The president of the teachers’ union at Loyalist College is surprised with the relatively low level of support for faculty going on strike.
Fifty-seven percent of the teachers at the province’s 24 community colleges voted yesterday in favour of walking off the job if a new contract isn’t reached for the nine-thousand OPSEU members.
Six of the colleges voted against the strike, but Local 4-20 President Bernard Belanger says there is no doubt about the support at Loyalist, where almost one-hundred per cent of the full time faculty cast ballots, and the strike support was the highest he can remember. He says some of the 43 per cent of the teachers who voted against strike action may not have felt threatened by the contract imposed by the colleges last November, and didn’t realize the schools could make changes to their collective agreement in the future if they felt they were necessary..
