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College Faculty bargaining update: Progress & security aren’t possible while concessions remain

December 10, 2024

Bargaining Bulletin 15

Over December 6 – 8, we entered non-binding mediation with the College Employer Council (CEC).While mediation has now ended, the parties have agreed to meet again in non-binding mediation on January 6-7, 2025. At this point in time, we have allowed the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) regarding no-escalation to expire.While we encourage the CEC to engage productively in January, encouragements have not moved concessions off the table. If we want different results, we need to take a different approach.We’ve always had to fight to make the changes we need for our colleagues and ourselves. It’s no different now – we need to be prepared to fight on all fronts against cuts, concessions, and the austerity sweeping several colleges.We are carefully reviewing our options to determine all available paths forward to securing a new collective agreement that reflects members’ priorities: no concessions, better wages, improved working conditions, and enhanced job security.

Concessions and Cuts Go Hand in Hand

As members have made resoundingly clear, and as we have stated from the outset: we cannot in good faith accept a collective agreement with concessions that erode our working conditions, which may make cuts from the colleges easier. Despite nearly 30 days of bargaining, 4 days of conciliation, a historic strike mandate, and 3 days of mediation, the CEC has maintained their concessions – all while manufacturing a crisis that threatens cuts to frontline workers.We now know how much work members are doing without recognition or compensation. If we had a collective agreement that reflected the realities of our workload today – not 40 years ago – it would cost the college system $24,500 per member. That’s $24,500 of free labour being skimmed off each of us, according to our costing.From 2024 through to 2025, our shared demands remain the same: no concessions, better wages, job security, and no free labour.

A Better System Requires New Leadership

Workers should never pay the price for the failures of college executives and various governments in mismanaging Ontario’s post-secondary education.The same managers who got us into this mess, cannot steward us through a crisis they helped manufacture. Their legacy has left the college system starved of public funding, fueled by an overwhelmingly precarious work force: some three quarters of all faculty are precarious. For more than a decade, the college system has raked in historic surpluses, while adding 1500 administrators and only 500 full time faculty.The heads of the college system and bad-faith politicians will attempt to capitalize on the current crisis to instill fear and uncertainty, and pit workers against each other: full-time faculty against non-full-time faculty, department against department, college against college.Letting uncertainty win only serves one agenda – and it’s not the agenda of a well funded, public college system with students and communities as the focus. Now more than ever, unity and solidarity are the antidote. We cannot allow our futures and the futures of the students we work with day in and day out to be compromised by bad decisions made at the top.A better college system is possible – and so is a contract that respects the work of 15,000 members across the province, training graduates for meaningful work in the communities we live in and serve.It will not come for free. We win when the employer looks across the table and sees each of us standing behind our bargaining team, ready to step up to the plate and fight for our futures.Solidarity,

Your CAAT-A Bargaining Team:

Ravi Ramkissoonsingh, L242, Chair (he/him) Michelle Arbour, L125, Acting-Chair (she/her) Chad Croteau, L110 (he/him) Bob Delaney, L237 (he/him) Martin Lee, L415 (he/him) Sean Lougheed, L657 (he/him) Rebecca Ward, L732 (she/her)

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