YUFA
Health
&
Safety
Health and Safety on Campus
Fall 2007
by Louise Ripley, Communications Officer
24 Sep 07 - This Fall has seen YUFA members concerned not only about their students at risk in dorm attacks, but about themselves at risk, with reports of swarmings in parking garages, dark deserted parking lots, long unlit building corridors after night teaching, excessive noise and dust from construction, poor or absent ventilation, plastic screens in work areas not properly fastened, broken exterior doors affording no protection for those working on weekends, the impossibility of obtaining keys for new graduate students… the list is long and it is all about health and safety.
YUFA members want to know what YUFA is doing about all this. YUFA’s President sits on the University Security Advisory Committee, YUFA members sit on the Joint Health and Safety Committee with the Employer, and we also have a Health and Safety Caucus of that Joint Committee. On September 9 York University announced that extra security measures would be implemented; the announcement can be found on the York University Website in the Media Release Archive. YUFA will be urging the Employer to carry out a wide-ranging safety audit on campus. The Employer must work with its respective unions and associations to do this and then to act on the audit’s recommendations.
We hope that as a YUFA member you also feel strongly about the need for a safety audit. If you do, please write to the President and tell him so:
President Mamdouh Shoukri
9th Floor
Ross Building
or
mshoukri@yorku.ca
Over the next few months I will be writing pieces for this space on the YUFA Webpage about specific health and safety issues. In the meantime, YUFA would like to hear your concerns about health and safety or other issues that you see as needing to be addressed here at York. Please write to me at lripley@yorku.ca with concerns you would like to see addressed here.