Faculty Can Lead Us into a Stronger College System: Bargaining Update

In our second stretch of 2024 bargaining dates, your College Faculty Bargaining Team has tabled all non-monetary proposals. Your democratic demands are represented in proposals that improve our working conditions for all faculty, including partial-load, counsellors, librarians and coordinators.We have received and responded to 54 questions on our proposals from our employer. In turn, the CEC has sent us their first proposals, which your team has begun to review.

Breaking Down the Non-Monetary Proposals & Your Demands

Presently, the following all proposals have been tabled: U1 (Workload), U2 (Partial-load), U3 (Coordinators), U4 (Equity), U5 (Staffing, Job Security, and Employment Stability), U6 (Union Representation) and U7 (Academic Freedom, Intellectual Property, and Collegial Governance).These proposals stress key issues regarding our working conditions and propose tangible solutions, including:

• the creation of the Partial-load Assignment Calculator (PLAC) to describe and put limits on assigned workload
• staffing language that would address a membership two-thirds in precarity and bring us to a 70% full-time staffing complement by 2027;
• stronger language to protect against contracting out and future lay-offs, including ways to improve accountability of the colleges to participate in employment stability processes;
• improvements to union representation language which would finally facilitate the ability of partial-load members to participate in union business;
• stronger protections around ownership of your course content, including the right to refuse unilateral changes of your intellectual property and mode of delivery of your assigned courses, by the employer;
• strengthening Advisory College Councils where faculty are key advisors – avoiding the deepening crises in the colleges, many of which are spear-headed by lack of faculty consultation. 

Workload Taskforce Report: Status Update

Your Bargaining Team is currently hard at work on two main fronts:

• negotiating an on-time renewal agreement with the employer;
• ensuring that the Workload Taskforce report is in the hands of all faculty;
• ensuring our voices, in the world’s largest study of faculty workload, are heard.

Our Workload proposal makes references to the Workload Taskforce report ordered in the last round of negotiations by arbitrator William Kaplan, to inform this round of bargaining. This report is currently only available in a confidential form to principal parties on both sides of the Workload Taskforce. It is our position that while we reference the document, we have not, in any way, released any confidential details from that report.

Faculty Can Lead Us into a Stronger College System 

14 out of 24 Ontario colleges no longer have a faculty librarian; and 5 out of 24 Colleges no longer have faculty counsellors, in a growing student mental health crisis. This data represents a significant erosion of Faculty expertise in our Colleges. As College Faculty, we are hired to train Ontario’s future. Our frontline expertise in the classroom and in our communities provides vital contributions and insights to improve the sectors we emerge from. Improving our Colleges begins with valuing the educators training tomorrow’s workers.