Strike a blow for freedom.

Classes are officially over, although I still have a couple of lessons left to teach, having been blessed this year with a chronically hoarse student. Hopefully by tomorrow she will no longer be laryngitic. It must be frustrating for her. It is certainly annoying for me.

I slept well last night, for a change, but on Tuesdays Mandy comes to clean and I had to get up earlier than is strictly civilized to let her in. She did the oven, which is nice, but she didn’t vacuum around the woodstove, which is really a weird oversight. She probably just doesn’t see the spilled ash there. Oh well, the house looks a lot better than if I were still in charge.

Later this afternoon there was a townhall meeting in to inform the members of the various faculty and staff associations of the state of negotiations for their respective collective agreements, and that they are not going well. Well, that isn’t strictly speaking true. Management is now moving forward with the staff negotiations since a conciliator was appointed, but they haven’t budged at all at the full-time faculty and librarian’s table, still insisting on clawing everything back that they were granted in the last contract, the one we won through our strike; and now it looks as though we may be striking again.

When I got home, there was already an email in my box saying that a strike vote is being held at the end of the week and I must go in person to cast my ballot. So, it could happen. This administration is more subversive than the other. The principal is trying to change the rules that run the university, and I really don’t know why. There is a trend to treat the university as though it were a business, which it really isn’t, and the professors and staff, without whom there would be no institute of higher learning, as employees of the lowest order who must be kept in their place and starved. The biggest issue is with the pension fund, and the desire on the part of management to de-index it for existing retirees who are drawing on it right now. According to Herr Doktor Professor, who is the chief negotiator for the full-time faculty and librarians, he will never sign to that.

I submitted a very short story to a contest at Elftown which can be viewed here if you have an account at that site and are logged in. If not, well, sorry.

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