Tag: collective bargaining

A Lost Opportunity: Report from the FAUW Representatives on the Policy 76/77 Drafting Committee

– By Su-Yin Tan and Kate Lawson

We are very disappointed to report that the latest effort to improve terms and conditions of employment for Definite Term and Continuing Lecturers has failed.

We are the FAUW appointees on the Policy Drafting Committee (PDC) that began work in March to revise Policies 76 Faculty Appointments and 77 Promotion and Tenure with regard to teaching stream faculty members; the administration appointees were David DeVidi (committee chair) and Kevin Hare.

We report here on the PDC procedures, FAUW objectives, and what happened over the past six months. (Note that confidentiality provisions in the Terms of Reference for the PDC mean that we can report only on public documents and on our own activities.)

We began the process believing that Lecturers at Waterloo deserve working conditions near or equal to those of teaching stream colleagues at other large non-certified Ontario universities (University of Toronto and McMaster University). UWaterloo is in very good financial shape and UW’s Lecturers are just as qualified as Toronto’s “teaching-stream professors” and McMaster’s “teaching-track professors.”

We entered into the PDC process having studied relevant policies at these “comparator institutions,” willing to prioritize our goals, and prepared for good faith and collegial discussions with the representatives of the administration. We are thus very disheartened that no agreement on any revised policies was reached.

Continue reading “A Lost Opportunity: Report from the FAUW Representatives on the Policy 76/77 Drafting Committee” →

FAUW’s response to Ontario consultations on public sector compensation

The Ontario government is conducting consultations to explore “tools to manage compensation costs” such as “legislated caps on allowable compensation increases that can be negotiated in collective bargaining or imposed in binding arbitration.”

FAUW attended an in-person consultation on May 3 and submitted a written response to the Treasury Board Secretariat last week. We’re hearing that the proposed legislation in question may be introduced this week (though the deadline for consultation submissions was only last Friday), in which case it could come into effect as soon as next week.

We don’t know yet whether or how this law will affect existing or future agreements, but we’ll keep you posted.

News From Your Board: February 1 Meeting Recap

—Peter Johnson, director for the Faculty of Environment

This mid-winter Board meeting kicked off with a discussion with the negotiating team about the details of the memorandum of salary settlement. As you have no doubt seen, this settlement shows evidence of the strong productive and collegial relationship between FAUW and the administration, and sets a positive foundation for future salary settlements. A well-deserved note of appreciation to the entire negotiating team for their tireless work on our collective behalf.

In addition to concluding salary negotiations, we are now entering a busy FAUW events season, with many exciting workshops, panels, and meetings over the remainder of the winter term. Of particular note are the upcoming Hagey Lecture, workshops on Navigating University Governance and Writing University Policy, the President’s Luncheon on Academic Freedom, and, looking further ahead, the Spring General Meeting and Tenure & Promotion workshops in April.

Ongoing topics included exam scheduling, specifically discussions with the Registrar’s Office to better understand the current timing of the release of the exam schedule, and the possibility of moving it earlier in the term. We feel that early release of this schedule will be a positive support for both student and instructor mental health.

The recently revealed ‘bug’ in Evaluate, the online course evaluation software used by the University to collect student course perceptions (which are in turn used to evaluate faculty for merit pay), caused much discussion. Though we applaud how the discovery of the bug was handled, there is much work to be done to develop a system of governance to guide the Evaluate project. We look forward to discussing how Evaluate will be used and its governance structure with the University and IST in the future.

News From Your Board – November 23 Board Meeting Recap

Sally Gunz, Past President

This is the time of year when we debrief our Council of Representatives meeting (November 14) and set the agenda for the Fall General Meeting (December 6). The former was very useful—thanks to all reps who attended. Interestingly, the exercise Shannon Dea (chairing the meeting) led reps through in terms of who knows what about FAUW and the University has informed our agenda setting for the General meeting. More later when the agenda is circulated.

Heidi Engelhardt reported back about her work on the President’s Advisory Committee on Student Mental Health. She chairs the Academic Panel. This is an important initiative and the discussion allowed for review of the interactions between this panel’s work and other initiatives on campus, and the Policy 33 review in particular.

