The Evolution of Relations Between Management and Faculty in Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology

Abstract

Arguably, the greatest barrier to the academic development and functioning of Ontario's twenty-two Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) is the hostile and suspicion laden relationship which exists between management and the union which represents the academic staff of the CAATs -the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU).This was the conclusion of the commission on workload in the CAATs which I chaired in 1985 (IARC, 1985) and was corroborated in a study of CAAT governance by a Special Adviser to the Minister of Colleges and Universities the following year (Pitman, 1986).An indication of the degree of concern felt by the Ontario Government regarding managementunion relations in the CAATs is that the largest (in terms of time and resources) public commission on the CAATs to date has been the Colleges Collective Bargaining Commission (Gandz, 1988).Given the potential for good or harm arising from a labour relations process which impacts indirectly upon more than half a million CAAT students and clients in nearly every Ontario community of at least modest size, it is surprising how little published examination and analysis there has been of labour-management relations in the CAATs.No doubt, the paucity of writing about this facet of the CAATs is part of a larger phenomenon that is the scarcity of books and articles about the development of the CAATs.For example, Volume IV of W.G. Fleming's series, Ontario's Educative Society, published in 1971, just five years after the founding of the CAATs, is still the only book in print on the development of the CAATs; though the history of the CAATs is examined in some books on the development of community colleges in Canada, most notably Dennison and Gallagher's Canada's Community Colleges (1986).The purpose of this paper is to add to the public record regarding the development of the CAATs in general, and their labour-management relations in particular, by addressing the development of labour-management relations in the CAATs from the early years to the present.My objective is to provide not merely a descriptive treatment of the subject (though that in itself would be useful); but to attempt to present an interpretive analysis, employing the theoretical framework developed by the British Industrial Relations theorist, Alan Fox (1974).

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