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Attack on faculty collective agreements in BC

by James Turk, Executive Director, CAUT

The Campbell government in BC has brought in legislation that allows college administrations to override key provisions of collective agreements with faculty. Bill 28 has the Orwellian title: "Public Education Flexibility and Choice Act."  The legislation gives administration the unilateral authority:
  • to override collective agreement limits on class size;
  • to override collective agreement limits on the number of students that can be assigned to a faculty member;
  • to require faculty to deliver courses through distance education;
  • to set the number and duration of terms or semesters and to require faculty to teach in whatever term or semester (including summer) that the administration decides;
  • to set the hours of operation and to require faculty teach in whatever hours assigned;
  • to allocate professional development time and vacation time "to facilitate its [the employer's] organization of instruction";
  • to remove barriers in faculty collective agreements to using teaching assistants, senior students, contractors and support staff members in the provision of "instructional support", i.e., to do faculty work.
The legislation also says that in any conflict between this legislation and the Labour Relations Code, this legislation is paramount. This legislation supersedes any conflicting provision of any collective agreement. Finally the legislation forbids any negotiation with the employer on any of these matters.

CAUT has written all college and university-college presidents -- calling on them to honour their collective agreements. [see below]

College Institute Educators Association of BC (CIEA) local presidents have met and launched a campaign in defence of their collective agreements. It is very important for faculty across Canada to send messages of support and solidarity to CIEA in the face of this serious attack on collective bargaining. Emails should be sent to Maureen Shaw, President, College Institute Educators' Association at mshaw@ciea.bc.ca.

It would also be helpful if you would send a letter to Premier Gordon Campbell expressing opposition to his government's vicious attack on negotiated agreements. I am attaching a sample letter sent by the president of the Malaspina University College Faculty Association, John Black, to MLA's. If you send a letter to Campbell, please copy CAUT and CIEA. Campbell's address is Gordon Campbell, Premier, Government of British Columbia, P. O. Box 9041, STN PROV GOVT, Victoria, B.C., V8W 9E1, fax 250-387-0087, email premier@gov.bc.ca.  CIEA's address is: 301-555 West 8th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1C6, fax 604-873-8865, email mshaw@ciea.bc.ca. CAUT's contact information is below.

James L. Turk
Executive Director/Directeur général
Canadian Association of University Teachers/Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d'université
2675 promenade Queensview Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K2B 8K2
Tel: 613-820-2270, ext. 322
Fax: 613-820-7244
Email: turk@caut.ca

ATTACHMENTS:

1. CAUT letter to college presidents
2. John Black's letter to BC politicians
3. CIEA background paper on Bill 28

1. CAUT letter to college presidents

January 28, 2002

Dear ______:

The passage of Bill 28: Public Education Flexibility and Choice Act forces you to make a choice that will have implications for your institution for years to come. You can choose to honour the agreement, or you can exercise the authority given you by the Campbell government to override provisions of the collective agreement you negotiated with your faculty association.

We hope you have the integrity, courage, and honesty to respect your collective agreement.  If you accept Mr. Campbell's offer to disregard your negotiated commitments, you will plunge your institution into years of hostility, ill will, and dysfunction.  Such an action will signal that your word is of no account, that agreements reached with you are not worth the paper on which they are written.

Nor will exercising your newly awarded powers improve the quality of education your institution provides.  Quite the opposite.  Class sizes will increase.  Unreasonable workloads will diminish the quality of education faculty can offer.  Faculty will be denied the ability to exercise academic freedom to make choices that enhance the learning conditions for their students and to organize their work accordingly.  Increased stress and staff demoralization will undercut the excellence you want your institution to achieve.

We urge you to reaffirm publicly your commitment to the agreement negotiated with your staff. Should you choose to use Bill 28 to abrogate provisions of that agreement, we will bring a motion to the April meeting of CAUT Council calling for a censure of ---------------------.  Such a censure would be advertised widely - in the academic world nationally and internationally.

