Creative Tactics and Union Politics. Learning from the York University Strike
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[First paragraph] The third-largest university in Canada, York University owes its fame to a long history of labor disputes. Historically, the neoliberal rhetoric and goals of York’s intransigent administration have always clashed with a radical body of graduate students and faculty, who not only deemed it politically and ethically necessary to challenge the employer and reclaim their rights, but also considered it a question of survival. Certified as a union since the mid-Seventies, York’s contract faculty and teaching assistants (then joined in 2001 by graduate assistants) [1] have been periodically engaged against the institution’s trend towards the progressive déclassement [2] of their qualifications and professional expertise, and the casualization of academic jobs (Vercellone 2009, p. 123). A great deal of tenacity and a fast increasing union membership helped them endure often lengthy and sometimes disastrous strikes. Despite mixed results, their union, known today as CUPE Local 3903, neither succumbed to fatigue and loss—using losses and victories equally to its own advantage to improve its members’ salary and benefit package—nor did it morph into a stiff bureaucratic machine and managing its internal conflicts openly and as creatively as possible—refusing to comply to an organizational structure forever frozen into a set of default rules.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".