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.
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.
As we prepare for the upcoming round of collective bargaining, we need to hear from you about your issues, priorities, and concerns. Below is a list of Zoom Consultation Sessions geared to specific constituencies that we’ll be holding over the fall.
While we are working toward either a negotiated settlement or an arbitration award, we want our Librarians and Archivists to know that we have been fighting to make your work better in this round—and we’ll keep pushing UBC in both this bargaining round and in the future.
The last meeting between the University’s negotiating team and the Faculty Association’s team was Thursday, February 2nd. As a result of that meeting, negotiations have now stalled.
There might well be no aspect of collegial governance that matters more to faculty members than our ability to participate as experts in the appointing, reappointing, tenuring, and promoting (henceforth, ARPT processes) of our colleagues. The Faculty Association has tendered four proposals that are directly concerned with ARPT processes.
We have told UBC that we would give them until Dec 1st to see if we could achieve a tentative settlement at the table. If that didn’t happen, we said we would move toward Interest Arbitration. We are now at that moment.
Here’s how Interest Arbitration works.
Benefits constitute a significant part of our total compensation. Any change to our benefits plan represents a change in compensation. Some changes can help our members — such as the recent move to cover massage therapy without a doctor’s referral. But others may have a negative impact — such as when UBC in 2018 signed on to the FACET Prior Authorization Drug Program, which requires pre-approval for specialty drugs (including for conditions like multiple sclerosis or cancer) or prescriptions which cost more than $5000/year.
Almost all of us will during our career at UBC experience a life event which requires us to take time away from work. Some of these events are joyous, as when we welcome a new child; some are catastrophic, as when we face the serious illness or death of a loved one. Leaves are essential to balancing work and life in periods of these extreme demands. It is essential that these leaves be a right accessible to all.
Full-time teaching for Sessional Lecturers in Education at UBC is 15 credits/term (yes, really), and they make less per credit than anyone else at UBC. If they teach fewer than 7.5 credits in a term, they are still considered less than half-time and do not qualify for most UBC benefits. We need to fix these inequities for our Sessional Lecturer colleagues at UBC, and not just in Education. Most Sessional Lecturers hold PhDs or other terminal degrees and teach a significant number of UBC’s courses; many Sessional Lecturers also do curricular work, service, and research in their disciplines on their own time, unpaid. All Sessional Lecturers deserve to be treated fairly and paid as the highly-qualified professionals they are.
The process by which the money in the three pools is to be allocated could definitely be better. This blog explains the problems the Association is attempting to rectify, and the objectives it is attempting to achieve, with our proposals.
Lecturers are the fastest-growing cohort of UBC faculty, highly qualified academics and professionals, performing key work central to UBC’s mission. Why, then, are they chronically over-worked and insecure? These are two of the issues facing Lecturers that we are addressing in this round of bargaining.
This post focuses on the top bargaining issue for most of us: the Faculty Association’s proposal for a general wage increase in response to current inflation trends.
We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. You may have questions and we have the answers.
It would be hard to over-state how much of a problem workload is for our membership. Everybody feels it; everybody wants it fixed. So: members who have read our “Day One” proposals will have noticed our Proposal #2: “The Association proposes to modify Part 1, Article 13 and Part 5, Article 7, to create workload language that is consistent with best practices at major Canadian research universities.” What exactly do we mean by that?
We know from our consultations that workload has created significant problems for most of our members, and we are addressing those in several different proposals. Here in Proposal #2, we are asserting one broad principle that appeals to the whole membership, and two that apply more specifically to the members (librarians and tenure-track faculty) with a pronounced mix of assigned and self-directed work. We have other workload proposals to address the additional specific issues facing Lecturers and Sessional Lecturers as well; these will be the subject of future bargaining posts.
They are clearly biased against racialized and other historically marginalized groups; they are statistically unreliable; and they do not and cannot answer their intended purpose. Yes, we are talking (again) about student surveys, the cheap candy of teaching metrics.