We hope we can add your name to the list of institutions that respect their negotiated agreements.  We will publish that list alongside any censured institutions so that academics, students and the public can see which institutions have integrity and which do not.

Yours truly,

Thomas Booth                                                                                                                          
President

James L. Turk
Executive Director

c: Board Chair
Faculty Association President                
Maureen Shaw, President, CIEA
Darwyn Coxson, President, CUFA/BC


2. John Black's letter to BC politicians

January 26, 2002

Dear Minister Reid, Minister Bruce, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Long,

I am writing to urge you, as MLAs elected to represent the constituencies in which members of the Malaspina Faculty Association work, to prevent the passing of Bill 28.  Like much of the changes recently legislated, this Bill is short-sighted in terms of its alleged goals, unjust in its disregard for the principles of civil society and offensive in terms of its overall effect.

While I am concerned about all aspects of the Bill, I shall restrict my comments to those parts which affect my members in postsecondary education.  The Bill will not result in improvements for students; in this I am in agreement with the recent arguments of the Canadian Federation of Students. Instead it will reduce the quality of education available at colleges, university colleges and institutes, by overloading both class sizes and educator work assignment.  If you yourselves had worked at such an institution, you would be familiar with the immense difficulties of maintaining the quality of service after two decades of almost continual real-dollar cutbacks, and with the persistent daily stress, for students, staff and faculty, that they have created. Because of the prevalence of stress-related illness, long-term disability premiums have more than doubled in the last two years - the objective symptom of an underlying malaise which we in the system know only too well.  Bill 28 is just the latest nail in the coffin of educational quality at our institutions.

The other argument I shall urge concerns the damage which the Bill does to the labour relations atmosphere.  Not only is it unjust to tamper with collective agreements duly negotiated between responsible parties who know best what is the most suitable compromise between their respective long-term aspirations, it is also prejudicial to the trust between the parties upon which all labour relations rest, and hence to the labour relations climate in the province as a whole.  The principle that a contract, once signed, should be honoured is an important moral underpinning of any democratic and pluralist civil society, and it is so for a reason, namely, that failing to maintain it would undercut the whole system of making agreements and contracts.  In the normal run of events, both employers and employees can be expected to keep to their agreements (or else can be brought to do so through third-party arbitration), and the result is relative peace in the relations between them.  Your government has put one partner to those relations - employees - on notice that the era of labour peace is over, for the contracts they have so thoughtfully made with their employers can no longer be expected to hold.

Finally, for reasons relating to both of the above arguments, the Bill is disastrous in terms of what the government has announced as its main aim: increasing sustainable economic activity.  The points are quite simple: a reduction in the quality of education leads to an under-educated workforce, well-established as being correlated with poor economic performance; the assault on collective agreements destroys labour peace, with resulting loss of both consumer and investor confidence.  That you are happy to go farther down this road (consistent with your other recent attacks on services to the public) indicates either that you are clinging to a now-discredited economic theory (one which ignores the crucial factors of consumer-confidence and labour peace) or else that you think it more important to pay back in the short term those sectors of society, including big business, which persuaded the majority to elect you than to look out for the long-term well-being of the province.

Sincerely,

John A. Black
President, Malaspina Faculty Association, CIEA Local 8
Malaspina University College
900 Fifth Street
Nanaimo, BC V9R 5S5                   
Canada
black@mala.bc.ca
+1(250)753-3245, #2171
+1(250)740-6458 fax
www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/mcfa/mcfahome.htm


3. CIEA background paper on Bill 28

STOP BILL 28
A CIEA CAMPAIGN TO PROTECT EDUCATION

Bill 28 -- 2002, Public Education Flexibility and Choice Act

Part 1 -- College and Institute Labour Adjustment

A short analysis

Introduction

The Government's backgrounder states that the bill is designed to improve student access, create additional student spaces, increase choice and availability of courses, and graduate more students in a timely manner.