Bryan Tolson attended a Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Council meeting in Ottawa this past weekend and some time was taken addressing issues expected to come up there.

Finally, with salary negotiations about to begin, our team (Benoit Charbonneau, Shelley Hulan and Dave Vert) is seeking guidance from the FAUW board on its mandate and, of course, it is best we treat these discussions as confidential. The team for the administration is, as with the last round, three deans but a completely new slate: James Rush (AHS), Pearl Sullivan (Engineering), and Steven Watt (Mathematics). Negotiations begin on December 1 and will run through the early months of next year. More on this in due course.

FAUW Celebrates Three Campus Champions and Six Decades of Collegial Governance

On October 26, FAUW held a 60th anniversary discussion exploring the unique relationship between faculty and the administration at Waterloo, and presented our first Awards of Appreciation to honour members of the University community who have made real differences in the lives of faculty members.

Left to right: David DeVidi, Roman Dubinski, Lynne Taylor, Ian Goulden, Bryan Tolson (FAUW president).

Panelists Roman Dubinski (FAUW president 1970–71), David DeVidi (FAUW president 2007–09), Lynne Taylor (chief negotiator and board member 2014–16), and Ian Goulden (dean of mathematics 2010–15) described the evolution of faculty representation at Waterloo, from the early relationship characterized by the University’s “benign paternalism” (in Dubinski’s words), through three attempts to unionize in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, to the “honest conversation” of the current arrangement.

Continue reading “FAUW Celebrates Three Campus Champions and Six Decades of Collegial Governance” →

Updates from your OCUFA Director

Jasmin Habib, FAUW OCUFA Director

Early in February, I attended the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) Board of Directors meeting.  Several issues remain high on the agenda, particularly as there is every reason to believe an election will be called in coming months.  I thought I might share some of what I learned at the meeting, below:

OCUFA Pre-Budget Proposal

OCUFA submitted a pre-budget proposal to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs.  Among other things, the submission called for a) increased funding to the universities, highlighting the extent to which universities have begun to rely heavily on contractually limited academic staff; b) a collaborative approach to resolving the university sector’s pension crisis; and c) a restoration of cuts to the faculties of education across the province.

Program Prioritization

Reports from OCUFA directors from Trent, Brock, Laurier, York, Nipissing and Guelph all noted the challenges posed by the Program Prioritization Processes (PPP) initiated by their administrations.  Note that several of the OCUFA directors where PPP is in progress reported low morale and serious polarization among faculty resulting from these processes. Our own Provost, Geoff McBoyle, has indicated that we will not be engaging in this process, something we can celebrate, by all accounts!

University Differentiation Policy in Ontario

OCUFA completed a research discussion paper entitled “University Differentiation Policy in Ontario” in response to the release of the Ontario government’s “Differentiation Policy Framework” in December 2013. According to OCUFA Executive Director Mark Rosenfeld “The document outlines the principles and components that comprise its differentiation strategy as well as the metrics that [can] be used to assess and promote their vision of differentiation.”  He notes, as well, that with each iteration of “transformational change” (that is the language used by the government to describe this process), the government seems to be backing away from actually directing universities to incorporate its vision.  That said, there is serious “[concern] that the government’s plan will discourage real, organic institutional diversity in favour of a limited, top-down vision of differentiation.”

Strategic Mandate Agreements

Negotiations over the Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMAs) continue, with the Minister expected to visit every campus across the province.  There is concern that we are increasingly seeing a shift in the degree of control taken by universities’ administrations and out of the purview of their senates.  Unlike many other universities, our own SMA passed through the UW Senate last month.  What we still do not know is what effect these agreements will have on future funding. That is, we are not sure what “levers” the government will or can use. It is not at all clear that program approvals will be linked to funding, but of course we need funding to mount new programs.

