YUFA
Communiqué
YUFA
Communiqué 2001
YUFA bargaining newsletter
19 June 2001
In
this issue …
- Offer
low, progress slow
- Leadership
in place for negotiations
- Sleepless
in academia … a letter from Ottawa
- CB
Notes
- Masthead
Offer
low, progress slow
The
management team tabled the Employer’s initial salary counter-proposal
late last week. The Employer proposed a 1% raise in each of the next three
years.
“The Employer’s initial salary proposal is just that, a first offer,
but frankly not a very promising one,” said Penni Stewart, YUFA’s
Acting Chairperson.
Absent
from the proposal are: retiree benefits, pensions improvements, inflation
adjustments to grants and fellowships, and most workload issues. On the
latter, the proposal indicates a willingness to discuss teaching load
credit for graduate supervision.
Although
the monetary proposal is low in across-the-board raises, it is rich in
market and merit money to be distributed at the Employer’s discretion.
Such
funds in the proposal total $1.3 million per year. By contrast, the
Employers’ across-the-board salary proposal is equal to about $1 million
per year.
Bargaining
teams for YUFA and management have made some slight progress since
beginning to meet on the 17th of May.
The
parties have reached tentative agreements on a few non-monetary items,
including appointments, information sharing, and law librarians’ issues.
The
tentative agreement on appointments includes:
- A
provision to allow members of the alternate stream to transfer to the
professorial stream, subject to decanal recommendation based on
professional contributions
- Clarifications
of affirmative action language about self-identification by members of
under-represented groups
- A commitment by the Employer to hold affirmative action workshops for faculty members
On
information sharing, the Employer agreed to provide the union with
enrolment data and lists of marketability raises given to individual
faculty members.
The
tentative agreement on law librarians’ issues deals with the change of
management structure in Osgoode’s library.
Talks
have also begun on the procedures for addressing harassment complaints.
YUFA is seeking due process, reasonable timelines, and joint agreement to
neutral investigators. The Employer team has proffered one exploratory
counter-proposal on this issue.
In
addition, management presented a costing of the union’s compensation and
workload proposals. The YUFA bargaining team continues to press for more
data in order to understand these costings.
The
Employer has declined to discuss several of YUFA’s key non-monetary
proposals, including accommodation for persons with disabilities, health
& safety, and scheduling of teaching.
Leadership
in place for negotiations
YUFA’s
leadership has been solidified for at least the next months, thanks to
constitutional amendments members adopted at the Annual General Meeting on
the 29th of May.
The
amendments included a new “Ranking Officer” section, as well as a
provision that Executive may appoint members to vacant officer positions
for specified terms.
The
“Ranking Officer” clause ensures that, should the Chairperson be
absent or the position of Chairperson be vacant, the union will always
have an authorised representative.
As
YUFA’s Past Chairperson, Penni Stewart is the ranking officer, and
therefore is now Acting Chairperson. She continues as an ex officio member
of YUFA’s bargaining team.
Lorna
Erwin and Leslie Sanders, YUFA’s immediate past Vice Chairs External and
Internal respectively, have accepted six-month Executive appointments to
continue on as Vice Chairs. Their appointments are subject to ratification
at the next General Membership Meeting.
In
addition, YUFA’s bargaining team has appointed Brenda Spotton Visano as
Chief Negotiator. Brenda provides YUFA with experienced, forceful, and
savvy leadership at the bargaining table.
This seasoned leadership team will guide the union
through the period of negotiations and their aftermath.
Sleepless
in academia … a letter from Ottawa
Dear YUFA members:
Last week, two of us from the negotiating committee
attended the CAUT Collective Bargaining Conference on Workload, hoping to
compare notes with members of other faculty associations about ways to
take up workload issues. In this we were disappointed: few associations
have tried to address workload as comprehensively as YUFA’s current
proposals, beyond, at some universities, establishing a 2.5 course
teaching load for faculty and pressing for more research time for
librarians. However, the conference did help us see the “big picture”,
why many of us may be “feeling sleepless in academia.”
Four themes emerged at the conference. The first was
‘de-skilling’ or de-professionalization, which several speakers linked
to devaluing teaching, separating research from teaching, and increasing
dependence on ‘teaching-only’ faculty positions.
A second, related theme is about tiering in the
profession. An egregious example of this is the Canada Research Chair
programme, which Rhonda Love (U of T Faculty Association President)
described as rewarding researchers who are grant-getters by giving them
even more funding. At some institutions, CRCs do not teach, increasing the
teaching and service loads of their colleagues, and thereby reducing the
research time available to all. What will happen at York when the CRC
programme begins to affect the workloads of the rest of us?
The third theme involved various aspects of
partnering between universities and other institutions. While conference
participants debated about exactly what kinds of partnerships could be
classified as ‘contracting out’ (i.e., shifting work outside a
bargaining unit), they agreed that partnerships do raise many concerns.
Gail Storr (UNB-Nursing) explained how these projects were often created
opportunistically by administrators, without consultation and with threats
against non-compliant programmes. She raised issues about the increased
workload, loss of collegial process, and even loss of academic freedom.
Here again we need to be vigilant at York about such partnerships.
More generally, there was discussion of
stress-related health issues, in response to Sandra Acker's (OISE-UofT)
analysis of women’s experiences of inequitable, gruelling, and
intensifying workload at several institutions. “At every hour of the
day,” said Acker, “somewhere in Canada, an academic is working.”
Conference participants discussed the extent and kinds of medications that
academics are needing in order to cope with workload issues. One cited
study identified treatments for indigestion as the top category of
academics’ over-the-counter drug purchases.
What else did we learn at this conference? That York
is in the forefront in its research on faculty members’ attitudes and
concerns about their work: more than 430 of you will remember filling in
YUFA’s bargaining questionnaire on these issues earlier this year. From
this survey, we found out that 67% of you who have worked at York for the
last 5 years feel that your workload has increased.
We got the picture: workload IS a priority in this
round of negotiations.
Leslie Sanders & Mary-Louise Craven
CB
NOTES
Write to the bargaining team
The YUFA Collective Bargaining Team now has its own
email address – bargaining@yufa.org.
The team welcomes your thoughts on bargaining.
Bargaining support net
Help YUFA at the bargaining table. Send names of
5-10 colleagues whom you could contact in the event of a bargaining
membership meeting this summer to Kathy Bischoping (kbischop@yorku.ca
or x55015). Sixty-two YUFA members already have done.
Get the proposals
From the YUFA Collective Bargaining Team web page at
- http://www.yufa.org/cb - or come by
the YUFA office (241 SSB).
Thanks for the support!
The Executive thanks the members who have come
forward to serve on the Bargaining Support Committee!
* Luigi Bianchi (Atkinson)
* Kathy Bischoping (Arts)
* Arthur Hilliker (FPAS)
* Mary Kandiuk (Libraries)
* David McNally (Arts)
* Naomi Norquay (Education)
* Barbara Rahder (FES)
* Penni Stewart (Arts)
Masthead
Communiqué
YUFA bargaining newsletter
Kathy Bischoping
Information Officer
Production: CUPE 1281
Smail: 4700 Keele, 241SSB, M3J2R6
Email: bargaining@yufa.org
Telephone: 416 736 5236
Fax: 416 736 5850
Web: www.yufa.org