The University of Toronto and CUPE 3902, which represents student and contract teaching staff on campus, are currently negotiating new collective bargaining agreements. Negotiations seem to have stalled, however, and Units 1 (mainly TAs) and 3 (mainly sessional lecturers) are readying for a possible strike. At a townhall last Wednesday, BASICS caught up with two union reps.

Erin Black is the Chair of CUPE 3902 and the chief negotiator for Unit 3. Ryan Culpepper is the Vice-Chair for Units 1 & 2 and the chief negotiator for Unit 1.

Interview with Ryan Culpepper and Erin Black, 11 February 2015

BASICS: Is the University stonewalling you guys? I’ve talked to a few Unit 1 members, and it kind of sounds like that.

Ryan Culpepper: I think that’s fair, yeah. I think they’re doing the bare minimum that they can do and not run into trouble with the Ministry of Labour.

BASICS: And why do you think they’re pursuing that tactic?

RC: I don’t know, I mean—

Erin Black: They have claimed, and there is some truth to this, but how much truth is the question, virtually every unionised group on campus is bargaining this year, so they have been trying to kind of prioritise things or schedule things, and there’s only so many of them, uh, so they say. I have some—there is some truth to that, absolutely.

RC: Though they themselves negotiated the terms of the agreement, so like the fact they all expire in the same year is something that they themselves have set up.

EB: And they’ve known that we’ve been coming for three years, and could have, in my humble opinion, prepared for, better than they did, in terms of, ‘I’m sorry, we just don’t have any dates for you, ’cause we have to go talk to, uh, whoever.

RC: But right now they’re not meeting with us and there’s no other unions bargaining, it’s just us and they’re still not meeting with us.

BASICS: So most of the agreements have already been made, for the other unions.

RC: Yeah, the other two biggest are done, Steelworkers and another big CUPE local.

BASICS: So, in terms of [Unit 3] membership, there’s sessional Instructors, like Rank 1, Rank 2, Rank 3?

EB: Yeah we call it sessional lecturer 1, sessional lecturer 2, sessional lecturer 3, or SL 1, 2, 3.

BASICS: So how many people are in Unit 3 of CUPE 3902?

EB: Unit 3 represents approximately a thousand individuals, that’s sessional lecturers, writing instructors, we have some hourly paid employees who are musical professionals, but the bulk of the membership is sessional lecturers.

BASICS: And what percentage of the sessional lecturers would you say are SL1’s?

EB: Oh, the majority.

BASICS: And I think you said there were, 44–

EB: There were exactly 44 who have hit that brass ring of guaranteed work [this refers to SL3’s having guaranteed positions].

BASICS: And do you know how many SL2’s there are?

EB: You know what, if you give me a minute I actually ran these numbers for our bargaining team, if you give me a second.
[Reading from phone]: So there are 440 SL1’s, 120 SL2’s, and, sorry, 45 SL3’s, we have a new one this term.

BASICS: Moving up in the world. And so, the rate at which an SL 1 is paid per course is $7500?

EB: The SL1 is $7,125[per course], the SL2 is going to be…I can’t pull the exact figure out but it’s going to be around $7500, um, and SL3’s would be about $7900.

BASICS: And they are guaranteed four half-courses?

EB: Four, yep.

BASICS: No guarantee for SL2’s, but just preferred hiring.

EB: Just hiring preference.

BASICS: Is there a maximum, I don’t know if you mentioned this earlier, for the maximum number of courses—

EB: That you can teach? No. If you get to SL3 they owe you four; you can apply for work on top of that, and if you get it you can have it; but after 8 years of service, at least 8 years of service to the University, after having taught at essentially that course load, that 2/2 load, that’s how we refer to it, for at least 3 years, and after having been deemed ‘superior’ not once but twice, the university owes you what amounts to a gross salary of around $35 000. After all of the stuff you’ve got to get. And I might add, that commitment was not permanent, we successfully have achieved that in this round of bargaining. It was time-bound to each collective agreement, and in this round of negotiations they have now agreed to make it non-negotiable.

BASICS: Do you have a lot of people who are sessional lecturers for very long periods of time who aren’t moving up?

EB: We do, we have a classification called ‘SL1 Long-Term’, uh, so those people don’t have hiring preference but they get like a hundred bucks extra pay in honour of their at least six years of service to UofT.

BASICS: Do you have any idea how many people are in that category?

EB: That’s actually a small category, ’cause most people do advance, um, I think it’s probably about twenty or so who are at the long-term rank, most advance, but for—the reason some of these people, I’ve asked them, like, ‘you qualify for advancement, why don’t you do it?’ and the most common response I get back is, uh, ‘the process [of teaching review to be able to move up in level] is too intensive for the outcome; I have to go through all of these hoops, for what amounts to just a smidgen more pay, and a hiring preference, which is a good thing, but which may or may not matter because the course may not exist in the future anyhow.

RC: Also increasingly they’re screwing with the advancement process. Like, they’re denying more people advancement, and they’re doing weird things, like just as someone’s about to reach the threshold for an advancement review, they’ll pull their courses—

EB: ‘Oops, we don’t need your course this year!’

RC: —yeah, they’ll pull their courses so that they can’t reach the threshold to be reviewed for advancement.

EB: They’ll tell you that it was just, you know, curricular changes necessitating that.

RC: There’s lovely coincidences out there.

BASICS: Right, ‘changes in the historiography necessitate the end of your course.’
What’s the–do you have a rough idea of how many sessional instructorships there are offered in a year versus the new tenure track positions which would sort of, be offered? What would you say the ratio is?

EB: That’s a bit harder to answer. UofT is a little different than other institutions, so the growth rate of tenure-track positions—there was a study done by the Higher Education Council for Ontario…which investigated a bunch of universities in Ontario. At UofT, which is different than other institutions…there has been greater sessional growth than tenure growth, but UofT has also created a bunch of ‘teaching-stream’ positions, so full-time, permanent benefits, all that sort of stuff, represented by the faculty association, so those guys are higher than us, but less than the tenure-stream. And at other Ontario institutions…who aren’t doing this, it’s basically like, tenure [gesture to show tiny increase], sessional [gesture to show large increase]. But UofT has this weird sort of blip because of these teaching-stream positions that have been created, that are full-time positions; we’re thrilled to see them, [but] our long-serving members often don’t get hired into them; so you’ve created a teaching-stream position, and instead of affording it to the individual who’s been doing that work for five, six, seven, whatnot years, chances are it’s not going to go that person.

BASICS: So, these are full time positions, but they’re not professorships.

EB: Their rank system is ‘lecturer–senior lecturer’, but they are full time positions, they are continuing positions, they come with benefits and pensions and they are represented by the Faculty Association. But because they’re ‘teaching-stream’, they’re not ‘assistant, associate, full professor’, which has a much greater research requirement; so that’s the difference.
And then there’s us: the course-by-course-by-course.

BASICS: What’s the average TAship in terms of hours? How many hours is the average contract?

RC: Probably an average contract would be about 140 hours for a semester or 280 for a year.

EB: I can tell you in my department, for any incoming new student…they work very hard to make sure they do not get over the 205 hours [beyond which T.A.s are paid at the rate of $42.05/hour; under this threshold, their remuneration is considered to be made up by the $15 000 stipend which all PhD students receive]. This year I have two T.A.’s who were brand new students who were each capped at the 205.

