As of our last bargaining session (April 27) the Association has not made any concrete salary or benefit proposals to the university (Proposals 9 and 10). We hope to be in a position to do so at our next bargaining session (May 26). There are two technical, but important, reasons why this crucial set of proposals has been delayed.
A number of variables inform our salary proposal, such as inflation rates, salary settlements at other Canadian universities, retention and recruitment issues, and the university’s ability to pay. To understand the university’s ability to pay, we need to have information about UBC’s many different funding sources, including the government grant (which comprises about 67% of the general purpose operating grant). Consequently, we generally await the government funding letter before making salary and benefit proposals. In fact, our Collective Agreement dictates that negotiations “shall not be concluded until the University has been officially notified of the operating grant allocated to it by the Province of British Columbia.” In short, we’re waiting for this notification (“the budget letter”), which should have arrived by now, but mysteriously has not.
Second, the University is currently negotiating with the Sauder faculty, who have rights to bargain for a subsidiary agreement. For reasons that are pretty obvious, we need to wait until those negotiations are concluded before making our general salary proposals.
