SFU clerical staff, library assistants, technicians, lifeguards, financial aid advisors, building technologists, programmer analysts, buyers, stores clerks, information specialists, control clerks, and programmers.