BASICS: And that’s why they kind of start having contracts where you don’t have any remuneration for–

RC: Yeah they trim the hours so that they don’t have to pay you the hourly rate. When you get offered a job, you get offered a job that is for a certain number of hours. And then you have to sit down with the supervisor and go through the breakdown of the hours. So that’s where the process happens of saying, ‘you’re going to get so many hours for marking, so many hours for office hours–

EB: So many hours for actual class time.

BASICS: So this may be anecdotal, but in your experience, does it tend to be in situations where they’re trying very hard to make sure that a TA doesn’t get a contract for more than 205 hours, where they tend to have these, sort of, more brutal regimes where you don’t have any time to talk to students, where you don’t have any time to hold office hours, that kind of thing?

RC: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how it is all over the university, I only know in departments where I’ve worked, I’ve seen big trimmings on contact time and prep time. That’s where they’re trimming back hours.

BASICS: And so, because course instructors are salaried, I assume there’s no–I don’t know, do you have an average of how many hours a sessional lecturer will spend working on a course?

EB: We did a survey of our members and asked that question; most said, if you were to add it up, the whole course, from start to finish, creation to delivery and marking and all that, most said that it’s probably at least 250 hours from start to finish. Interesting fun fact: for employment insurance purposes, a course is only credited at 230 hours.
And it really does vary. For instance I mentioned earlier, I teach a fourth-year seminar; because there’s no lecturing in that course, it’s straight up student discussion, and there’s fifteen students, it’s less labour-intensive than a course that I prepare lectures for. And the first time you’re preparing lectures for a course, it probably takes an average of maybe 8–10 hours to write one single lecture; so what gets spoken to the students in 2 hours takes probably 8–10 hours to actually draft. That first year I taught I actually kept track of my hours, and then I divided it by the stipend, and I was making below minimum wage. Because we’re not paid on an hourly basis; we’re paid like, ‘here’s a stipend.’ TA’s get this, Ryan referred to it, this Description of Duties and Allocation that breaks it down, x hours for this, x hours for that. I get a letter that says, ‘Dear Dr. Black, we’re hiring you to teach this, there are 24 hours of lecture in this course and one hour of office hours per week, and you will be paid x,’ which is the stipend, and x includes everything, from creating the syllabus, picking the readings, delivering the lectures, meeting with students, grading the students, or if I have TAs working for me, supervising the TAs—it’s kit and caboodle for them, it’s all part of delivering the course, so it’s one stipend.

BASICS: Can you tell us where the bargaining process is at?

EB: Sure. Both units are in similar spots actually; we’ve both filed for conciliation, which Ryan mentioned, that happened in December, we did it on the same day, that’s the process where you involve the Ministry of Labour. Both teams have now, after a meeting in conciliation, requested what’s called a ‘No Board’ Report, it’s a labour term basically. The upshot of that is when that report is issued, that starts a clock ticking, a 17-day clock, at the end of which puts either the union in a legal strike position or the employer in a legal lockout position. Both Units 1 and 3 have asked for the report that is now ticking down to a legal action on either side. But both have more dates to meet, [to Ryan] you have–

RC: Four.

EB: Four dates scheduled between now and the strike deadline, uh, the ticking clock ending, and we so far have the one additional date that they offered at 2 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

BASICS: And I guess in your experience, or in the experience of the union, is that–are four dates or one date a realistic amount of time to get an agreement?

That one’s harder to answer, I think what’s more telling is that Unit 1—what have you had now, a total of what, 14—maybe—dates? In the last round of Unit 1 bargaining [during the 2011–2012 school year], well before they even got to conciliation, they had like 25 dates.

RC: We had 18 even before our strike vote last time.

EB: Yeah, and this time there were like 6 or something. So it’s—at the end of things, processes can move or they can stall, that’s sort of amorphous, but—

RC: I mean, they know what it would take to get an agreement, right?

EB: Yes.

RC: They know what it would take to get an agreement, they’ve known since Day 1, so it could take one day, but that’s not the way that they bargain, so I mean, is timing a concern? Yeah, definitely.

BASICS: So, you mentioned the role of the province, the Ministry of Labour mediator, in the process, how helpful has that been? I don’t know what the specifics of that mediator role are.

EB: It’s up to the parties. So, sometimes the conciliator, he’s called a conciliator at this [earlier] stage, although now he’s a mediator, because both of us have filed the No Board Reports, he or she can do different things. Sometimes the parties sit in separate rooms and he or she shuttles back and forth, sometimes the parties meet face to face and the conciliator’s in the room, to sort of hear both sides, so it’s really up to the parties how they do it.

RC: And the Ministry of Labour employs conciliators in the first place for one purpose, which is to prevent strikes. That is their job. Their job is to prevent labour unrest in the province, so they come into the process, to sort of bash both sides on the heads and get them to come to an agreement. And so they go the employer and say, ‘Listen these guys are serious they’re gonna strike, you should be scared, give them what they want,’ and then they come to the union and they’re like, ‘Dudes they’re ready, they’re ready for you they’re gonna squash it you can’t go out you have to take the deal,’ like that’s their job, so you know. I don’t begrudge them for doing that job, but you have to recognise, I guess on both sides, what that is.

BASICS: I guess was just trying to get at—what kind of help from the province can you get, I mean, it doesn’t really sound like much if at all.

RC: I think the conciliator—the conciliators I’ve worked with in the past and our conciliator now, they’re usually quite aggressive, they really try to get you to make movement, draw proposals, that kind of thing. And that’s annoying and you have to develop your own way of dealing with them, but the good part is they also do that to the employer. I have found the ones I’ve worked with to be quite neutral in how they—all they want to do is prevent a strike, so they’ll be aggressive with both parties if it means, you know, getting you to sign a contract, so that is sometimes helpful.

BASICS: I wanted to ask about the solidarity between the two sections of the union: how did that come about, and is that rare, I guess? Do they often work together in collective bargaining? And also, it seems as though the University, if they’re closer to making a deal with Unit 3, then they might—is there a possibility that they would then use that against the TAs? Because it’s a lot harder to do a strike for just the TAs, right?

RC: Yeah.

EB: Well they’re a lot bigger though, I mean, much bigger, 6 000 to 1 000. So I think size takes away that sort of differentiality.

RC: I think it’d be more like, um, sessionals are—I mean, I’m learning from going out to events like this and talking to journalists, and sessionals are a more sympathetic crew; people like sessionals. So that’s great, um, so I think if sessionals [Unit 3] settled before we [Unit 1] did, I think the damage that it would do to us would be more like, ‘well, we always thought you were a bunch of unreasonable, radical students anyway, that nobody could deal with, and look, like the sane people, the people who will listen to reason settled; you’re on just some crazy crusade,’ and you sort of then lose the war of public opinion.

EB: I don’t disagree with Ryan, I think that would be the perception out there; what’s behind the scenes, though, is that for—[the University] are not making movement for Unit 1; they are making movement for Unit 3, and I’m not saying it’s enough—

RC: Oh yeah, fair enough, I think they’re absolutely trying to set themselves up to do exactly that, so that they can take, you know, frankly the more politicised Unit and give them a lot less, by giving some crumbs to the one that looks more sympathetic.

