By Evan Fox-Decent and Kirsten Anker

In the fall of 2021, our faculty of some 45 or so professors began building a more democratic workplace at McGill Law by creating the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL). Three years later, we are not only in a strong position to achieve our first collective agreement but have helped expand unionization to some 500 professors across McGill from the faculties of arts and education.

Our initial aims were modest: restore decision-making to the Faculty of Law after years of centralization, reverse a worrying trend of colleagues leaving McGill Law for greener pastures, and attract recruits, too many of whom were refusing our offers. We were a bit naive. We believed that because we sought to directly incorporate most of McGill’s existing regulations and policies that concern our work conditions and to focus on the few areas where we wanted change, its administrators would quickly negotiate a collective agreement with us.

We hadn’t realized that their attempt to block our union would become their principal negotiation strategy, after they lost a challenge to our accreditation at the Labour Tribunal. We were also undisciplined. We did not call on and insist on active participation from all members, leaving the work of the union to those who volunteered.

We are no longer quite so modest, naive or undisciplined. The knowledge imparted by colleagues across Canada helped us navigate a steep learning curve. As a small and newly formed union, we had no experience with member mobilization, communications or bargaining, much less running an extended strike. We became better informed about post-secondary education labour standards and the multiple ways in which McGill falls behind. We wised up to their Walmart legal strategies. And, with the invaluable counsel of veteran union advisors over the course of a mammoth 13-week strike, we became more disciplined.

We focused our activities on what worked, adjusting our tactics through trial and error. We met and discussed our strategies frequently with members, both informally on the picket line and more formally through co-working meetings. We listened to them when they told us we went too far, and we mobilized them to actively engage in reconstructing a community that had been undermined by a centralizing administration. When we were on strike, we offered teach-ins and town halls to students to keep them engaged.

Through listening, we developed new strategies, such as drastically simplifying a last-minute offer to avoid resuming our strike: we would drop our strike if McGill agreed to recognize our union and put what we had already negotiated into a collective agreement. The fact that McGill then refused cemented the view of the entire membership that McGill was determined to defeat and decertify us through a legal proceeding that had been set for December, and rallied them to pull out all the stops.

As weeks turned into months on the line, our demand for a fair collective agreement persisted, but our cri de coeur became recognition of the very right to exist as a union so that our collective voice might be heard. We learned that our fight was not just about governance and retention, but about who would have a say in the university’s future.

Through concerted job action, we eventually compelled McGill to abandon its legal challenge to our existence as a union. But that’s not all we achieved.

We also persuaded McGill to drop its opposition to the certification of the Association of McGill Professors of Education and the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts. What’s more, McGill agreed to negotiate university-wide matters with faculty unions through a confederation we are now creating, and to which other faculty unions will be welcome to join. Faculty-specific unions will bargain faculty-specific matters, and all tentative agreements on faculty-specific and university-wide matters will be subject to separate member ratification by each of the faculty-specific unions. We think this gives us both strength and autonomy — the best of both worlds!

Throughout this whole process, the national and provincial representatives of faculty unions — CAUT and the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU) — have been rivers of nourishment to us. At every turn, every week, union members from across McGill, Quebec and Canada — particularly graduate teaching assistants, course lecturers and fellow faculty unions — joined us on the picket line. The Flying Pickets from the CAUT Defence Fund went far beyond pumping up our numbers; they filled us with hope and optimism during the toughest times. And the Defence Fund otherwise ensured we had the resources to support our members, pay legal bills, and engage with our constituencies. In periods of doubt and fatigue, we drew strength from them and like-minded allies.

Unionization made us see that all of us share a common mission and that what happens at McGill affects others across the country.

After more than 13 weeks on the picket line, we have come to understand that our power comes from each other and from those who have stood with us. We are enormously proud that our journey that began with 45 law professors has facilitated the certification of two other unions and the unionization of 500 colleagues. Solidarity — crucially, the support we received from our fellow unions and associations — has been the indispensable vehicle to achieve this. The solidarity from CAUT and others is forevermore embedded in McGill University. McGill is now a union university!

Evan Fox-Decent is the president of AMPL and
Kirsten Anker is the vice-president.