Satellite Campuses

The Ontario government released its “Major Capacity Expansion Policy Framework” in December.  Many think of this as the “satellite campus policy” because it was

If new campuses are supposed to offer students the full range of undergraduate education, then this guideline runs against a differentiation policy which is meant to encourage universities to build distinct programs.

developed to guide those universities that have proposed or are considering proposals for expanding their existing campuses or building satellite campuses. In the main, these campuses are supposed to offer undergraduate education to underserved geographical areas.  Several people noted that there are contradictions embedded in this policy when one compares it to the “differentiation” policy (as above).  If new campuses are supposed to offer students the full range of undergraduate education, then this guideline runs against a differentiation policy, which is meant to encourage universities to build distinct programs. A key consideration for OCUFA in all this is to ensure that faculty members at these campuses enjoy the same rights and privileges as their colleagues do at the centre or main campuses.

Online Ontario

In January, the Ontario government announced that it would launch “Online Ontario” in the 2015-16 academic year.  The plan is to offer students access to online courses that will be transferable across the province, and to “optimize enrollments” across the province.  Of special note: there is no faculty representation on the governing board of this new institution.  Kate Lawson, President of OCUFA (and a faculty member from the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo!) outlined a series of issues and concerns that have been raised by the range of proposals, including but not limited to:

  1. The question of intellectual property rights (that is, who owns these online courses?);
  2. The revenue sharing model is yet to be determined (that is, would a dean want to cover costs for a professor to mount a course for Online Ontario?  What would be his/her incentive for doing so?);
  3. Ever-present workload issues (especially as several reports indicate that online courses may be far more labour-intensive than campus courses with, for example, many students requiring one on one responses to their inquiries);
  4. Academic freedom regarding course content and design;
  5. Problems that may arise for students.

The above serves to highlight that the government does not have a clear vision for this entity. There appears to be a lack of any meaningful discussion about the governance structure of Online Ontario, as well as questions of scale, though we know that it is not likely to be a degree-granting institution. We understand that there

“How can one represent just 20% of a painting?!”

is funding for start-up but what thereafter? The government may see this as a money-saving venture but there is evidence to show it can be more expensive to run these courses well, when compared to campus-based university instruction.  Those who teach using images (for example, courses in art history, visual culture and film, digital media) also noted that the rights to publicly display such images are inordinately expensive. Best line:  “How can one represent just 20% of a painting?!”

Pensions

Pensions, pensions, pensions. This was the topic of very long and complex discussions and I am sorry to say that I did not understand some of the technical discussions at all.  Of interest is that OCUFA, along with the Council of Ontario Universities (COU), is engaged in the development of a straw model for a joint sector pension plan (JSPP).  This collaboration will enable the university sector’s stakeholders to respond to the Ministry of Finance’s technical working group, which is advising the Ministry on pensions in the public sector.  On a related front, in January the government appointed Paul Martin to advise on retirem
ent income sustainability. OCUFA supports the government’s “leadership on CPP reform”.

Trends in Higher Education

Several Directors reported on trends that should raise some concern:

  1. An overall loss in the number of full time faculty (10% and more with no plans to replace retirees at some institutions);
  2. An increasing number of tenure denials;
  3. Budget cutting processes that put small programs at risk of disappearing;
  4. An increase in the number of teaching stream positions, and with them inordinately high teaching loads (5/5 teaching was just one example from a settlement is expected to be ratified);
  5. 2-tiered bargaining strategies so that new hires may get different workloads and fewer benefits. One can imagine how this sort of splitting can have a deleterious effect across campus;
  6. Online teaching evaluations have been adopted by several universities and all of the Directors who reported on this process have given it a big FAIL.  It is so problematic that at some institutions the administration has conceded and allowed tenure stream faculty to have paper and in class versions of evaluations because the submission rates have been so low (20 to 30% max) for the online versions. This has placed vulnerable faculty at increased risk.  Several faculty – including a member of the OCUFA Status of Women Committee – noted that there is growing evidence that teaching evaluations – whether online or not — can have a disproportionately negative effect on members of marginalized communities. All in all, it appears the move to online evaluations can lead to unanticipated and disastrous consequences;
  7. Last but not least: there is an erosion of collegial relationships across some campuses as budget cuts take their toll and administrations take a more managerial approach to running universities and pay less attention to the needs and voices of both faculty and students.