As we said in 2019, it is hard to imagine an instrument more ill-suited to its supposed value than student opinion surveys. Leaving aside the statistical limitations involved in what are often small non-randomized samples, these surveys cannot provide accurate information about the skill of the instructor or the effectiveness of their teaching. They tell us instead, as one would normally expect from a survey, about the students themselves.
As anyone who has read the headlines, or gone to the grocery store, or filled their car knows, inflation has recently surged to levels unseen in Canada in over thirty years. And it’s not going to get better in a hurry.
Negotiations between UBC and UBCFA to renew the Collective Agreement that expires on June 30, 2022 began formally this week.
Both parties have shared all of their Day-One proposals; these are outlines of each party’s goals and objectives. The opening summaries will be followed by proposed specific contract language as bargaining proceeds…
In this first edition of our Bargaining Advisories, we respond to common questions and concerns you’ve raised about the rights and protections we have already negotiated.
Last fall, as we prepared for the upcoming negotiating round, the Faculty Association’s Bargaining Preparation Committee (BPC) surveyed the membership on areas of bargaining priorities. We were pleased that almost 1500 of you responded to the survey with meaningful feedback.
The new collective agreement (CA) came into effect earlier this year and has been posted to our site. In June of this year, we updated the membership on the finalization of the agreement and posted a compendium explaining the changes that were agreed to at the bargaining table. The compendium is available at this link.
We are pleased to announce that the Collective Agreement between the UBCFA and UBC, July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2022, has been ratified by both parties. A copy of the Agreement will be posted to our respective websites as soon as it is finalized.
On Friday, January 17, 2020, the bargaining teams for UBC and the Faculty Association reached an agreement for a new Collective Agreement for the period July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2022. Both the Faculty Association and the University worked hard over the past year to reach this mutually agreeable settlement.
On the matter of student evaluations of teaching (SEoT), our position is clear: we propose that these measures not be used in the summative evaluation of teaching for appointment, reappointment, promotion, and tenure. The invalidity of these instruments has been known for a long time; the evidence that they are also biased against protected classes of people increases seemingly weekly.
We are all familiar with the titles associated with the research professoriate: Assistant, Associate, and full Professor. UBC’s “Educational Leadership” stream has titles that are quite a bit less tidy. In 2010 we entitled the final rank in the then-new Educational Leadership stream “Professor of Teaching,” but the first and second ranks in that stream don’t have matching titles. We’ve been trying to fix that.
The Association continues to seek to modify Part 5, Conditions of Appointment for Librarians to ensure that workload is collegially assigned in a fair and equitable manner, and to create Heads language for the Library that mirrors Heads language for faculty (i.e., term appointments, stipend, administrative leave). In addition, in this round we have proposed a change in the confirmation review process and introduced definitions upon which candidates for confirmed appointments will be judged.
When the BC Government announced in 2007 that it would end mandatory retirement in the province, the Faculty Association got busy to protect our most senior colleagues from forcible retirement while that legislation was pending. The result was our Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) #2 on page 26 of the Collective Agreement.
We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. Read the answers to a few key FAQ’s…
Lecturers are the fastest-growing cohort of faculty at UBC, but their terms of work have not kept pace with their increasing presence on our campuses. Lecturers are designed to be a teaching stream with teaching and service as their assigned responsibilities; they are full-time salaried faculty members with one- to three-year appointments and a presumptive right of reappointment as long as the work is available. But many other elements of their work-lives at UBC need attention.
Occasionally as we prepare for bargaining we uncover an issue that we didn’t know we had and that causes us to enunciate a principle. One such issue is the protection of our benefits coverage.
It is hard to imagine that there is a widely-used instrument as ill-suited to the purpose to which it has been put as student opinion surveys are to measuring teaching effectiveness.
This post focuses on our Sessional Lecturer job security/access to work proposals. Sessional Lecturers without Continuing status have a right of reappointment. But to what, exactly?
This post focuses on the benefits (pension, health benefits, and professional development funds) denied to our colleagues on sessional contracts.
Workload is a major concern for UBC faculty and librarians alike.