In the second reading debate on Part 1 of Bill 28, Minister Shirley Bond described the bill and its intent in the following terms: 

The bill "gives institutions the right to determine class sizes and the number of students, to assign faculty to deliver distance education and to determine their hours and the number and duration of terms."

Some colleges, university colleges and institutes "have been held back by collective agreements that contain detailed formula-driven limits on the number of students per class, the number and duration of terms or semesters and the use of instructional support."

The bill "gives post-secondary institutions the tools they need to expand capacity where there is demand and where physical space permits."

Some institutions "have more flexibility than others and there are also differences in class sizes and instructor workloads. While this bill will allow institutions to make their decisions in all of these areas, these differences will not be the result of restrictions in collective agreements."

The bill "will result in increased autonomy for institutions. It will make them easier to respond to the demands in their communities and meet local needs. Institutions will have the flexibility to decide class sizes based not only on their resources and their community, but, most importantly, on the needs of students in their communities. Issues that should be decided by post-secondary institutions as matters of good management will once again be within their control."

To which parties does Part 1 of Bill 28 apply?

This part of the bill applies to institutions established under the College and Institute Act, the Institute of Technology Act and the Open Learning Agency Act and to faculty members under the College and Institute Act and the Institute of Technology Act. Both the College and Institute Act and the Institute of Technology Act define a "faculty member" to include an instructor, librarian, tutor counsellor, research associate, program co-ordinator or other employee of the institution that a collective agreement specifies to be a faculty member.

Bill 28 gives institutions the following rights:
  • To establish the number of students who may be assigned to a class and the total number of students who may be assigned to a faculty member in a term, semester, or academic year.
The institution can establish maximum class sizes and maximum student-to-faculty ratios that are different from those provided for in a collective agreement.
  • To assign faculty members to instruct courses using distributed learning.
Bill 28 defines "distributed learning" as "a method of instruction that, in whole or in part, uses information technology, teleconferencing or correspondence as a means of instruction".
  • To determine its hours of operation and the number and length of terms or semesters during which it offers instruction to students.
Institutions can determine the number and length of terms or semesters and the hours during which courses or programs will be offered to students. This right does not affect collective agreement provisions relating to the number of hours of work, number of courses or sections of work, or the length of an appointment for a faculty member. For example, Bill 28 does not restrict collective agreement provisions that require an employee to have a specific amount of time off between courses.

This section of the legislation is like saying that the local grocery store can now be open on Sundays, and daily from 8:00am to 12:00pm. But, it doesn't allow an employee's maximum daily or weekly hours to be increased to cover these extended hours of operation.
  • To allocate PD time and vacation time to facilitate an institution's organization of instruction.
An institution can change the allocation of PD or vacation time if it can establish that the change will "facilitate its organization of instruction".
  • To provide support for faculty members including, but not limited to, teaching assistants, senior students, contractors or support staff members.
This does not change the scope of the bargaining unit represented by a faculty association as defined by a certification order or a collective agreement recognition clause.
Inconsistent collective agreement provisions voided

If an institution exercises the rights conferred by Section 2 of Bill 28, then any collective agreement provision that is inconsistent with or limits the exercise of these rights is void to the extent of the inconsistency or limitation.

The bill also removes any requirement on an institution to enter into negotiations with a faculty association to replace any collective agreement provisions that are invalidated as a consequence of Part 1 of Bill 28.

Dispute resolution

Any disputes regarding the interpretation or application of Part 1 of Bill 28 will be resolved through the grievance and arbitration procedure under the collective agreement. However, an arbitration board or the Labour Relations Board has no authority to restrain an institution from exercising a right under Part 1 of the bill by injunction, prohibition or stay of proceedings.

Produced and distributed by the College Institute Educators' Association of BC

CUPE 1004 02.01.30
cs-s/bill 28/bill 28 analysis