OCUFA News

A random survey of faculty on other campuses who were asked to indicate how they would like to receive information from their faculty association indicated that they prefer electronic and email newsletters and email updates by a very wide margin (76.2% and 68.3% respectively) over Facebook (2.5%), Twitter (2.4%) or blogs (18.6%).

OCUFA is working with all faculty associations to develop a campaign website should an election be called. Watch for analyses on their site.

Academics on Strike: Why FAUW Stands in Solidarity

As many of you may know, our faculty colleagues at Mount Allison University and at the University of New Brunswick have both recently been on strike for different reasons.  In such situations, FAUW stands as one with our hard-pressed colleagues in their efforts to improve and safeguard their working conditions.

Background

The Association of University of New Brunswick Teachers has just ratified an agreement on 6 February, which the Board of Governors has also ratified, putting an end to their strike/lockout situation.

At Mount Allison, colleagues have explained their situation thus: “Faculty are prepared to strike if necessary to protect Mount Allison’s academic mission and its role in providing a supportive community for intellectual development and academic excellence for faculty and students.  In our negotiations, we are fighting to protect existing provisions in the Collective Agreement that uphold academic freedom and collegial governance – provisions that the administration is trying to weaken.”

FAUW’s Position

At the Faculty Association’s Board of Directors meeting on 9 October 2008, in the midst of strikes at the University of Windsor and Brandon University (MB), the following motion was passed: “That, providing its financial situation is healthy, FAUW will send $1,000 and a letter of support from the president to faculty associations that have been on strike for a week, and that the Board will discuss additional donations if the strike continues.”

Consequently, FAUW has sent a $1,000 cheque to each of the faculty associations mentioned above, along with a letter of support.

Why Offer Support?

Colleagues at unionized institutions have the same concerns as we do: to defend academic freedom, collegial governance, principles of equity in the workplace, and to establish a safe and positive working environment for all members.  When administrations at other institutions see fit to erode or abrogate any of the core principles of

“If these principles are not defended everywhere, they can be eroded anywhere, regardless of whether or not the faculty operate in a unionized environment.”

academic life that are FAUW’s duty to defend at UW, it is also our duty to offer support to our colleagues at those institutions.  If these principles are not defended everywhere, they can be eroded anywhere, regardless of whether or not the faculty operate in a unionized environment.  As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, we at UW have been extremely fortunate for having an administration that has not (yet!) deserved to work with a unionized body of faculty.

This situation prevails because there has been, by and large, a practical recognition of the importance of those principles that appears to be at the core of decision-making at UW.  We at FAUW are well aware of the potential precariousness of this situation – it depends largely on continuing good will and recognition of a positive common cause on both sides.  As we know, administrators change, and with such changes comes the risk of a degradation in operational relations between faculty and the administration.  Consequently, we are eager to support our colleagues who work in adversarial contexts elsewhere, since our own good fortune can by no means be taken for granted.  Should our own relations with UW’s administrators ever degrade to the point of both unionization and a strike, we would certainly benefit from being part of an established national network of support.

Moreover, colleagues at other institutions are just that: colleagues.  Any number of them may have been or may again be at some point your own departmental colleagues.  The expansion and transmission of human knowledge to future generations are our primary tasks wherever we work as academics and therefore our working conditions are a common concern.

None of the above implies that FAUW is considering a union drive at any point in the near future – we simply don’t need one.  That being said, in the current economic and social environment, it would behoove academics to support other academics in their efforts to fulfill our duties to society. Nothing less than the future of advanced human inquiry and cultural memory is at stake.

Academia in the Age of Austerity

Part 2 – The view from other situations

I return you to the scene: 120 conference attendees, absorbing a talk on the decline of the university as a centre of critical thought and human development, while using a spoon to chip away at a perfect sphere of hyper-frozen desert effectively unsupported on a flat plate without (a) making too much noise; or (b) launching the sphere across the table at a colleague.