BASICS: But my impression is that Unit 1 is not asking for a lot—you said something like, a raise [to the guaranteed minimum funding package] of a few thousand dollars is not even going to put you above the poverty line—that doesn’t seem like an insane amount to—

RC: I don’t think it’s insane at all, but I think they would like to paint us as entitled, greedy—

EB: And what they’ll focus in on, and this is focused in on by student news coverage at UofT, is the $42.05/hour rate. Which is like, ‘Oh my God, you make that much? What are you complaining about?

RC: I did an interview with the Star today, and like, that’s all, I could not get her off the wage, that’s all she wanted to talk about.

BASICS: What would both of you want to say to people about the positions of your Units of the union?

EB: Well first of all, we are separate units, we have separate agreements, but we’re the same union, to come to your question about solidarity…we are CUPE 3902. So, we’re looking out for each other, to the extent that we can, we brought joint language, um, around common issues, which really freaked them out, ’cause this is the first time we bargained at the same time, normally it’s been one ahead of the other—

BASICS: So this is the first time that’s happened?

EB: Yeah, so that really freaked them out, and Ryan for Unit 1 came to the Unit 3 table, and they’re all like, [miming shock]—

RC: They spent an hour arguing whether I should be there or not.

EB: —it’s like, ‘what’s, what’s going on here?’

RC: They’re very very scared of the idea of collaboration. They said to me at that time, they said like, ‘You are the negotiator for Unit 1, how dare you try to bring that leverage to bear at this table!’ you know, like they are very scared of the idea of [collaboration]. I think the thing that is shared, and I hope it makes everyone equally sympathetic, but I’ll say this definitely about Unit 1 members, like I see, I’m out at info sessions and town halls all the time, and member department meetings, like, people are broke, they’re broke and they’re overworked and they’re exhausted and they’re exasperated, and the reason we are where we are is they feel like they’re out of options. So I think that’s shared with Unit 3.

EB: Oh it’s absolutely shared with Unit 3, equally as broke, equally as stressed. Have you heard of ‘Rhodes scholars’, right, like the impressive scholarship for Oxford, there’s a take on it, ‘Roads scholar’…because sessionals are always on the road so much, working at like a gazillion different campuses… One of our bargaining team members like goes to Peterborough for Trent, to teach. We have people who work on our campus who come in from as far away as London and Kingston and stuff like that. So yes, absolutely, the common ground is that whether you’re a graduate student education worker or somebody who has actually crossed the floor and gotten your PhD, we are similarly in the same economic boat.

BASICS: Living paycheck to paycheck.

EB: While being asked to do an incredibly important job, which is undergraduate education.

BASICS: What can students and the public do to mobilise or show solidarity?

EB: If the university can be told in no unequivocal terms, ‘We’re on their side,’ that’s going to be worrisome in Simcoe Hall.

* * *

You can follow updates from CUPE 3902 on Twitter at @cupe3902 or on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CUPE3902

Tensions are running high at the University of Toronto between administrators and CUPE 3902, the union which represents 7000 T.A.s and sessional lecturers on three UofT campuses.

During 2014, Units 1 and 3 of CUPE 3902 both had their collective bargaining agreements with the university expire. However, the University has shown little interest in negotiating new ones. In the face of intransigence from administrators, both Units have set a strike date of February 27. If collective bargaining agreements are not successfully signed by then, a large part of the teaching activities at UofT will temporarily cease.

A townhall held last Wednesday night at the George Ignatieff theatre, just south of Bloor and St. George, clarified the issues. Originally, it was organised as a forum for both CUPE and University representatives to explain their positions. A mere two days before the event, however, the University e-mailed organisers and notified them that it was refusing to participate. The peculiar reason provided was that “[negotiations] have not reached an impasse.”

This statement appears to bear little relation to reality. CUPE representatives Erin Black and Ryan Culpepper say that the University is resisting setting meeting dates on which both sides can negotiate.

“They’ve claimed [that] virtually every unionised group on campus is bargaining this year,” said Black in an interview, “[but] they’ve known that we’ve been coming for three years, and could have prepared better.”

Culpepper added: “But right now they’re not meeting with us and there’s no other unions bargaining. It’s just us and they’re still not meeting with us.”

Far fewer meeting dates have been set during this round of negotiations than in previous years. But so far it’s unclear why the university is uninterested in negotiating.

Empty chairs at empty tables: UofT representatives neglected to even show up on Wednesday.

Units 1 and 3 of CUPE 3902 are composed of different parties. Unit 1, with about 6000 members, represents mostly teaching assistants, who are almost all either graduate or undergraduate students at the University. Unit 3, with about 1000 members, primarily represents sessional lecturers.

Labour conditions for workers in both Units are no longer tenable. A minimum funding package for all PhD students at the University was won during the last CUPE 3902 strike in 2000, according to organisers. But this $15 000 per year stipend falls well short of the poverty line in this city, estimated at $23 000 per year.

“People are broke,” said Culpepper, “they’re broke and they’re overworked and they’re exhausted and they’re exasperated….they feel like they’re out of options.”

Despite inflation and rising tuition costs, it has been seven years since the last funding package increase. Furthermore, the package runs out after five years, forcing many students to search for other sources of funding. The goal of CUPE Unit 1 bargainers, therefore, is simply to get their members above the poverty line.

Sessional instructors, members of Unit 3, make on average about $7500 per half-year course they teach. If they manage to teach two courses per semester, which demands hours equivalent to a full-time job, they can make about $30 000 per year, plus a meagre $300 in benefits.

During the question period at the townhall, one speaker observed that the highest-paid person at the University (Jim Moriarty, who manages the UofT asset corporation) makes $750 000 per year, while President Meric Gertler, who because of his position has a residence provided by the University rent-free, makes over $400 000 per year.

Another student commented on the similar quality of instruction provided by sessional lecturers compared to tenured professors. She had taken a philosophy course one year from a tenured prof, and sat in on a lecture for the same course a year after, finding the experience “pretty much the same.” But, she pointed out, the University had to pay that professor almost $300 000 the year he taught that course, and only $7500 to the person who taught it a year later. “That’s not equal pay for equal work.”

The University’s media division did not respond when reached out to for comment.

Concerned residents and community members gathered at a vigil on Christmas eve for Jermaine Carby, a Brampton man who was shot and killed by Peel Regional Police three months earlier.  The gathering rallied about 50 members at the location of Carby’s murder, near Queen and Kennedy, where members of the Justice for Jermaine Carby Campaign along with friends, family, activists, and community members participated in an hour long blockade of the busy Brampton intersection.

Carby’s cousin La Tanya Grant, a lead member of the Justice for Jermaine campaign, stated that the vigil was held, “to bring awareness, to let [police] know that we are not going to stop, that we are going to keep coming in the media eye to demand answers for Jermaine.”

Carby was shot on September 24, shortly after being stopped by police for undisclosed reasons. Witnesses have stated that he had his hands up or was slowly approaching the officer who shot him, claims consistent with the gunshot wound to his inner left forearm which his autopsy indicated.

Grant spoke about his death as a personal tragedy, but also emphasised that it was only one moment in the red record of the Peel Police.

“A young man died and nothing is happening,” said Brampton resident Amuna, who went to highschool with Michael Wade Lawson, the 17-year-old who was also shot and killed by Peel Region Police officers in 1988 in the back of the head by an illegal 38-calibre slug known as a “hot bullet” which expands on contact, banned in Ontario by the Ontario Police Act.  Lawson’s murder, and the mass protests it set off, contributed to the creation of the S.I.U. a couple years later.

