A Brief History of CREW Union

Long before the reaffiliation campaign, we were running meetings, organizing events, and building relationships. We were agitating for better campus services and paid training for our members. We were mobilizing for higher pay for TAs and RAs. We were campaigning around sexualized abuses of power at the university. We were growing the union in countless different ways: conversations in labs and classrooms, union socials in bars and parks, flying our banners at climate actions and May Day rallies, attending departmental orientations, and cultivating leadership skills amongst our members. In other words, the CREW-CSN organizers were the union. Day to day, week to week, month to month, we kept the ship afloat and moving. 

Our reaffiliation campaign
We were the union… until we realized that we couldn’t uphold our three core tenets with PSAC as our parent union. As a directly chartered local, we didn’t have meaningful autonomy over crucial strategic decisions. This lack of autonomy prevented us from effectively pursuing the kind of campaigning agenda that gets results. It was clear that PSAC would not stand up and fight for the deal that our members desperately needed and deserved.

So, in early 2023, dozens of TAs and RAs came together to transform our union. We had conversations with thousands of members, in every department of Concordia, and heard their stories of workplace strife and frustrations at stagnant wages and conditions. In doing so, we realized that in order to win the changes we needed, we would need to reaffiliate our union with a different federation that would support our demands. Thankfully, we had found the CSN, a union confederation with an incredible track record of winning for low-paid and precarious workers like us, that takes a leading role in campaigning around social issues in Québec, and places local union autonomy at its very foundation. By the middle of March, the entire executive council resigned in unanimous support of the CREW-CSN reaffiliation campaign. Their resignation letter can be found here.

Our reaffiliation campaign was met with overwhelming support from every corner of the university, and in the spring, a decisive majority of our members, over 1700, had signed cards with CREW-CSN. On April 3rd, we submitted union cards to the Quebec Labour Board (the Tribunal Administratif du Travail, or TAT) so CREW could be formally recognized as the union that represents Concordia’s TAs and RAs. The judge presiding over our affiliation case affirmed that we had support from a clear majority of the 2100 TAs and RAs working on April 3rd. 

During the Labour Board hearings it was revealed that PSAC officers had failed to file TRAC’s previous collective agreement with the government. Their negligence left us without legal protections for over two years and placed our union in grave danger. However, it also opened a legal loophole for PSAC-TRAC to secretly re-file for certification on May 26th.

We were confident that we had a strong legal basis to be fully certified. However, to unravel the legal mess that PSAC-TRAC made by re-filing would have taken years in court. During this time, they would have continued to collect all our dues and would have prevented us from bargaining for a better deal with Concordia. Instead, owing to our strong majority on April 3rd, we were eligible to settle this question through a court-administered vote. We agreed to this secret ballot because we could not accept any more delays by PSAC-TRAC. 

Throughout the Fall semester we continued our reaffiliation campaign to make sure members were informed about the vote, the difference between the two unions, and the stakes of this important decision for our union’s future. The Labour Board determined that 1853 members, those who were working on April 3rd (CREW-CSN’s filing) and May 26th (PSAC-TRAC’s filing) and who had not yet graduated by the start of the Fall semester would be eligible to vote.

Between October 23rd and November 13th, members went to the electronic ballot box. Voter turnout was very high at 81% and of the 1466 votes cast, an overwhelming majority, 1044, or 71.7%, were for CREW-CSN. For the second time in a year, members made their voices heard and demanded change. With this result, CREW-CSN was officially certified on November 14th, 2023!