In every bargaining survey from 2010 to the present, we have consistently heard that you are struggling with unhealthy workloads and difficult work-life balance challenges and significantly dissatisfied with the transparency and equity of workload assignments. The University’s Work Experience Survey (WES) confirms this unhappiness with workload…
Negotiations between UBC and UBCFA to renew the Collective Agreement that expires on June 30, 2019 began formally this week.
Both parties have presented all of their Day-One proposals; these are outlines of each party’s goals and objectives…
Preparation for collective bargaining is almost complete. Thank you to the members who have taken the time to fill out the survey, meet with us, or email us with comments and concerns. Your input was crucial for developing the proposals that we will take to the table. On January 17, 2019 the Executive Committee approved the proposals the Association plans to take to the bargaining table. Our first bargaining session with the University is scheduled for the third week of February.
In preparation for bargaining we have tracked the growth and changes in our bargaining unit over the past decade. Knowing who we are and how we’ve changed as a group of faculty, librarians, and program directors helps us determine how the university is evolving (or devolving) and which trends we might need to address. The table tracks the composition of our active membership in 2006, 2012, 2015, and 2017…
A message from the Chair of the UBCFA Bargaining Preparation Committee:
Dear colleagues,
The Faculty Association is preparing to go to the table to negotiate our 2019 Collective Agreement, and we need to know what matters most to you.
The University and Faculty Association Bargaining teams have continued to meet over the past two months, and we have three days of bargaining booked for the last week of June. Progress is being made, slowly. A couple of issues have been resolved and a number of important issues where the parties have some mutual interests are being worked on, and resolution on those issues seems possible.
We are trying to solve a major problem with our proposal #3 (Merit, PSA, and CPI certainty).
The existing language pertaining to Progress Through the Ranks (PTR) contains specific dates for the distribution of this money to faculty members. The 2014-2016 Collective Agreement specifies that the PTR be allocated on July 1, 2014 and July 1, 2015. Normally what would happen is that the 2016-2018 Collective Agreement would specify new dates: July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017. However since negotiations to renew the Collective Agreement have not yet been completed, the July 1, 2016 payments have been delayed, much like those for 2014 and 2015. This delay happens every bargaining round that is not settled before the Collective Agreement ends and is always a source of considerable irritation by the members.
The Association’s Proposal #8 seeks to transfer a member’s tuition waiver to their spouse or partner, if desired. The tuition waiver permits members to take up to 12 credits per year. Specifically our proposal would allow a member to transfer the tuition waiver to his or her spouse. The Association does not believe that this waiver transfer would add a significant cost to the University, while making it easier to recruit and maintain faculty members. Our members have repeatedly told us that a spousal tuition waiver would help address both recruiting and retention issues.
The Association has proposed a significant revision to the maternity and parental leave Article in our Collective Agreement (Part 3, Article 6). There are a number of particular issues around maternity and parental leaves that we are attempting to solve.
Over the past three bargaining rounds we have, through our bargaining blogs, talked frequently about the UBC Faculty Pension issue for Lecturers, Sessionals, and all members working at and beyond age 71. It is sufficiently important to talk about it again.
Occasionally the bargaining team asks members for permission to share their thoughts via the bargaining blog. In September 2016, Christina Hendricks, Chair, Instructor Network Leadership Team, sent a letter to the Provosts at UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan, the President of the Faculty Association and the Chair of the Okanagan Faculty Committee discussing the need for change in the Educational Leadership titles. The correspondence follows:
As current faculty members in the Educational Leadership stream we are requesting that you advocate a change to our titles to align appropriately with our job descriptions and career trajectories, as well as to parallel our Research stream colleagues. We suggest that titles of Instructor and Senior Instructor be replaced with Assistant Professor of Teaching and Associate Professor of Teaching, respectively. Such a shift in titles would create a sensible, clear trajectory of rank that ends with the extant Professor of Teaching. The University of Toronto has just recently made a change to their instructor/educational leadership stream faculty titles.
