What follows is an Article-by-Article comparison of the College Employer Council’s final offer, tabled in the morning of November 6, and the Union’s final proposal, tabled in the evening of the same day.
Management’s offer contains serious concessions that would:
- Allow the Council to avoid applying Bill 148’s equal pay for equal work provisions to partialload.
- Gut Article 2 and impair the ability of the union to create more full-time positions.
- Weaken workload protections to allow for unlimited overtime and unlimited teaching weeks.
- Allow management to narrow the scope of faculty professional development, to deny PD, and to micro-manage it.
- Reduce the credit that faculty get for post-secondary education when calculating starting salary.
- Allow for partial-load coordinators to be paid less.
- Include an “Academic Freedom” letter of understanding that actually leaves faculty worse off in terms of academic decision-making.
- Create a Return-to-Work nightmare in which full-time and partial-load faculty will not be properly compensated for the work necessary to complete the semester.
Both offers also contain items agreed-to by the Council and the Union, including significant gains around partial-load seniority, benefits, the impact of student accommodations on workload, and the Provincial Joint Task Force that will examine collegial governance, faculty complement, precarious work, and intellectual property.
Accepting management’s offer would mean unprecedented concessions in our Collective Agreement.
These are changes to our CA’s most important Articles that we would never get back. It would also mean that the gains the Union has been able to bargain for partial-load would be completely undermined. If we accept, then a four week strike, a four year mobilization, and a province-wide movement for the rights of precarious workers would have all been for nothing.
Voting NO on management’s offer will enable faculty to win historic gains for partial-load, full-time faculty complement, and academic freedom. It will change the college system forever, and improve the working conditions of all future faculty, and the quality of learning for all future students.