But nearly a quarter century later, organizers with the Justice for Jermaine campaign see little use for the S.I.U. except to “cover up” police actions, and put families on ice while community anger dissipates. Among the demands of the campaign included, disbanding the S.I.U., which organizers brought up “clears officers of wrongdoing at a rate of 98%.” The campaign is also demanding:

• That the name of the officer who shot Carby be released.
• That the name of the person in whose vehicle Carby was a passenger be released.
• Immediate public disclosure of whether a knife was recovered at the scene.

Police cruisers quickly showed up. They attempted to isolate the vigil by blocking off the roads around the intersection, but met with limited success for some time. While two or three drivers expressed anger at the vigil participants, uttering death threats to organizers right in front of Peel police, many others joined in, and some passersby shouted encouragement.

An inconvenienced driver threatens to the cops that he “run ’em over” if protestors are not removed by the police, while flailing his arms in the cops’ faces. How many people of colour could get away with uttering death threats and aggressively approaching the police? As one protestor mockingly hollered at this perturbed little man, “Hang on buddy, you’ll get to have that eggnog soon enough!” #white privilege #white terror 

One protester, who saw Jermaine like a big brother told BASICS, “I was homeless and he gave me a home. This was the kind of person he was… He helped me find a place… Why did they take him from me? He was my older brother and I love him so much, and I will not forget him.”

“Sabey” – being interviewd by BASICS correspondent Steve da Silva.

After almost an hour, the intersection was clear in all four directions but for the police roadblocks. The campaign organizers, buoyed by the strong impression they had made and the solidarity the participants had shown, thanked everyone in attendance. Shortly before the end of the vigil, a CityTV team showed up, but did not speak to any of the participants, and quickly left when it became clear that things were winding down. No other major media outlet was present.

For a video essay of the rally, see the following video

On October 29, 2014, Sportchek in a partnership with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (the Raptors owners) launched an advertising and publicity campaign called #MyNorth asking Torontonians to share stories about local basketball culture in the various Toronto ‘hoods. The campaign builds off of Drake’s re-branding of the Toronto Raptors earlier this year, with his #WeTheNorth campaign, which included an intelligent and extremely well-produced television advertisement featuring basketball courts largely located in social housing projects throughout Toronto.

The #MyNorth campaign seeks to implement the ideas developed in the initial Raptors re-brand marketing that centered around attempting to get people who identify with the local basketball culture to begin to associate this culture with the Raptors themselves.  Torontonians have never really identified the Raptors as somehow defining or even influencing the local basketball culture, unlike some basketball meccas like New York with the Knicks and Chicago with the Bulls where local basketball cultures are strongly influenced by their NBA teams.  In New York, the Knicks are almost considered to be part of the city’s identity and history, much like the Yankees.

While the new #WeTheNorth campaign is attempting to develop a similar identification with the Raptors in Toronto basketball culture, the campaign has made some surprising mistakes in understanding the very nature of basketball culture and how this culture is viewed by those who participate in it.

Bathurst Heights basketball courts built on the surface of old tennis courts in 2004 with a donation of $20,000 from Nike in honour of Phil Dixon. It say a lot about the #MyNorth campaign that it is being launched in the winter when all outdoor courts are frozen as in this picture. It is clearly scheduled to coincide with the start of the NBA season as well as the high school basketball season.

These mistakes are surprising only because of how savvy the initial Raptors rebrand of #WeTheNorth was, with it being obvious to many that Drake’s knowledge of Toronto’s culture and geography, having grown up in Toronto’s west end in Vaughan and Oakwood and Forest Hill, was the factor that led to the success of the initial campaign and its relatability to Torontonians. Some of the mistakes of the #MyNorth campaign would suggest a lesser degree of creative control from Drake or really anyone who understands basketball culture or geography in Toronto.

Thus far, the new campaign features billboards, several television advertisements as well as the Twitter hashtag itself, which has apparently received little use by actual Torontonians.  Mostly it’s been used to post scores of Raptors wins by Sportchek employees as well as several video ads telling local basketball stories. For example, a video was posted that told the story of a former Toronto high school player named Denham Brown who scored 111 points in his last high-school game in 2001 before going on to play for the University of Connecticut. Another ad tells the story of Phil Dixon, a former Bathurst Heights basketball star in the late 1980s, who was pegged to be a star in the NBA but never played a game at that level due to an injury early in his college career.

There is another video advertisement being used by #MyNorth that talks about the campaign in general and attempts to get the general concept across, and has a very similar message to the videos focused on Dixon and Brown, focusing on individual stars on high-school teams and Toronto’s ‘hoods as producers of potential basketball stars who may be one of the few to make it from rags-to-riches and become superstars or ‘heroes’, as the video openly states.

The problem with all of these videos is that they fail to actually talk about the basketball culture of any of the ‘hoods they are supposedly focused on.  They instead tell stories about individual stars in the context of their school-based careers and their school-based teams and not their ‘hoods recreational basketball history and the broader basketball culture in which they honed their skills and style growing up.

The video about Phil Dixon, the former Bathurst Heights star, produced for #MyNorth doesn’t even mention the existence of Lawrence Heights once, though the public basketball courts at Bathurst Heights (now John Polanyi Collegiate Institute) are generally recognized as some of the most interesting in Toronto in terms of the diversity of ages, abilities and ethnicities of players to play there over the years, as well as the sometimes surprisingly high quality of games to be played on these fairly dusty and poorly maintained recreational courts that were actually rebuilt nearly a decade ago with money from the Raptors and Nike in honour of Dixon himself. A lot of the culture around these courts comes out of Lawrence Heights, with youth who use the courts generally feeling that they belong to those who live in Lawrence Heights and the surrounding areas.

There has often been a degree of hostility among area youth to anyone from Keele and Eglinton, the centre of another distinct urban youth culture that is also connected to particular basketball courts located at a nearby recreation center. While both of these somewhat distinct recreational basketball cultures are located partially around a high school, this does not mean that these teams are central to these cultures.  Rather, there is an overall recreational basketball culture around the student populations of these high schools that goes way beyond the actual team and is sometimes almost unrelated. While some people do occasionally play basketball in both areas, this is quite rare, partially for the reasons mentioned above.

In the above analysis of these localized basketball cultures I did not once mention North York or York, the respective old Metro Toronto municipalities in which the two areas are located. However, the #MyNorth campaign bases itself off of these old municipal-legal divisions of Metro Toronto rather than actual neighbourhoods. They effectively call all of North York, Scarborough and old Toronto ‘neighbourhoods’ despite the fact that they all contain many distinct neighbourhoods with very different basketball cultures that have little in common with each other and basically no relations or overlap. It is unknown why they did this, though it seems that this was done solely because the campaign was designed by people who know very little about Toronto basketball culture or Toronto in general, and just looked at a map of the old Metro Toronto municipal divisions. It is this particular flaw of the campaign that would suggest that Drake has had very little creative control or even oversight in it.