The Association proposal remains, as it always has been, to provide a general salary increase sufficient to keep pace with inflation and the general state of salaries elsewhere. In particular the Association’s position has always been that on salaries, we should rank at, or just below, the University of Toronto. This latter goal is an important and long-standing objective of the Association. UBC is one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, university in Canada. It can easily afford to pay salaries comparable with those at the University of Toronto. There is no financial justification for UBC to rank so far down the national salary rankings.
A Lecturer is defined in the Collective Agreement as a person holding an appointment without review for a term of twelve (12) months or less with responsibilities limited to teaching and related duties. Those related duties may include administrative responsibilities normally undertaken by faculty members (i.e., not work normally undertaken by administrative staff). The university has proposed adding service to the duties of Lecturers, something to which the Association is not opposed in principle, although we recognize that with additional responsibilities should come additional compensation.
As a matter of labour law if a party to a Collective Agreement has knowingly declined to enforce a provision of the Agreement, or where the parties have entered into a practice that is contrary to the plain language of the agreement, they may be estopped from enforcing the actual language of the collective agreement.
After a long hiatus caused by scheduling difficulties, the Faculty Association and the University resumed bargaining on April 5th and 6th. We are bargaining today and have another 8 full days of bargaining scheduled between now and the end of June.
Negotiations between UBC and UBCFA to renew the Collective Agreement that expired on June 30, 2016 began yesterday. Both parties presented all of their proposals.
The University and the Association have started to table specific language. At our next meeting, on February 9, both parties aim to table specific language on all proposals.
In preparation for the 2016 round of negotiations with the University, the Faculty Association is seeking applications for volunteers for the Bargaining Preparation Committee and the Bargaining Advisory Committee.
The first phase of bargaining between UBC and UBCFA has ended. During this phase, the parties attempt to reach a final agreement on all matters, in which case the agreement is then put to the members for a ratification vote. However, if this phase ends with some matters unresolved, then “the matters in dispute shall be submitted to arbitration” (Part I, Article 9.04(b) of the Collective Agreement (see page 8). This phase concluded on Friday, January 30, 2015 when the parties signed a Memorandum of Agreement that itemizes the proposals on which agreement has been reached, the proposals the parties have mutually agreed to withdraw, and those “matters still in dispute” that the parties may submit to arbitration. We will be providing more details on the agreements reached in future blog posts.
As part of its general wage increase offer the University has made what must be described as a most peculiar proposal. Their proposal is that on May 1, 2016, in addition to the general wage increase they have proposed, our salaries will also be increased by 50% of the amount by which the Economic Forecast Council forecast underestimates real (inflation adjusted) GDP growth in 2014. They also proposed similar forecast error increases on May 1, 2017, May 1, 2018, and May 1, 2019. This will take some explaining.
On June 5 the Faculty Association and UBC exchanged proposals for a general wage increase (GWI). The University has proposed a five-year agreement with a GWI of 0% in 2014/15, 0.9% in 2015/2016, 1.4% in 2016/17, 1.4% in 2017/2018, and 1.5% in 2018/19. The Association has proposed a two-year agreement with a GWI of 3% in 2014/15 and 3%.
Two of our proposals pertain to pensions. First, we propose that the university provide pension plan contribution for all sessional lecturers. Currently the university only pays full compensation (salary plus pension plan contributions) to sessional lecturers with at least 50% workloads. Second, we propose to work out a way for members’ full compensation not to be reduced at age 71, which would happen if the university stopped paying the pension plan contributions at that age.
To understand why we feel so strongly about these proposals it is first necessary to understand how our pension plan works.
In preparing for the 2012-2014 arbitration, the Faculty Association commissioned a report from Professors Cameron Morrill and Janet Morrill, accounting professors in the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. The Morrills have considerable experience in examining University budgets for Faculty Associations in Canada. While we did not use this report in the actual arbitration, it did help us to understand a variety of issues related to the University’s ability to pay appropriate salaries to faculty members.
