Gearing Up for Bargaining 2025

Welcome to the start of a new collective-bargaining season!  As we start preparing for the next bargaining round, here are three ways we can collectively make this a powerful and successful set of negotiations:

1. Participate: Watch for a consultation session near you; email the FA with your ideas and issues; respond to the Bargaining Survey in October.
2. Help us out: If you have an issue, an experience, a perspective or an expertise that would inform or enrich our negotiations, please email us and let us know.
3. Claim your rights: In our last round we won a number of important protections and provisions. They are all yours, but sometimes it helps to be reminded that you have them and can exercise them. 

These are new rights and protections:

Equity:

We have made several gains here, both for equity-deserving colleagues and for our colleagues in precarious or under-paid positions:

1. New language recognizing Indigenous forms of scholarly activity
2. New ceremonial-leave provisions for Indigenous members
3. Improved parental-leave provisions
4. Explicit domestic/sexual-violence leave provisions
5. Expanded paid short-term leave provisions for non-continuing Sessional Lecturers
6. Service to equity-deserving communities acknowledged for Librarians
7. Sessional Lecturers in Applied Science and Education with improved benefits-eligibility, seniority rights, and per-credit minimum pay: as of July 1^st, 2023, “full-time” down from 15 credits to 12 credits per term).

Workload: 

Here we have made some incremental and some dramatic improvements:

1. Explicit acknowledgement of needed time for research
2. Increased transparency on workload assignments within units
3. A significant improvement in workload over the life of the agreement for Lecturers in Faculties with more than a 3/3/2 maximum teaching load

Leaves & Benefits:

Several meaningful improvements here beyond those captured above in “Equity”:

1. New option of study leave at 100% of salary after 8 years
2. Increased Health Spending Account by $200 annually
3. New option of study-leave-to-retirement transition
4. New protection of study-leave accrual for members moving from contingent to confirmed/renewal appointments
5. Tuition-waiver transfer to spouse/partner: new option

Appointment, Re-appointment, Tenure & Promotion Processes:  Tenured & Tenure-Track Faculty

Several helpful improvements here:

1. Expanded criteria for extending the tenure-clock
2. New language on Indigenous scholarly activity
3. Better, fairer language on the body of scholarly activity/educational leadership and how it should be viewed
4. Clarifying grievance rights around optional reviews
5. Clearer language on graduate supervision criterion
6. More consistent language on referee letters for EL faculty
7. Acting Assistant Professor role standardized & improved
8. Voting rights in departmental committees for ARPT clarified

Job-Security & Career-path:  Lecturers

1. Increased appointment-lengths for ongoing Lecturers

As always, your union works because you do. Let us know early and often how we can be of use to you in collective bargaining for a better UBC.

Elizabeth Hodgson,

Chair, UBCFA Bargaining Preparation Committee