About YorkIsUs

On November 6, 2008 over 3,000 members of CUPE union local 3903 - teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty at York University in Toronto, Canada - started a strike action against their employer. Two of the key issues were job security and wage increases in keeping with cost of living increase in Toronto. Although close to its end the strike achieved some political victories particularly by bringing to public attention the precarious conditions of work and lack of job security for contract faculty, the Liberal Government of the Province of Ontario, in an unusual move, legislated the workers back to work and thus forced an end to the strike that had lasted 85 days.

Soon after the strike began, the propaganda against the union that was generated by the university's highly paid public relations machinery convinced a few strikers that older union approaches were not on their own sufficient to positively affect the outcomes of the strike or the larger community's reactions to it. Picket lines at campus entrances brought classes to a stop, but they were not effective in countering the University's clever media campaign.

Although the union's almost-daily media releases tried to explain the real stakes in the strike and contrast the University's deceitful claims, they were not reaching the media that were gulping what they got from the University's media relations. The issues raised by the union and the dynamics of power they exposed through the strike were far too complex to explain to the sound-bite media in a couple of paragraphs in conventional media releases. The fight had to be taken beyond the picket lines and the official media channels.

Conceived by a small collective of strikers (who are also artists and cultural workers outside the academy and all of them women), YorkIsUs (formerly at URL yorkisus.org) started as an intervention in the information war with the University. Cloning YorkU's electronic media, the project aimed to jam the news by releasing information that was false only insofar as it exaggerated the absurdity of the University's propaganda and exposed the power dynamics hidden behind academic meritocracy/hypocrisy.

The project started with a spoof website that used a structure and look identical to the YorkU original but infused it with different, bitingly satirical and worker-oriented content. For example, the animated logo it featured read "York Is Us: negotiating is possible" alternating with "defying the impossible." This replaced the trite and trademarked University logo and motto "York U: redefine the possible." The spoof site also subtly revamped the original's colour scheme by substituting the YorkU red (also trademarked) with a purple shade that pointed to the union's official colour.

In addition to the website, the project included a regularly published electronic newsletter - named XFile after York U's official newsletter, YFile. Using appropriated (often from the university's own media) and then remixed graphics and satirical text, XFiles focused on current topics and events during the strike and were distributed widely through YorkIsUs website, various university listservs, on Facebook and in print on the picket lines. Collaboratively produced, the authors used pseudonyms including Prof. Basta, Caree Routsider, Joan of York, Prof. Marginati and other evocative names.

YorkIsUs also produced two reports on research conducted about labour relations and income distribution at the university (note the Research section of this site and also XFile 9). Lastly, the project distributed a few electronic viruses that targeted entrenched anti-union elite professors and forced them to expose their real politics publicly (for example note XFile numbers 6 and 7).

Mobilizing unconventional (in a union context) tactics that mixed network technologies and web 2.0 tools with more performative, theatrical interventions, YorkIsUs served a few objectives:

It was a tool of direct action and counter-information; it became a space for relief through humour for the strikers who were keeping up the picket lines for 12 hours a day in cold winter months; and, because of its anonymity, it encouraged the involvement of individuals who otherwise would have never dared to "go political" for fear of reprisal by their academic department and the University Administration.

By using different tactics, targeting different issues and telling different stories, and by combining electronic spoof with picket line activism, YorkIsUs helped shed some light on the complexity that characterized the composition of the union's relations with the academic employeras well as with other groups within the university (for example, note XFile 3 in relation to the university's art gallery).

As stated above, the strike lasted 85 cold winter days and ended with a back-to-work legislation passed by the Liberal Government of Ontario. Visit CUPE 3903 strike website for more information about the strike.

YorkIsUs was included in JavaMuseum's 2010 NetArt Features.

Last modified 25/FEB/2010