Some of the highlights of their report include the following observations:
By far and away the largest single complaint we received from members while we prepared for bargaining concerned UBC’s budget model. Members are justifiably unhappy about a budget model in which the departments and Faculties are not treated as central to the core mission of the University. The comment “I am particularly concerned about the apparent over-allocation of University funds to administrative positions/costs, and a concomitant reduction of funds available to support scholarly activity and investment in hiring faculty” sums up the comments of many, many members.
When the bargaining preparation committee analysed the input we got from members in face-to-face meetings, from emails, and from the survey, particularly the comments sections of the survey, three major issues emerged, in addition to widespread concern about salaries. Members can see that most of our non-salary proposals deal with these issues in one way or another.
First, we are increasingly observing what can only be described as symptoms of burnout.
Negotiations between UBC and UBCFA to renew the Collective Agreement that expires on June 30, 2014 began formally on April 7 – 8, although the parties did engage in some preliminary discussions in the preceding months.
Although the 2012-2014 Collective Agreement was only finalized in late 2013, it will soon expire, on June 30, 2014. Consequently it is already time to begin preparations for the next round of negotiations, tentatively set to begin in mid-March. Once negotiations begin it is expected that they will proceed fairly intensively until either a new Collective Agreement, or impasse, is reached. Our expectation is that if the University is willing and able to negotiate a Collective Agreement without recourse to an Arbitrator, it will be done by mid-June.
On July 25, 2013, the Faculty Association and the University sent out a joint memorandum describing the details of the arbitration award for the years 2012 – 2014. We also linked to the actual award so that members could read it in its entirety. However many members have found the entire award a bit much to internalize and have asked us for a short, non-technical, explanation of the reasoning behind the salary settlement. Here it is.
Yesterday we received the award of Arbitrator Colin Taylor Q.C. which decides the July 1, 2012 – June 30, 2014 Collective Agreement between the University and the Faculty Association.
The interest arbitration to resolve the dispute between the Faculty Association and the University about the terms of the 2012-14 Collective Agreement finished on Wednesday, June 5, although the arbitrator asked for additional information, which was supplied last week.
Message from Nancy Langton, UBCFA President
Members will recall that the Association and UBC were scheduled to begin five days of mediation-arbitration this week. Unfortunately, the Arbitrator, Colin Taylor, became ill and had to cancel the dates at the last moment. This was a very disappointing development, but clearly not one either party had any control over.
Last week the University contacted the Association and suggested they were prepared to make a new offer in the week of December 10. Although we started meeting with the University at the beginning of the week, unfortunately, it turned out that they were not, in fact, prepared to make an offer until today.
One of the primary objectives of this round of bargaining is to bring our salaries back in line with those of other Canadian universities of comparable academic quality and size.
The Faculty Association and the University had set aside this week (October 22-26) to continue negotiations towards a new Collective Agreement. Both parties had hoped that an agreement could be reached at this time, but unfortunately the parties are still far apart on a number of issues, key among which is the Across-the-Board (ATB) salary settlement.
In May 2012 Maclean’s magazine published an article comparing median faculty salaries at Canadian universities for 2010/2011. The data were provided by Statistics Canada’s Centre for Education Statistics through the University and College Academic Staff Survey.
After a long hiatus over the summer, negotiations between the Faculty Association and the University have resumed. As we noted in our June 28 blog, our intention was to set arbitration dates before resuming. The parties have agreed on a date for binding interest arbitration with arbitrator Colin Taylor.
When negotiations between UBC and the Faculty Association began on February 14, the parties set the third week in June as the date when we would take a hiatus, if necessary.
In 2010, one of our bargaining proposals was for a unified minimum salary scale for all sessionals. We have this as one of our bargaining objectives this year as well. Here is the rationale we provided to the members in 2010:
On February 14 the Association and the University met for the first time for the current round of Collective Bargaining. During this meeting the Parties exchanged proposals and provided a general overview of the problems the proposals are intended to solve, or the objectives they are meant to accomplish.
Upcoming contract negotiations begin in early 2012, but right now, we want to hear from you! Come to the Faculty Association’s face-to-face consultations and tell us what you think. The Association is coming to your area of campus to hear your issues and answer your questions.
