https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/62030/archive/files/546a5109c376d0e61de59a068f2a1a61.pdf?Expires=1787788800&Signature=SkyaT2QsrLpEJY5hbL4duCVuYyu2EbZFKiOYrBcBp1ANGTNe9blHwR4Gcti9xO4Ca%7Ets4FbTuIv7fdsXcMc8s2XckC%7EFe35TzorzPTGwg2U6bbTSKqObjEjUFg16zM20eun2ZTIUcVSbOnk8-cZ0PQeYugEN73a-3hVTsTqtPsNGXiiGo8Vfzj%7ExmZUy1FyfT0-J-NadO-una3YM0fvQ2Jnaq0OpOHWqN7ac-d85q-9vOCTAE4LCAokrLJ7CyHU92m7x927hT3Bw%7E9AMNkf7iO3rRkoKfUSuJMqqXGY6Oh6FnhKoWxADbTL2EGlSyunyRwrwKSV-wLz7gHL2hPhVmg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 1dcb686033e27756cc4b26086ac7fcd5 PDF Text Text Commentary The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008 Respect and fair employment for all teaching staff Richard Hink HYDE PARK T his has been a rough year for labour on campus. Teaching assistants (TAs) are still fighting to be paid for workhours completed before their long, bitterly-fought 11-week strike earlier this year. Getting paid for your work is a principle we all agree with, and we hope the University will move quickly to find a solution before proceeding to arbitration. The union representing non-academic staff, MUNACA, is also in negotiations, and so far McGill has been unwilling to meet their demands. Apparently, the University’s motto – “By work, all things increase and grow” – doesn’t apply to workers’ salaries or the consideration they receive from the administration. And to make matters worse, a short-sighted decision last month by the Quebec Labour Relations Commission has placed TAs, other graduate employees, and non-traditional workers at a disadvantage by placing all of their on-campus activities at risk when exercising their right to strike. This week, McGill TAs join contingent academic workers from across the continent to observe Fair Employment Week. We are calling attention to those whom the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) dubs “invisible academics:” teachers who do their fair share of teaching but don’t ben- efit from the same respect and protections as do the full-time, tenurestream faculty. Fair Employment Week has traditionally focused on working conditions for sessional instructors. At McGill, they carry a huge portion of the teaching load and their numbers are growing; according to the University’s web site, in January 2007 only 26.5 per cent of the academic staff were tenure-stream faculty. And even though we depend so heavily on these professionals, most sessionals earn as much as $3,000 less per course than their equivalents at other Quebec universities. According to CAUT, they have no benefits, limited job security, inadequate academic support, and no opportunity to participate in research activities or academic governance. They are academia’s cheap labour. In the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that, like TAs, graduate employees must also be recognized as contingent teachers. As enrolments increase and the number of tenure-stream faculty – for instance, those involved in research – stagnates, the teaching load is shifted more and more to sessional instructors and assistants. In fact, several well-respected education journals have acknowledged this shift by publishing articles demonstrating the need to include teacher training in graduate curricula for those who will become TAs and instructors. This should come as no surprise to McGill undergraduates who will likely have more face-to-face contact with their teaching assistants in many of the University’s larger lecture courses. In my own experience working with TAs, I have worked alongside an accomplished journalist, an awardwinning world-class musician, and a number of junior scholars conducting ground-breaking field research, to name just a few. The next time you find yourself meeting with a TA during office hours, take a few moments and ask them about their own work. Let us not forget that the term “graduate student” can too easily disguise the fact that your TAs and sessionals are talented teachers and scholars in their own right, deserving of the same fair and equitable treatment as anyone else in the university community. You can judge for yourself whether the administration’s response to TAs and other graduate and contingent employees constitutes “fair employment.” We should all take a moment this week to reflect on the role that all teaching staff play in the academic vitality of the McGill community. Their contributions shouldn’t need Fair Employment Week to be recognized; let us all carry forward that sense of respect and equity for the rest of the year. 11 Vote with your fork So you might be thinking: why a meat issue? There are identities, ideologies, and politics involved in the food we choose, and meat is one we have a particularly complex relationship with. This year at The Daily, we decided to do some unpacking (get it!?), and chose meat for the ethical and political debates surrounding it. The moral qualms around eating meat are many and varied, from concerns over climate change, to animal cruelty issues, to world hunger. As George Monbiot wrote in his summer Guardian column on the food crisis, “While 100M tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars [with bio-fuels], 760M tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals. This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.” On the other hand, Schwartz’s is at the heart of Montreal culture, and for many of us, potatoes and peas just seem lonely all by themselves. We’re hardly of one mind about what to eat ourselves, and we’re not here to preach to you to become vegans on the spot. The point is more that going to the grocery store seems like such an everyday chore – and the food industry so huge – it’s easy to forget that individual choices actually do count. Supermarkets are very sensitive to the turnover rate of different products. With computerized inventories, whether a product moves or not impacts if it will be re-ordered. Individual consumer actions could be much more decisive in determining what markets stock than we tend to