a very good morning to all CAAT-A college faculty!

& an absolutely terrible morning to whoever put together this trash fire of corporate lies for the CEC! i...can't even believe someone wrote these bullet points with a straight face

hey CEC, let me fix ALL of these for you:

i've tweeted about it a fair bit already, but i modeled & textured almost every object in "i don't think i've walked this stretch of road before" in #crocotile3d, an exceedingly rad #lowpoly, tile-based 3D design tool by @SpectreSkully

#GameMaker #gamedev coming from a 2d #pixelart context, constructing volumes *from* tiles was remarkably accessible. as i got a lil more comfortable, distorting & dividing geometry & watching the ensuing texture chaos was a great way to learn more about uvs, etc

one of the common reservations i've heard about supporting continued labor action against ontario college management is that the terms of the CEC's upcoming "offer of settlement" (read: forced offer vote) don't seem *that bad*

let's dig into this a little: without wanting to restate the obvious, the most fundamental issue here is that this "offer" was NOT obtained through bargaining;

it was unilaterally drafted by a corporate management body that has repeatedly refused compromise on ANY key issue raised by faculty union reps

i don't want celebrities talking to me about mental health. they're figureheads of capitalism & individualism. they cannot, by definition, care about the collective good. i want my friends & family & neighbors & colleagues talking to me about mental health -- theirs, mine, ours. i completely appreciate that rich powerful people also have emotional struggles; i hope they can find support where it makes sense for them. but i have no interest in the paper thin care discourses of millionaires whose public image is a celebration of the unattainable

well, the CEC has gone and played the last, crumpled, worthless card in their bag of union-busting tricks: a forced offer vote

surprising absolutely no one, it's empty of compromise, self-satisfied in all the wrong ways, & extremely dangerous to faculty, students, & colleges some colleges have already sent the "offer of settlement" to their employees (clotting up institutional channels as usual, as if management's communiques are simply statements of fact and not CEC propaganda)

if you haven't seen it:

collegeemployercouncil.ca/en/bargaining/…

apparently the CEC felt the need to blast college faculty with a weekend email full of the same chest-puffing truth-distortion that is rapidly becoming their exclusive brand

why are they so determined to bypass the bargaining table? why won't they negotiate in good faith? the CEC is no longer maintaining even a pretense of negotiation. their only tactic at this point is to suggest that if CAAT-A is fully confident in their proposals, they should be willing to risk everything in a win-lose vote with the arbitrator

this isn’t open & honest, it’s just more meritocratic mythmaking that sidesteps all the other structural prejudice & bottom-line thinking that pushes people out of these spaces before they even get started

https://twitter.com/JLHGameArt/status/1464055874444578817

maybe, MAYBE if you’re speaking in purely technical terms, it’s worth having a conversation about skill-level expectations, but it’s impossible to separate these from the economic & cultural conditions these industries are premised on

college faculty, friends, allies: looks like another email just came down the chain from the CEC

the big reveal is: it's just more aggression

to be honest, this one confused me for a minute. luckily, there are some kind folks helping to keep me sorted! thanks for that!

anyhow, what threw me off is that the CEC appears to finally be offering something the union has been calling for since last week: voluntary binding arbitration

this is a process where a arbitrator agreed upon by both parties is called in to help assemble the new collective agreement

hey hi folks who followed me for OPSEU/CAAT-A stuff; thanks! i also tweet about other things you may/may not find interesting;

to preserve a bit of order, here's a thread of union/bargaining-related threads; i'll keep adding to it until faculty win a better collective agreement

https://twitter.com/bryinlyin/status/1462118424386191360?s=20

it *could* have been a quiet morning, but the CEC decided to bombard college faculty with another blast of management propaganda

the CEC is desperate to convince you that their proposals are "reasonable" & "neutral" where CAAT-A's are unlawful & arbitrary

but it's just not true the CEC is fixated on Bill 124, which they claim the union's proposal's "violate"

but Bill 124 is a simply a provincial cap on salary increases & public spending, which CAAT-A has already publicly accepted the (politically dubious, but that's another story) limits of

i want to return to two of the most important sites of tension in CAAT-A's struggle to bring the CEC back to the bargaining table:

part-time faculty & intellectual property

believe it or not, these issues are much more related than they might seem at first i've already tried to speak a bit to the CEC's long term agenda for the ontario college system -- an aggressive shift towards privatization, "micro-credentials" (basically corporate certificates), and deep devaluing of faculty labor & student education

normalizing mass death is not the same thing as ending mass death so many of the people arguing "we just have to live with covid now" are either hugely structurally insulated from it or unable to avoid it *because* of people who are hugely insulated from it

the (racist, classist, ableist) persistence of the pandemic is not inevitable

college faculty bargaining update!

today, the CEO of the College Employer Council (which represents management/the province) sent an "open letter" to OPSEU/CAAT-A (the faculty union)

it's as bad as you expect. read on if you want to get your blood boiling this chilly afternoon: here's the letter. i'm reluctant to drag it into the light of day, but for transparency's sake you're welcome to suffer through it yourself:

collegeemployercouncil.ca/en/news/letter…

i'm going to focus on two things: 1) why it's pure management propaganda, & 2) how to turn it against the CEC

i know a lot of ppl (myself included) who've gone through an ontario college video game/narrative design/digital arts program

whether you're a current or former student, if you missed my thread this weekend, please know that college faculty need your support *right now* for the sake of not repeating myself (much as i love to), here's the original thread:

https://twitter.com/bryinlyin/status/1462118424386191360?s=20

ok, this time with feeling:

if you're an ontario college student or, yknow, just *in* ontario, you might know that unionized college faculty (OPSEU CAAT-A) are currently bargaining with the College Employer Council (CEC) for a new collective agreement if you're not familiar with organized labor, unions, management, etc. this might feel over your head or irrelevant, or you might have preconceptions about either side of the bargaining table from things you've read or heard