In preparation for the 2012 round of negotiations with the University, the Faculty Association is seeking applications for volunteers for the Bargaining Preparation Committee and the Bargaining Advisory Committee.
You may have woken up the other day to a headline in the Ubyssey claiming that the Faculty Association bargaining team bargained away the “right to strike earlier this year.” We’re still wondering who provided them with this information.
Under the provisions of the Collective Agreement, if a negotiated agreement has not been reached within six weeks of the receipt by the University of official notification of the operating grant allocated to it, the matters in dispute shall be submitted to binding arbitration. This type of arbitration, which is designed to resolve a bargaining impasse, is known as “interest arbitration”, as opposed to rights or grievance arbitrations which resolve disputes about the interpretation or application of the Collective Agreement.
Joint Communication from the University of British Columbia and the UBC Faculty Association
Following nineteen days of negotiations which began in February of this year, the University and the Faculty Association have reached an impasse in negotiations for a new collective agreement.
Our Collective Agreement has a technical expiry date of July 1st, 2010. Don’t panic. There’s nothing to worry about if we don’t reach agreement by that date. We have what’s called an “evergreen clause” (Article 26 in the Framework Agreement) in our Collective Agreement, meaning that it remains in force until such time as we reach a final agreement.
One of the basic ways to prevent teaching-intensive positions from becoming a ghetto for the academics who uphold UBC’s teaching mission is to guarantee respectable minimum salaries.
In 2009, the Faculty Association had to work hard to ensure that UBC withdrew a bad privacy policy – one that would have given the university access to all of our private information, including in filing cabinets, emails and offices.
We recently received an email from a member, saying that there were rumours circulating that the Faculty Association had been offered a general rise in salary at the bargaining table, and we had turned it down. This rumour, of course, has caused concerns among our members.
Technology has made surveillance, including that done surreptitiously, so easy that its use is growing dramatically, often forcing us to surrender our privacy for no tangible or even foreseeable benefit.
UBC claims to rank in the top 40 internationally for research-intensive universities. The university states that this achievement in excellence “is supported by strategic efforts to promote funding success, research infrastructure, the recruitment and retention of talented faculty members, and knowledge mobilization.”
Salaries in most jobs are characterized by seniority-based pay systems. This is partially to account for increasing productivity over time, but primarily it is designed to defer compensation from the early part of the employee’s career to the latter part.
A big black hole: that’s where heads, directors, and associate deans live in the Collective Agreement with UBC. We have no guidelines in our Agreement to protect the department’s voice in appointing heads.
Our bargaining Proposal 2 flows from the premise that UBC faculty members have the right to promotion and tenure processes that are fair. We should be able to trust that the evidence is appropriate, that the processes are iterative and responsive, that there are safeguards and mechanisms to ensure accountability.
The FA has three big goals in our Proposal 6: to tidy up the very messy systems for counting and paying sessional faculty for their work; to create more job-security for our most vulnerable colleagues; and to create a real career-path with promotions and reviews for our dedicated full-time sessional faculty.
Our proposal to the university on faculty workloads (Proposal 5) aims to make sure that our members have a healthy and productive work environment, with workloads assigned collegially, fairly and equitably.
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).
We have bargained with the university weekly (usually twice a week) between March 1 and April 27. That amount of intensive bargaining time has allowed both the Faculty Association and the university to present their proposals in great detail, and also answer any questions the other side had about the objectives that were trying to be achieved through specific proposals.
On February 1 the university repeated a proposal they had made informally a few times previously in the past several months, that we just ”roll over” the Collective Agreement for a two year period.
Before the University tabled its proposal with the Faculty Association, they suggested that the Association consider a two-year “rollover agreement” which would write in the 0/0% salary increases recommended by the province for the public sector but not otherwise discuss or negotiate any revisions or new language for our Collective Agreement.
On February 1 the parties met for the first time to exchange proposals and provide a general overview of the problems the proposals are intended to solve or the outcomes the proposals are intended to achieve.
