Bargaining Bulletin #6: Negotiations Resume
Dear colleagues, we hope your semester is starting off well.
On 18 September we resumed negotiations with the University administration to renew our Collective Agreement (CA). This followed a break over the summer during which the administration was onboarding new members of their team, including a new spokesperson.
Short version: There is a lot of bargaining still left to do, but we have an opportunity to make significant improvements, and to obtain a boost to the CapU budget in the process (along with increasing faculty salaries 3% per year, effective from April 2025 onwards). We are committed to doing all we can to reach a deal before the end of 2026.
We expressed concern at the start of the meeting about the lack of meaningful response from the administration to many CFA proposals. Since April, we have repeatedly heard “we will get back to you” from the administration on specific proposals, without receiving substantive responses or counter-proposals. Then at the start of June the administration’s lead negotiator told us he was leaving CapU for a new job. We agreed to cancel the bargaining dates we had scheduled for the rest of June—on the understanding that the administration would appoint a new spokesperson and devote the original June dates + July and August to preparing responses to the CFA’s proposals.
The bad news is that the administration does not yet have the responses we have been asking for. This has left the CFA committee feeling that we have not moved beyond where we were in late April.
The good news is that our meeting on 18 September felt more productive than the meetings last spring. We made some progress in that meeting with new admin spokesperson Stephanie Kellar (the admin’s Senior Director of Labour Relations) and the renewed admin committee. This gives us hope that we can reach a good agreement this fall.
The other good news is what we now know the government’s financial mandate. In addition to a 3% annual raise in salary for all faculty, there is a significant budget increase available to the University. If the parties reach an agreement on terms the government sees as improvements to CapU, the government will provide additional funding that ratchets up to an added $1,248,000 per year in 2028/29. That amount would then remain a permanent part of the University’s funding in future years.
That is a considerable amount of money, enough to make dramatic improvements to our working conditions: improving pay for non-regular faculty and lab supervisors/instructional associates; retirement incentives; updating our benefits plan; and other CFA proposals that the administration sees as “cost items.”
The agenda for 18 September included a review of several key proposals that the CFA identified ahead of time as ones the parties should be able to agree on, to build momentum. These included:
The CFA’s draft of a joint proposal to the B.C. government to unlock that additional $1.25 million dollars in annual funding. We believe our draft is a well-developed outline of how the CFA’s bargaining proposals, in combination with proposals from the administration, address the government’s priorities. The University administration indicated that they are interested in submitting a joint proposal on this matter and committed to providing a response to the CFA for our next meeting, on 2 October.
The CFA then reviewed a number of the proposals on which we have been awaiting promised responses from the administration. We focused explicitly on:
Benefits proposals – which includes updating the dollar amounts on our plan, most which are unchanged in 31 years, along with improvements to our life insurance, psychological care and counselling, paramedical services, optometry, and others. The administration agreed to a targeted side-table meeting on Sept 25 to work with the bargaining committee at costing the proposal and approaching Canada Life for needed data. That meeting was productive, and we hope the administration will send the data requests to Canada Life soon.
We discussed the University administration’s proposed “troubleshooter” mechanism for grievance handling – which would give the CFA and admin a cost-saving alternative to full arbitration of the many active grievances that are taking too long to resolve. We requested costing on how much this proposal would save the administration in legal fees and how money saved could be costed against the bargaining mandate. The administration argues that this cost savings should not be taken into account alongside the added costs of things like benefits improvements. We are still discussing this.
Perhaps the most encouraging part of the meeting was that we were able to work together with the administration at the table to amend the wording of a CFA regularization proposal, reaching tentative agreement on this update to the CA. The proposal codifies in the CA the right of regular faculty to top-up their commitment level based on workload across the whole academic year, not just the best two terms. In exchange for exercising this option, the member would have to waive the right to have their commitment level met in two terms. It was a productive discussion. We were able to come to agreement on the language, subject to the employer receiving approval from the Post-Secondary Employers’ Association (PSEA), the government body that oversees our sector.
We discussed the CFA’s counter to the administration’s proposal of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee. We came close to full agreement on the language of the proposal but hit a snag on the CFA’s proposal to include section release for committee members–especially members from equity-deserving groups, to enable their participation. The administration was willing to look at costing this with us before approving it.
We discussed our proposal on a committee to review evaluation procedures and all factors that affect teaching at the University holistically, and then revise the process in article 11.5 of our CA. We explained again that this proposal complements the new Senate Teaching and Learning subcommittee on evaluation of courses and programs, but has a different focus. We remain hopeful that the administration will accept this proposal.
We are looking forward to a productive discussion at our next meeting, this Friday, 2 October, and have now scheduled meetings on every Friday in October and November. Our goal is to work in between meetings to get proposals ready for agreement, and then to work out the final details for groups of proposals in the Friday meetings.
We will update you regularly as the meetings proceed.
In solidarity,
CFA bargaining committee
Doug Alards-Tomalin, Dwayne Beaver, Michael Begg, Chelsea Bell Eady, Iris Gordon, Ferdos Jamali, and FPSE advisors Monica Staff and Robin Wylie