Another reason for their choice of the old metro divisions may be their privileging of school basketball teams, with these divisions making somewhat more sense when it comes to high-school basketball competition between schools than actual basketball culture as a whole. There are, of course, larger problems with their centering of basketball culture in school basketball teams, which in my own experience, at Northern Secondary School involved major contradictions between the players and an old, white, racist and classist coach whom the players suspected of playing games with the line-up based on racial competition between the black and white players. The are are also many good players who never even try out for their high school teams, don’t have good enough grades to play or drop out of high school altogether.

Despite the failings of #MyNorth, they are doing some interesting things that warrant our attention. They claim to be making basketball culture documentaries on each of the ‘neighbourhoods’ of Toronto and doing area-specific clothing launches, with all of this supposedly being based on input from local residents who actually know basketball culture. While we can already see that they probably won’t do this very effectively and we know that they are only doing it to make a buck at the end of the day, there is something interesting about their ‘engagement’ with the community that warrants further investigation.

Their campaign involves a strategy that is called community engagement or public participation in the corporate and government world, which resembles a kind of caricature of some of the strategies organizers have developed to organize communities. These strategies generally involve going to people where they are, understanding their issues, consciousness and stories, and then coming back to them with some kind of plan, political program or project based on this and continuing the process.

Of course, #MyNorth will only end up selling people branded merchandise with a slightly more local flavour, not giving people a plan to improve local conditions or get them involved in changing the hoods and larger society that they live in. That corporate institutions have developed such strategies and are trying to implement them is part of the ongoing battle for Toronto and its neighbourhoods.

Michael grew up playing on several courts in the area before the Bathurst Heights courts were built, though many of them have been rebuilt and relocated or closed to the public, specifically one at a private hebrew school that is now secured by high fences and a complex alarm system. He is one of a small number of people to still play basketball on outdoor public courts in his 20’s, and has put in a lot of hours playing at the Bathurst Heights courts since 2004. He has probably seen three ‘generations’ of court regulars come and go in this time. 

To listen to this episode by clicking the SoundCloud box to the right side of your window, or visit https://soundcloud.com/basics-news/1-dec-2014-radio-basics.

Immigrant workers are the first to experience the shift in the labour market towards an increase in temporary work, and the reduction of permanent jobs with benefits and legally enforceable health, safety and labour standards.  Many immigrant workers obtain temporary jobs through agencies that are unregulated and fly-by-night.  R’s experiences shed light on the difficulties that temporary agency workers in Montreal face, difficulties that create what he described as “a kind of super-stress.”

R came to Canada from Mexico in 2008 and obtained different kinds of jobs through agencies: cleaning trays in a bakery, general cleaning work, jobs clearing snow and ice.  When we asked him about safety conditions on the job he said, “Well, the degree of safety that I’ve had is basically nil.”  He described “clearing snow at a height of three metres on slippery icy roofs…without safety equipment, cleats, cords, harnesses” for the temporary workers. “At the other end, people that were insured, who worked directly for the company, the whole team was provided with helmets, cleats, harnesses, special tools and special clothing for the cold, and meanwhile all we had was rubber boots.”  R left that job but he told us, “One of my buddies fell, fractured his clavicle, and was incapacitated for two or three months.”

R eventually did suffer a serious workplace injury: “The injury that I had was caused by a fall on a production line, on a conveyor belt. We didn’t have access to the controls for the machines, so people had accustomed themselves to jumping the belt. There was no other way, because shutting down the machine would slow things down and cause problems with production. One of the security railings was loose…I fell on my head, and remained unconscious for a few moments. And there, I don’t remember… After what happened, there was no ambulance called. They sent me to the cafeteria. I was in a state of shock. And they continued with the production, which for them was the most important thing.”

The employer took no action whatsoever after this accident.  Under pressure to keep working to meet family expenses, and because he didn’t want any trouble, R continued to work.  Later, as he continued to get headaches and suffer from tinnitus, he went to see a doctor, but didn’t receive proper care because he hadn’t sought it in time.  “I’m still dealing with some gaps, holes in my memory, even to date.”

R told us that he had witnessed other temporary workers sustain terrible injuries on the job: “Well, I remember in one case, there was a station where there were normally supposed to be two people doing packaging, and they only put one person at the station, to try to force her to speed up, but there really should have been two…She slipped and fell and hurt her mouth, opened up her lip. Intense. For another person, it was their hand in one of the conveyor belts, where the trays come out of the oven, got stuck and their skin got ripped off. They had to take them to the emergency room, and the wound was about 10 centimetres long.”

“One of the worst accidents that I saw, a co-worker fell backwards because the floor is always covered in mineral oil, so he slipped and one of the protective railings on the machine that the oil was leaking from wasn’t there, so he fell, lacerated his hand, cutting his tendons and lost the ability to use his hand. Afterwards, this person went to make a demand to the employer, but the employer pointed the finger at him, and then he started to have problems with immigration. I think he was deported.”

Besides the physical dangers, the conditions of work were extremely gruelling.  R had to work night shifts, and found changing his sleep rhythm difficult.  “It starts to produce a lot of stress in your body, and besides that, physically, you have to be constantly alert and focused on what you’re doing. For example they set you to work in places where normally the machine should be able to function on it’s own, but nobody had calibrated it, because they didn’t bother to contract a technician to do it. It’s controlled with a kind of laser beam in order to keep the size of the loaves of bread standard. But we had to do it manually, so you’re watching these laser beams constantly for an eight our shift… some people ended up dizzy or vomiting. So really, you come out of that totally physically drained.”

But even more draining than the physical stress was the constant psychological pressure that supervisors put on workers.  R described this pressure: “They were constantly threatening to fire us…The state of being constantly threatened with dismissal sets off a kind of super-stress, and that can end up also creating psychological problems. I lived through that, and, well, it’s pretty tough. It leaves a mark on you.”

“And the problems then can get transferred through a person to their family, to their wife, their children, neuroses… and a person feels a kind of incompetence towards all kinds of things, their job… being in that kind of situation constantly blocks the kind of consciousness that you need to get out of the vicious cycle.  And having a low wage puts you in a situation where, say, you can’t handle having a whole week without work. And as a result, you can’t leave your job. On a psychological level, that’s really hard to deal with.”

As R explained, employers use threats of dismissal to discourage workers from complaining about their working conditions: “Well, even when you invest yourself in doing the job well, doing it right, that doesn’t get noticed and basically they don’t care about you. But say you arrive five minutes late, then they notice, and that’s a horribly serious mistake for one to make. And all of a sudden it’s like you’re on a kind of blacklist. And so it starts to get complicated, because you can’t even make the tiniest of mistakes, and that to is a pretty serious form of pressure. And just as much, it’s a way to keep a worker submissive. I think that’s one of the basics for the use of psychological pressure as a means of controlling workers.”

R elaborated on the fact that temporary workers form a sort of parallel work force in the same place of employment.  “In a lot of cases there isn’t even a contract. Obviously we don’t have all of the rights that workers have, we’re basically pawns that they plug in to the assembly line until they’re no good anymore, and then they bring someone else in.”

Even though temp agency workers often do the same job as permanent workers, they are almost always paid less.  “I was making nine dollars, in contexts where, in the written contracts that I saw with my own eyes, it was stipulated that a person would be making seventeen dollars an hour, for example, in the packing area. In a context where normally they would have two people working there full time, they have one person, making nine dollars an hour…The difference in pay between what we make and somebody who is hired directly by the company, well, that’s profits for the temp agency.”

