A huge “clash” between York University and its striking academic workers over the issue of job security leaves no hope for a negotiated deal between the two sides, leaving arbitration — either voluntary or forced — as the only solution, says a report ordered by the minister of labour.

“It is this clash that makes it impossible for the parties to freely negotiate a collective agreement,” investigator William Kaplan wrote in a report released Friday.

“This conclusion is established and reinforced by a review of the bargaining history between this employer and this union. The parties need to meaningfully address issues relating to contract faculty but they cannot do so because they fundamentally disagree on underlying principles.

“They have completely different world views that are informed by completely different academic and institutional aspirations.”

While other issues remain, he noted they “are ultimately more amenable to settlement in collective bargaining, or before the (labour relations board).”

Kaplan also slammed the union for its bargaining methods, saying they are “not normative.”

Three weeks ago, Kaplan was appointed the sole “industrial inquiry commissioner” to look at the now two-month-old job action by the 3,000 workers, who are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903.

About half of all classes for the university’s 50,000 students have been affected.

Contracts expired last summer for three bargaining units — which represent teaching assistants, contract faculty and graduate assistants — and bargaining began in October. The workers walked off the job on March 5.

York later requested a forced vote on its last offer, which was soundly rejected.

Labour Minister Kevin Flynn and Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development Mitzie Hunter are now appealing to both sides to accept the “interest arbitration,” which would put an end to the strike while an arbitrator hears from the two sides before issuing a binding decision.

York has agreed, but Local 3903 rejected the call for arbitration. The university has to “stop cutting corners and come to the table with a willingness to engage in meaningful negotiations,” said local chair Devin Lefebvre.

While parts of the report are “worthy of support and long overdue ... we cannot in good conscience agree to surrender our members’ constitutionally guaranteed right to bargain collectively,” Lefebvre added.

Over the weekend, York issued a statement calling on the provincial government to legislate CUPE back to work.

The union has said all along that it believed the university wanted arbitration instead of a negotiated deal. It believes interest arbitration is a “blunt instrument only to be used in the most extreme cases” and not appropriate for “such a complex issue,” Kaplan wrote.

York noted that it has been able to reach deals with all other unions, but said that with Local 3903 there has been a “pattern of acrimony and labour disruptions that it experienced with none of its other bargaining units,” and that’s why it preferred arbitration in this case.

York called CUPE’s insistence that there would be no deal until all three bargaining units agreed on terms a roadblock — as did Kaplan — and said CUPE’s demands were “unflinching and unrealistic.”

“The only freely negotiated deal that could be achieved at the bargaining table, in York’s submission, was one where all, or almost all, of the union’s demands were granted,” Kaplan said.

Job security hinges on the ability of contract faculty to move into full-time positions; York has said it prefers open searches and, in its final offer, said six such “conversions” would be entrenched in the three-year contract.

Kaplan noted that in the province, 98 per cent of all bargaining ends in deals. This is Local 3903’s fourth strike in the last seven rounds of bargaining.

York has only had one other strike in that time, by full-time professors, in 1997.

“No comment need be made about the union’s bargaining parameters and culture other than to say that it is not normative,” Kaplan wrote.

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“Given its track record in successfully negotiating collective agreements, the union might usefully reconsider its general approach.”

Kaplan also urged the labour ministry to look at the issue of precarious contract work in the post-secondary sector, something it is already doing in the college sector after a lengthy faculty strike last fall.

He said that should the call for arbitration fail, legislating CUPE 3903 back to work “will almost certainly be necessary.”