Borg adapting to phasers
After lunch, more discussion on the austerity excuse to rewrite Ontario labour legislation brought home the scary point that the government might adapt its strategy based on lessons learned through the zero-zero ‘consultations’and the various fights with big unions such as the ones representing teachers (in my mind, I think of the Borg response to phaser fire in Star Trek).  The most extreme case would be US-style ‘right-to-[be-exploited-in-your]-work’ legislation to cripple all collective bargaining.  Many of our neighbouring states have it already. 

Britt Hall - National Education Association, Director for Wisconsin
Britt Hall –
National Education Association,
Director for Wisconsin
When warned by Wisconsinites in May 2011 at CAUT Council, that we had one to three years to avoid taking their path, I’m sure many thought such things would be unthinkable in Ontario.  At that time, we were told that the hard-right-wing message is well scripted and revolves around a simplistic “power back to the people” message of (a) eliminating collective bargaining; (b) removing Rand formulae; and (c) requiring constant recertification.  It is a strategy of divorcing both the public and association members from association leadership.  The moral of the story, as told to us, was to learn to fight now, not after it starts, and to use every means to get and stay connected with our members.  A look back at the polling data mentioned in my previous post will convince you of how easily such legislation could slide past the Ontario public.
Maybe this is a good time to point out that if FAUW manages to get you, just once, 0.5% more scale increase than the university/government wanted to pay you, your dues are pretty much covered for the rest of your career.
A session on student perspectives was very enlightening.  We could learn a lot about organizing political dissent from the Quebec student example.  They seem to have made masterful use of decentralized support building and clear messages attuned to the general public’s sympathies.  What got lost somewhat in Ontario news reporting was that the protest was not all that much about money, but rather the forced effective change of higher education from a social good to an individually consumed service.  The metamorphosis in Ontario has been more gradual and is already much farther along, so the Quebec uprising didn’t gain much traction here. 
However, students told us they are very worried about tuition levels which result in too much debt and as many as half of all students are working too many hours at outside jobs during school terms.  They argued that tuition should be zero but I think this ignores some perverse incentives and moral hazards that might enter the picture with that much imbalance between the government and individual investment.  Still, if a university (or college) education is increasingly the franchise for adult life, then it clearly is a social good and saddling the student with an undue fraction of its cost can be viewed as a ‘youth tax.’  Tuition may yet become the galvanizing issue for dissent even in Ontario.
The last half day of this conference focused on international perspectives.  England is always a bracing example.  Recently, government there cut teaching support to universities by 80% (yes, that says eighty percent) and allowed massive increases in tuition, implementing a near instantaneous ideological shift.  They expect an average student to accumulate about $70k (Canadian) in debt and take 20 to 30 years to repay it – essentially education via a mortgage.  One effect this year has been a sharp drop in enrollment.  Whether a student carrying that much debt might go on to graduate studies remains to be seen and was not part of the consideration by government.  England is also way, way down the metrification path and, curiously, universities themselves appear far more interested in rankings than do funding agencies, students, or government.  Perhaps the next time rankings are justified in Senate, we should ask for verifiable proof that these things matter to anyone but us?
From the US perspective (courtesy of Jeffrey Williams,Carnegie Mellon), we heard about what was called a deliberate policy shift over the last few decades.  Students have been reconfigured as objects of private profit (customers).  Faculty have been reconfigured as minority players – only one quarter or less are permanent employees.  Administration has grown and become corporatized.  Buildings and grounds exist largely for self-accumulation with enticing things like luxury dorms and fitness centres.  Two-thirds of students accumulate on the order of $30k of education-related debt by graduation, essentially a form of indenture.  Universities play a role in class sorting and the class divisions which plague the country.
According to panelist Eleanor MacDonald (Queen’s), much of the cutting in Ontario since 1990 was absorbed not just in tuition hikes but in quality degradation and workload increases in universities.  We require less of students in the form of fewer assignments with less participation and less critical t
hinking, if only due to the sheer number of students in each class.  In addition to this, the corporatization and branding activities in universities are leading to subtle and not-so-subtle disavowal pressures to not talk about the deterioration.  We all are meant to be promoters and marketers of our individual units and schools.  She believes we should get involved in the democratic processes and start to talk more openly.  Since this is precisely what FAUW tries to do, I couldn’t agree more.
George Freeman