Some temporary agencies pay workers irregularly, and frequently, temporary employment agencies ‘disappear’ without paying all of their workers’ wages. As R put it, “Once the term of work is over, sometimes it’s easier for the agency to simply leave its workers behind without paying them at all, without granting them their vacation pay or any other kind of severance, then to go and open up a new agency, and avoid having to even pay taxes to the government.”

R ultimately decided to act on his rights, with the help of organizations that exist to help workers.  This involved “going and presenting my complaint and presenting the situations at work, explaining what had happened, and the resulting debts that I had, the fact that I hadn’t gotten my vacation pay, my rights, and also bringing forward other people that were in the same situation, and bringing them right to the Labour Standards Board [in Quebec]. I put in my complaint at Labour Standards, and the person who was my agent looked through the system and found that this agency owed more than a million in income tax. And then they started to follow the agency’s tracks. But the agency had already closed and filed for bankruptcy.”

Eventually, R became a member of the Immigrant Workers Center.  He described how this happened: “Well, I contacted the Centre when I was, let’s say I was already at the end of my line… I didn’t have a job anymore, I couldn’t get access to welfare, I had zero income. I had to reach out to organizations that provided assistance. And I met a person who told me about the existence of the Immigrant Workers Center, and told me that they might be able to help. So I got in touch, and little by little they got me oriented, and at every step they accompanied me in filing complaints, they accompanied me with translators, they provided contact with lawyers, through volunteers in the universities, and basically because of that I was able to file my demands the right way.”

R’s message for other workers was: “Well, I hope that many people won’t have to suffer the same kinds of consequences that I suffered for lack of consciousness, lack of knowledge about my rights, also that they realise that this organization exists, that they can get help at any time, even if they’re not dealing with any problems… For people that are going through a problem, the most important thing is to find calm, so that they don’t get immersed in that super-stress, since they do have rights, and those rights can be demanded.  They need to reach out, that they need to file letters, they need to make their demands, and not stand there with their arms crossed because if that’s what we do, this situation is going to continue, this abuse of workers…”

Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Center has just launched a new newspaper, “La Voix des Migrant(e)s”, from which this article is sourced.

R’s message for the federal and provincial authorities was this: “There are gaps in the law, through which all kinds of agencies can grow and thrive.  This is a problem that affects the government itself, because these companies aren’t paying taxes, but also because it damages the image of investment, damages the image of the government.  They have to focus their attention on these gaps in the law so that it’s harder for agencies to dodge the law and leave people in situations like this. They should specify exactly who holds the responsibility for paying medical insurance and taking care of workplace safety. Is it the agency, or the company that hires the agency? It needs to be spelled out clearly so that workers can protect their rights.”

As changes are being considered to the Live-In Caregiver Program that would increase eligibility requirements for participants, decrease the number of applicants accepted, and make it more difficult for participants to obtain permanent residency, it seems timely to reflect on the experiences of caregivers who are presently in the program.

B’s story, gleaned from a face-to-face interview, sheds light on some of the frustrations and challenges that caregivers experience because of restrictions on their mobility, an undervaluing of their prior experience and qualifications, and their vulnerability in their situations of work.

After graduating in the Philippines, B worked as a nurse in the Middle East.  She said that she found working as part of a team in the pediatric care and the infectious diseases units at a hospital extremely rewarding.  Encouraged by her sister, B decided to come to Canada in 2008, even though this meant giving up a career in nursing.  She told herself that she would, after 24 months, be eligible to apply for permanent residence, and be able to find her way back to her original career track.  In fact, the wait for permanent residence dragged on, and when we interviewed her, she had been waiting for nine months after submitting her application.

B said her job – which involved caring for two children and doing household chores – had been a good one, relatively speaking.  This was because her employers did not require her to live in their home, and respected the hours stipulated in her contract, so she was able to work from 9 to 5.  She said that most Filipina caregivers who are part of the LCP work from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. because they are always on call, living as they do at their place of work.  She said this was not only exploitative but also terribly stressful and damaging to their health.

While B was not asked to work extra hours, she found that the specific hours she was asked to work were frequently shifted at the last minute:  “For me, I always wanted a good working relationship with my employer, so I have to give in most of the time, and it’s really hard.”   Also, although she was supposed to work for a single employer, she was expected to work in the households of relatives and friends of her employer: “With the jobs as live-in caregiver, one thing really that I really disagree, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is, like, the employer can just give you to either his friend or their friend, or their parents’, their sister.” She found this difficult as she had to learn the particulars of each household. B said that most live-in caregivers put up with wage-theft, exploitative conditions, and worse, because they tell themselves that after 24 months they will be free to find other jobs.  Here again, they are likely to be frustrated, B noted, because the regulations and processing times keep changing.  And while they wait, they are not able to take academic courses, as B had hoped to do to requalify as a nurse.

In her time in Montreal, B has appreciated the support of the Filipina women’s organization PINAY, which she says really helps live-in caregivers.  She is proud to be a member of PINAY.

“We asked people working minimum wage jobs what they thought the minimum wage should be,” said Deena Ladd over the phone.

Deena Ladd is an organizer with the Workers Action Center in Toronto. In 2013, the Workers Action Center starting organizing to raise the minimum wage in Ontario.

The coalition was able to reach out to groups in over 15 cities throughout the province of Ontario throughout 2014. They met with working people to come up with a set of principles to determine the minimum wage.

“Together, we looked at how the price of living had increased, yet the minimum wage had stayed at $10.25.”

They agreed that the minimum wage should bring workers and their families out of poverty. The minimum wage should be set 10% above the poverty line. The minimum wage should also be updated every year with the cost of living. (Four other provinces and territories have already adopted this policy: Alberta, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Yukon).

Based on their principles, the coalition agreed to fight to raise the minimum wage to $14 per hour.

For their first action, they invited their members to freeze $10.25 in a block of ice and deliver it to their provincial representatives.

Every 14th of the month, the coalition organized new actions throughout the province. They made the actions exciting and accessible for people with various levels of political experience.

“Our actions were covered in the small town newspapers and talked about on the radio,” said Ladd.

“Because our members were people working minimum wage jobs, they were great spokespeople. They spoke about their own hardships. They could tell anyone why the minimum wage needed to be increased.”

Beyond the grassroots, the campaign received a boost from professionals like doctors and nurses who testified about the adverse effects for health of living below the poverty line and the need to raise the minimum wage.

As the campaign gained momentum and press coverage, businesses and the provincial government got scared.  Rather than be divided, the coalition would continue to organize to put pressure on the government.

Businesses also tried to manipulate the public opinion and Ladd stressed the importance of having vocal small business owners on board.

After one year of organizing, the coalition was able to force the government to unfreeze the minimum wage and to agree to index the minimum wage to inflation.

Unfortunately, the Liberal government only raised the minimum wage by ¢75 as the NDP opposition was silent when it was time to ask for more.  The coalition was extremely disappointed by the NDP’s inaction at a crucial moment, and they took to calling the leader of the NDP to criticize them. Perhaps as a result of this pressure, the NDP has now put forward a call to raise the minimum wage to $15 – but only after the Liberals took a majority in Ontario and so only after it became easier to take a hardline from the sidelines.

Deena Ladd says that the Workers Action Center is continuing to organize and fight to raise the minimum wage for people throughout the province.

