Category: Bargaining Unit

Bargaining is sometimes slow cooking food—worth it in the end, but needing a certain degree of patience.  This is definitely one of those rounds.  Normally, we know what the provincial funding for public sector bargaining units is by late spring, usually before our contract term is up.  This year, however, it was mid-November, with the BCGEU mediated agreement, before we knew what the provincial “mandate” would be.  So that delay has definitely slowed down our work toward a tentative agreement at the table. 

Many academics have spent time on short-term contingent appointments; by some measures, academia is in fact one of the most highly casualized work sectors in Canada. This is unhealthy for our institution and even less sustainable for the scholars who fulfill UBC’s public mission with very little in return. We want to keep improving this situation for all of our sakes.

There are three central issues that we have brought to the bargaining table this round related to our extended health benefits plan: (1) that any changes to our benefits plan must be approved by the Faculty Association; (2) an across-the-board increase to the specified coverage limits in our SunLife benefits plan; and (3) benefits for all!

Many of our bargaining proposals on salaries, benefits, and workload will apply to all of us in the Faculty Association, but we also seek to ensure that protections offered in the Collective Agreement recognize the vitally important work of librarians and archivists within the University, and build in parity with other bargaining unit members whenever possible. For this round for Librarians and Archivists, we are focused on selection committee processes, recruitment and selection procedures and processes, and clarifying and expanding our criteria for appointments.

We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration.  You have questions, we have answers:

While we are working toward either a negotiated settlement or an arbitration award, we want our Librarians and Archivists to know that we have been fighting to make your work better in this round—and we’ll keep pushing UBC in both this bargaining round and in the future.

There might well be no aspect of collegial governance that matters more to faculty members than our ability to participate as experts in the appointing, reappointing, tenuring, and promoting (henceforth, ARPT processes) of our colleagues.  The Faculty Association has tendered four proposals that are directly concerned with ARPT processes.

Benefits constitute a significant part of our total compensation. Any change to our benefits plan represents a change in compensation. Some changes can help our members — such as the recent move to cover massage therapy without a doctor’s referral. But others may have a negative impact — such as when UBC in 2018 signed on to the FACET Prior Authorization Drug Program, which requires pre-approval for specialty drugs (including for conditions like multiple sclerosis or cancer) or prescriptions which cost more than $5000/year.

Full-time teaching for Sessional Lecturers in Education at UBC is 15 credits/term (yes, really), and they make less per credit than anyone else at UBC. If they teach fewer than 7.5 credits in a term, they are still considered less than half-time and do not qualify for most UBC benefits. We need to fix these inequities for our Sessional Lecturer colleagues at UBC, and not just in Education. Most Sessional Lecturers hold PhDs or other terminal degrees and teach a significant number of UBC’s courses; many Sessional Lecturers also do curricular work, service, and research in their disciplines on their own time, unpaid. All Sessional Lecturers deserve to be treated fairly and paid as the highly-qualified professionals they are.

Lecturers are the fastest-growing cohort of UBC faculty, highly qualified academics and professionals, performing key work central to UBC’s mission.  Why, then, are they chronically over-worked and insecure?  These are two of the issues facing Lecturers that we are addressing in this round of bargaining.

We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration.  You may have questions and we have the answers.

They are clearly biased against racialized and other historically marginalized groups; they are statistically unreliable; and they do not and cannot answer their intended purpose. Yes, we are talking (again) about student surveys, the cheap candy of teaching metrics.
As we said in 2019, it is hard to imagine an instrument more ill-suited to its supposed value than student opinion surveys. Leaving aside the statistical limitations involved in what are often small non-randomized samples, these surveys cannot provide accurate information about the skill of the instructor or the effectiveness of their teaching. They tell us instead, as one would normally expect from a survey, about the students themselves.

In this first edition of our Bargaining Advisories, we respond to common questions and concerns you’ve raised about the rights and protections we have already negotiated. 

Last fall, as we prepared for the upcoming negotiating round, the Faculty Association’s Bargaining Preparation Committee (BPC) surveyed  the membership on areas of bargaining priorities. We were pleased that almost 1500 of you responded to the survey with meaningful feedback.

We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. Read the answers to a few key FAQ’s…

While some issues, like obtaining a reasonable general wage increase, are constants in bargaining, others evolve over time in response to changes in management practice or in the composition of the bargaining unit. For example, the kinds of workload complaints we hear now include issues that were largely absent in 2006.

One of the things that has changed over the past 9 years, and has changed the focus of our bargaining proposals, is the composition of the bargaining unit.