I often write about the unsustainability of university finances, the lunacy of its cost base, the fact that Canadian profs are better paid than
in any public system of higher education in the world, etc. Some people have concluded from this that I am hostile to labour, or to academic unions in particular.
But that's not true. Though I do call BS on some of the sanctimonious nonsense that comes out of academic unions on the beleaguered state of
their (let's face it) quite privileged members, I cannot, and do not, blame people for banding together and bargaining in their best interests. If you want to blame anyone for our current financial predicament, try looking at the administrators who keep saying
yes to labour's demands.
Although things are slowly changing, we had a pretty serious agency problem on the management side of the bargaining table for most of the last
twenty years. While senior administrators are sometimes demonized as aliens feasting parasitically on the body of the academy, the fact is that most of them are academics themselves, and a fair number of them intend to go back to do more teaching and research
at some point. That puts them in a bit of a conflict of interest since there's a good chance that they will eventually end up in the bargaining unit with whom they're negotiating. And it's not as if they're negotiating with their own money - if they give
away too much, they can always lobby government for more money, or higher permissible fee increases, right?