A rising wave of antiwar and anti-conscription protest is taking place in cities and towns across western Ukraine. The protests are prompted by the announcement of Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko ten days ago that a “third” military mobilization is now required for the war that his governing regime began waging against the population of eastern Ukraine three months ago. Kyiv calls the war an “anti-terrorist operation.”

The protests are paralleled by a rise in Ukraine army desertions and refusals of men and women to heed conscription orders.

Poroshenko’s mobilization proposal was approved by the Ukraine Rada on July 22. The measure means that more people will be conscripted into military service and that more reserve army units will be thrown into the battle theatre.

Since the crash of Malyasia Airlines Flight 17, Kyiv has embarked on a frenzied military push into southeast Ukraine to try and defeat a pro-autonomy rebellion there. It is blocking access by investigators to the MH17 crash site and the forward line of its military push consists of intense and random bombardments of towns and cities amounting to war crimes on a massive scale.

This video of shelling of an apartment block in the city of Donetsk on July 29 is an example of what is occurring. Buzzfeed reports, “Tuesday’s attack was the first time that shelling hit central Donetsk, a hitherto tranquil rebel stronghold. It left three people dead and wounded 15. The nearby city of Horlivka declared three days of mourning after heavy fire killed 17 overnight and wounded several dozen others. At least four more people died in shelling in the Donetsk suburb of Yasynuvata.”

Kyiv is in a race to defeat the rebellion before the crippling cost of it all as well as rising antiwar protests and army desertions bring its offensive to a halt. It also has to worry about anticipated revolts by the Ukraine population as a whole once the harsh consequences of the economic association agreement that Kyiv signed with the European Union on June 30 bite deeper and deeper.

Protests on the rise

Although the propaganda websites of the Kyiv government boast of the successes of its now three-month long “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine (which it dubs its “ATO”), the special mobilization measure approved last week shows its war is in trouble. More fighting units are needed, the national treasury is effectively bankrupted by it all and there are rising numbers of desertions from the army and growing protests by mothers, wives, friends and neighbours of conscript soldiers. ICTV reports that the advisor to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Anton Gerashenko, has announced that anyone in Ukraine who agitates on social media against the regime’s war will be arrested.

The expanding protests have multiple messages. Some oppose the war outright. Others are specifically addressing the harsh and dangerous conditions that soldiers are facing in the east.

One of the most dramatic of the many protests since the “third mobilization” measure was announced has been in the port and shipbuilding city of Mykolaiv (also spelled Nikolaev), on the Black Sea, east of Odessa. Mothers and wives of soldiers repeatedly blocked the Varvarovsky Bridge over the Bug River for three days beginning July 25. They demanded a return of their sons or husbands from lengthy tours of duty in the 79th Paratroop Regiment. The tours have been extended and the regiment has suffered intense combat.

The women went on foot to the bridge carrying placards reading “Save our boys!” and used a pedestrian crossing to block traffic. Tussles with police and militia took place. (See dramatic video footage here from July 25.)

On the first day of the protest, the women drafted a letter to President Poroshenko which the mayor of the city and regional governor agreed to deliver. The women said their action would not end until they received a satisfactory reply. They didn’t receive that. A police mobilization ended the blockade on July 27. Some protesters were arrested.

The websites Hronika.info and ZIK.ua report that in the town of Bohorodchany in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast (region) [1], in southwest Ukraine bordering the Carpathia region, angry people attacked the military registration office and the premises of other local organs of power on July 22. They burned conscription documents. (Ukraine language report here.)

It’s a rural region and protesters sounded a theme that is common to many of the anti-conscription protests: they say their menfolk lack proper training and equipment and therefore face “certain death” when sent to the east.

“Certain death” faced by soldiers is not a sign of a war going well. It also suggests that the most recent report of the Office United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting “at least” 1,129 killed by the war in Ukraine is seriously understated. It’s a fact that the report’s claim of “100,000” people made refugee by the war is laughingly low — Russia says more than 500,000 refugees have crossed its border since the war began in April and Ukraine admits to nearly 100,000 internal refugees.

Russia has condemned this latest report by the OUNCHR, saying, “Its key message is that the government of Ukraine is permitted to legitimately use force to restore law and order in the east of the country.”

Also on July 22, residents of the village of Skobychivka linked arms and formed a human chain to block the road from Ivano-Frankivsk to Bohorodchany, causing a kilometre-long traffic jam. The protesters held placards reading: “No Afghanistan in Ukraine!” “Send call-up notices to the children of the higher-ups!” “Return our children to us,” and “Stop the bloodshed.” A common slogan in the protests is “Refuse!”

A separate report in Vesti quoted the relatives of soldiers saying their sons were being used as “cannon fodder.” The report said people were also protesting in Yaremcha, in the same region, and in Sambor, Lviv region.

Not far from that area, in Bukovina region, residents in seven villages blocked roads on July 28. That region is southwest Ukraine includes a significant population of Romanian descent.

A video published by 112.UA shows soldiers’ relatives blocking a road in Obukhivs’kyi district, near Kyiv on July 24 demanding a return of soldiers from lengthy duty.

Protesters in the Odessa region blocked the Black Sea coastal highway for hours on July 28.

Residents of six villages in Sokyryanskyi region (Chernivtsi oblast) — Bilousivka, Lomachyntsi, Mykhalkove, Serbychany, Korman and Romankivtsi — blocked the highway between Chernivtsi and Novodnistrovsk on the morning of July 25, demanding that their menfolk not be sent to war.

Protests have gripped the entire region of Chernivtsi in southwest Ukraine. A video recording showed people saying, “We don’t war — we want peace” and “We did not raise our children for war. We will not give them our children.”

This video (screen below) shows a group of people, mostly women, from Chernivtsi who gather to confront a local military recruitment officer. They are carrying their sons or husbands’ conscription orders.

“Go fight your own war,” they tell the conscription officer, who tells locals to “go to the Internet” if they want to find out why the new mobilization is happening. He is referring to the Kyiv regime’s intensely propagandistic websites devoted to all things “ATO.” But the protesters are having none of that. They gather dozens of blue-coloured conscription orders into a pile and burn them.

As they stand around watching the flames, they’re all voicing their opinions. One mother says, “[Kyiv authorities] are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, but they come here to take our sons and send them to death. They made the mess and now they need us to clean it up.” The conscription officer stands by helplessly. What can he do? He is following orders.

In the settlement of Marshintsi in the Novoselytskyy region of Chernivtsi, protesters blocked the entry of soldiers and police. Residents brought tyres and barricaded the road leading into the village. Many wrote letters of refusal, describing the events in the south-east as a “slaughter”.

On July 20, the Kyiv-Chop highway was blocked by local residents, mainly women, in the vicinity of the village of Hamaliivka near Lviv. A protest last month also blocked the highway. The same highway was blocked on July 28, in the villages of Rakoshyno and Znyatsevo, near the border of Slovakia and Hungary.

Here is one of the latest videos to be published on YouTube, of a protest in the town of Town of Novoselytsya in Chernivtsi oblast on July 30.

Many protests are voicing a “No Afghanistan in Ukraine” demand. This harkens back to the ten-year war that the Soviet Union fought against the people of Afghanistan, beginning in 1980. Altogether, 14,500 soldiers of the Soviet Union’s army died, 54,000 were wounded and many, many more Afghans died. The war was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which happened not long after it withdrew from Afghanistan in ignominious defeat in 1988.

