AGM Response

Response to The Newspaper – November 16, 2011 The annual general meeting is an opportunity for general members of the Union to come together and shape the work of the Students’ Union collectively. Together, we review the strides we have made as an organisation in the services, the advocacy and the programming we provide to our members. It is also an opportunity to reflect on our operations as a Union, both financially and in terms of our bylaws, to ensure we meet the needs of our members. For this year’s general meeting, we aimed to facilitate an opportunity for our members to learn about the broad scope of the Union, to think of ways to expand our services and programming, and to look at the significant challenges facing our membership, particularly the rising cost and privatisation of our education.

We invited the spokesperson for the CUPE3902 bargaining team, James Nugent, to join us and speak to how our members are affected by the current bargaining process with the University of Toronto administration. Our classrooms are where our TAs and sessional instructors work, and where our members learn. As a Union, we need to support our TAs and instructors to ensure fair working conditions and a quality education for our members. It was shocking to hear that instructors with their doctorates (PhD) earn a living well below the poverty line at $15,000. More shocking still was the astounding statistic that there are dozens of tutorials with more than 100 students, and 18 tutorials with over 200 students at the University.

It was great to be able to share with our members the new services that the Union is introducing in the new year, including discounted BIXI memberships and discounted faxing and photocopying, as well as a new banner printing service for our clubs. As a result of increased demand for our services, we are extending our office hours to better serve members, particularly those that are in classes until the evening.

Our members democratically approved bylaw changes that ensure that our Union’s operations will better serve our membership, including the change to increase our efforts to provide notice of elections.

Collectively, members approved a change of requirement to provide notice of elections not only in newspapers such as The Newspaper and The Varsity, but to aim to provide notice in other campus publications as well, in an ongoing effort to increase engagement of our members.

As a Union, we are here to save our members money, defend student rights and ensure that our members get the most out of their student experience – inside and outside of the classroom. We had a great turn out for the meeting, with members packing the lecture hall to participate, which speaks both to our efforts to engage our members and to the importance of our work as a Union. I look forward to future opportunities of working with members to continue to build upon our successes as a Union this year.