Counteracting Campus Precarity:
Toward Just Service In BC Post-Secondary Education
The Counteracting Campus Precarity: Toward Just Service Work in BC Post-Secondary Education research project is a part of the Understanding Precarity in BC Partnership Grant supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities research Council.
This research project has three key goals:
- To investigate the contracting out process and contract service worker precarity on BC university campuses
- To understand how outsourced food and cleaning service work has been brought in-house at other universities and in other sectors (including health and public service) and what workers’ experience of this transition has been
- To track unions, coalitions and campaigns involved in efforts to bring contract food and cleaning service work in house in order to assess what has been successful other contexts.
Drawing on community-based, action research, and worker inquiry methodologies, this project generates research which brings public attention to the working conditions of SFU’s contracted workforce, expands our knowledge of efforts to bring contracted work in-house, builds links among different kinds of workers on campus, and supports the coalition’s work.
Research Team
Enda Brophy,
Principal Investigator
Enda Brophy teaches in the School of Communication and the Labour Studies Program at SFU. He is a founding member of Contract Worker Justice campaign and a Principal Investigator on the Counteracting Campus Precarity research project.
Nadine Attwell,
Research Team Member
Nadine Attewell (she/her) is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she also directs the Global Asia Program. As a scholar of empire, social reproductive labour, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, her work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by her positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and is currently at work on a SSHRC-funded book entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City.
John Calvert,
Research Team Member
Prior to his retirement in 2021, John Calvert was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences for 14 years where he taught courses on the Canadian health care system, international trade agreements and health policy. He has published a number of books and articles on Canadian and international public policy and economic issues. From 2007 to 2021 he was on the Committee of Management of four SSHRC-funded Work in a Warming World (W3) research grants on labour and climate change. He was also co-chair of the BC component of a 2013 5-year SSHRC funded research project on Canada’s disability system. Prior to coming to Simon Fraser University, he worked for 8 years in the BC government as a policy analyst in the Ministries of Labour, Employment & Investment, Crown Corporations Secretariat and the Cabinet Policy and Planning Secretariat. Previous to that he worked as a senior research officer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees in its Ottawa office.
Aaron Windel,
Research Team Member
Aaron Windel teaches in the Department of History at SFU. He researches the history of colonialism in the British empire with a focus on colonial rule, anti-colonial movements, and the history of cooperatives. He brings to his teaching and university work a concern about how universities in North America – including SFU – have been transformed by neoliberal policies since the 1980s, which only have increased universities’ reliance on profit-focused initiatives and the contracting out of important campus work to for-profit companies.
Research Assistants
Cristina Figueroa,
Campaign Research Assistant
Cristina Figueroa is a graduate of Simon Fraser University. She has a degree in Labour Studies and a minor in Indigenous Studies. Cristina works as a Research Assistant on the CWJ research team.
Kayla Hilstob,
Campaign research project coordinator
Mitch Hoganson,
Worker Organizer RA (Unite Here Local 40)
As a core member of a social and worker justice campaign at Simon Fraser University, Mitch is dedicated to advocating for the fair treatment of contracted food and cleaning staff. His mission is to ensure these essential workers receive the respect, benefits, and job security they deserve by bringing their positions in-house. With a passion for equity and community-building, Mitch works alongside an inspiring team to create lasting, positive change for workers at SFU.
Khushpreet Kaur,
Worker Organizer RA (CUPE 3338)
Khushpreet has worked as a cleaner with BEST for over 3 years, in addition to being a CUPE 3338 Unit 4 representative. She joined the CWJ campaign because she wants every contract worker to get what they deserve, including respect, job security, benefits and equality through the process of in-housing. She believes that the CWJ campaign will help workers get what we deserve.
Kabir Madan,
Campaign research project coordinator
Kabir is an anthropologist whose research is based around soccer fields and soccer players in Bengaluru and New Delhi. He is primarily interested in studying how soccer players produce and reproduce social capital to create spaces to play and train for soccer. Kabir is also a research assistant at Contract Worker Justice and is also a student organizer at SFU.
Derek Sahota,
Campaign research assistant
Yameena Zaidi,
Campaign communication and research coordinator
Yameena is an MA student at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, studying the evolving strategies of the gig workers’ movement in India. Her research interests include political economy, state-labour-capital relations, trade union renewal and migration.