Post-Soviet, independent Ukraine later joined the U.S.-led occupation and war in Afghanistan. A small force still participates.

The well-known Ukrainian television journalist and commentator Ostap Drozdov has called for a boycott of the latest mobilization decree. The website Russkaya Vesna reports him saying: “My program yesterday (on the regional television channel ZIK) can be considered the start of an informal campaign to boycott the mobilisation. I state my intention to give my utmost support to this initiative, which goes by the provisional name “Mobilisation Equals Genocide.'”

He said, “It is very important that people who speak out against the mobilisation of the civilian population should see that they are not isolated. There are a great many of them.”

Army in trouble

Exact numbers of army desertions are not known and are the subject of considerable debate and counter-debate. This website report, for example, publishes a purported Ukraine army report saying that close to 3,500 soldiers deserted in the third week of July and that 1,600 soldiers died and 4,700 were wounded in that same time. Sources in Russia say the documents it cites are not authentic.

Here is a brief news report in which several Ukraine soldiers speak of their decision to take asylum in Russia. (Many videos of the fighting in eastern Ukraine are posted here on the “Anti-Maidan YouTube Channel.”)

This video records a protest in Kyiv of relatives of the 72nd Army Brigade that suffered heavy losses from a rocket attack some days ago. The protesters chant “Help the heroes”. A poster reads: “Send [Rada] deputies and generals to the battlefield!” They pray, and sing the Ukraine national anthem.

The Brigade was caught in a grisly cauldron in southeast Ukraine with many killed and injured and some survivors taking refuge in Russia. In this video, soldiers of the brigade speak for 13 minutes of their difficult and disturbing combat experience.

The pro-Kyiv, Interfax news service reports on 18 Ukraine soldiers who took refuge in Russia and received medical treatment.

Russia Today reported several days ago of this group of 40 soldiers who entered Russia and requested asylum.

Recasted fascist introduces conscription bill

Andriy Parubiy introduced the “third” mobilization bill to the Rada. He is Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, a key advisory body to the President and the Parliament on military matters. He says the measure will mobilize 15 more army combat units and 44 combat support units.

Parabuiy is a renowned fascist in Ukraine who has modified his image in the past year and risen to prominence in the Kyiv regime that seized power in February of this year. Last year, he joined the Fatherland party of former Ukraine prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and was elected to the Rada. Fatherland is a neo-conservative coalition/party.

U.S. journalist Robert Parry wrote of Paruiby earlier this year, “Parubiy is himself a well-known neo-Nazi, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991. The party blended radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols.

“Parubiy also formed a paramilitary spinoff, the Patriots of Ukraine, and defended the awarding [in 2007] of the title ‘Hero of Ukraine’ to World War Two Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose own paramilitary forces exterminated thousands of Jews and Poles in pursuit of a racially pure Ukraine.”

The United States is boosting its military aid and training to Ukraine. The announcement came from U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on July 25. The U.S. already committed to $23 million in equipment; that will now rise to $33 million. It is also intervening in the countries it dominates in the region to boost the training and equipping of their armed forces, including Moldova and Romania on Ukraine’s southwest frontier and Poland on the northwest.

Kyiv’s ruthless shelling and bombing of towns and cities is running out of time due to the war’s huge financial cost. Describing Ukraine’s economy, the Washington Post wrote on July 26:

“The IMF forecasts that Ukraine’s annual GDP will drop by 6.5% this year, while the government deficit is projected at 10.1% of GDP. This week, the government announced that it would need at least 800 million dollars to continue its counterinsurgency operation and asked the parliament to further increase taxes and cut public spending. The deputies’ refusal to appropriate needed funds yesterday triggered Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s resignation as he recognized that soldiers would receive no pay next month. The reconstruction of Donbas is even more uncertain as the government promised to turn to foreign donors for funds in the coming fall.”

In a remarkable admission last week, Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada, Vadym Prystaiko, told the Globe and Mail, “We are pouring all the money in our budget… into the anti-terrorism campaign.”

The war is scandalously riding roughshod over the international investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Investigators were blocked from reaching the site on July 27 and in the days following by the relentless shellings and other bombings by the Ukraine army in the region.

A woman stands in her home destroyed in the Ukrainian troops’ shelling of the Golubovka village near Slavyansk on June 27, 2014. (RIA Novosti / Andrey Stenin).

As reported by international media, inspectors are lodged in hotels in Donetsk each night and the passed easily through self defense lines surrounding the city to get to the site. But as the days wore on, the international media reported the blockage as due to “fighting” and “clashes.”

On July 30, Kyiv propaganda began saying that rebel fighters had placed mines on the crash site and were shelling it. That story evaporated the following day when, in circumstances unexplained, inspectors finally reached the site.

The grim reality of Kyiv’s military campaign in eastern Ukraine has been airbrushed out of mainstream news reporting. Little or no visual presentation of bombardments or other war crimes is allowed to pass through editorial filters. The war and its consequences are explained away in the vacuous language of “fighting” or “clashes” taking place. The Toronto Star‘s Tanya Talaga began a front-page article on July 30 with, “The European Union and western nations joined on [July 29] to try to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop his military aggression in Ukraine…” (Inside the same edition, the Star published a factual account of the bombardments of cities and towns.)

The European Union is matching the Ukraine army offensive by upping its economic sanctions on Russia. The sanctions are punishment for Russia’s refusal to obey U.S. and European demands that it police the pro-autonomy movements in eastern Ukraine and pressure them to surrender. They are also part of the long-standing drive by the member countries of the NATO military alliance to weaken and isolate Russia.

The rising antiwar movement in Ukraine has profound consequences for the future of the country. Will protests stop Kyiv’s war before southeast Ukraine is reduced to ruin? Will Ukrainian as well as international protests give pause to the military planners at NATO who are increasingly training their sites on Russia?

Ukraine’s economic elite has made a sharp turn to embrace austerity Europe. The kind of austerity consequences that have ravaged Greece and other countries of southern Europe await the Ukrainian people. How will the antiwar protesters and other ordinary Ukrainians react as the government deepens unpopular cuts to social programs and subsidies that reduce the cost of essential items?

Protests around the world are needed to stay the hands of the warmakers in southeast Ukraine. Solidarity actions can stop the killings. They can also help Ukrainians to chart a different path of economic and social development. That would be fitting because anti-austerity sentiment was at the heart of the rebellion in eastern Ukraine in the first place.

A new, 80-minute video compilation, Ukraine Crisis, has been produced that provides a powerful record of the war in eastern Ukraine during the past month. A warning, there are some scenes of death and destruction caused by the Kyiv government’s shelling that are disturbing, particularly in the four to six minute section, inclusively. The testimony of the woman who speaks for five minutes at the 1’17″30 mark is especially insightful and heartrending. She has lost her son to the war, not knowing since March if he is dead or alive. She asks, “What has become of this Ukraine nation?”

This article draws in part from a July 28, 2014 article from the Russian website Rabkor (“Worker Correspondent”) which was  translated into English by Renfrey Clarke. 

Notes:

[1] Ukraine is subdivided into 25 regions: 24 oblasts (regions, or provinces) and one city with special status, Kyiv. Two former oblasts — Donetsk and Luhansk — voted in May for autonomy. The ferocity of Kyiv’s war is driving those two regions to a de facto secession.