think. When you buy food, you’re supporting a specific agenda, and sending a message all the way down the supply chain. Be conscious of what you buy, and vote with your fork. Editorial Richard Hink is a PhD student in communication studies and President of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM), the union that represents TAs. Curing our moral schizophrenia Sophie Gaillard HYDE PARK I ncoherence and contradiction is the norm with our attitudes toward nonhuman animals. We are, as Rutgers University law professor Gary Francione puts it, guilty of “moral schizophrenia” in our relations with other animals. People generally agree that it is morally wrong to inflict suffering on animals when this suffering cannot be justified by necessity. In fact, this idea is so widely accepted that it has been enacted into provisions of Canada’s Criminal Code, which prohibits causing “unnecessary pain, suffering, or injury to an animal.” But what about our practice of raising animals for meat, dairy products, and eggs? Could it fall into this category of acts we consider morally wrong? In order to answer this question, we must first examine two sub-questions: first, does our current treatment of farm animals cause suffering? And second, is this suffering necessary? The answer to the first question is undoubtedly affirmative. Each year in Canada, over 650-million animals are slaughtered for food – over 1.5 -million daily. Contrary to what the meat, egg, and dairy industries lead us to believe in their advertisement campaigns, which depict cows happily grazing in pastures and chickens running about in a courtyard, the modern farm has nothing to do with these idyllic country scenes. Today, the overwhelming majority of animal products consumed by Canadians comes from large-scale industrial farming operations known as factory farms. These farms strive to produce the most meat, milk, and eggs as quickly and as cheaply as possible, in the smallest amount of space possible. The unavoidable side effect of this mode of operation is a complete disregard for the most basic physical and behavioural needs of the animals. Animals are raised to grow up in incredibly large numbers, spend their lives confined to cramped living quarters, and undergo systematic mutilation without the use of anaesthesia – tail docking, castration, and de-beaking, in the case of chickens. These practices are considered industry standard and are perfectly legal in Canada. As soon as animals raised for meat have put on enough weight, or when dairy cows and laying hens are no longer producing enough, they are loaded onto trucks to embark on a painful and lengthy journey to the slaughterhouse. Now that the suffering inherent in current farming practices has been established, can this suffering be deemed necessary? The question of what constitutes necessity is subject to debate, but if the term is to have any meaning at all, then it must exclude acts committed purely for pleasure, habit, or convenience. Easy access to meat, dairy, and egg alternatives has dramatically increased in the past few years. These products are now readily available, not only in health food stores, but also in large supermarket chains, even in rural areas. Specialists agree that well-balanced vegan diets are just as capable of satisfying our bodies’ nutritional needs as omnivorous diets. Vegetables, beans, nuts, grains, and soy products are excellent sources of protein, iron, calcium, and even omega threes. Not only are vegan diets safe, most experts consider them healthier than diets containing meat. Studies consistently show that eliminating meat from one’s diet is associated with a reduced risk of developing cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, and certain cancers. Thus, for the great majority of Canadians, the consumption of meat and other animal products does not constitute a nutritional necessity. In fact, it may even be detrimental to our health. Clearly, current farming practices result in tremendous suffering on the part of farm animals, and that eating meat and other animal products is not, in any meaningful sense, necessary. The only justifications for imposing suffering on farm animals are pleasure and habit. We are shocked and outraged by animal cruelty cases that make headlines – and rightly so – but what is the difference between a sadist torturing and killing an animal for entertainment and the systematic, intensive confinement and mutilation that millions of farm animals are subject to daily for our gustative pleasure? Our morally schizophrenic attitudes toward other animals are probably best illustrated by our differential treatment of certain species: the ones we consider pets. We love our dogs and cats and treat them like members of the family. Yet, there exists no significant difference, in terms of sensitivity to pain or cognitive capacity, between dogs and cats on the one hand, and pigs, cows, and chickens on the other. What makes us love the former and not care in the slightest about the latter? Being vegan seems weird and extreme to most people, but it isn’t. It’s simply an attempt to live life in a way that is coherent with the moral attitudes that most of us share. Veganism is the cure to our moral schizophrenia. Sophie Gaillard is a Law I student and a Master’s ‘07 Speech-Language Pathology grad. She can be reached at sophie.gaillard@mail.mcgill.ca. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Coverage from The McGill Daily Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data PDF Volume 98 Issue 16 Page Number(s) 11 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Respect and Fair Employment for All Teaching Staff Description An account of the resource An article about labour conditions for McGill's academic staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard Hink Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The McGill Daily Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008/10/27 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English strike union