The bargaining teams for UBC and the Faculty Association reached a tentative settlement for a new Collective Agreement for the period July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2029. Both the Faculty Association and the University worked hard over the past year to reach this mutually agreeable settlement.
As you’ll remember from our December 2025 bargaining update with its FAQ’s, we have been waiting for the provincial public-sector bargaining landscape to de-fog, since it took the province until late November of 2025 to settle with the first public unions in the province. By now, happily, most of the major unions in BC have reached tentative agreements with their employers, including BCGEU, the BCTF, and several others. And the provincial “mandate”—i.e., what the province is willing to fund—is becoming far clearer and has shown itself to be consistent in each settlement.
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.
Workload—the increasingly overwhelming onslaught of deadlines, administrivia, course-preps, projects, supervisions, marking, reporting, writing, meetings, experiments, editing, and endless emails—is becoming close to unbearable for many of us. For most of us, workload is our top concern and burden.
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.
UBC’s Lecturers 400+ are the heroes of the undergraduate curriculum at UBC. Without their teaching expertise and important service, UBC’s curricular offerings would be unsustainable. And yet these academics remain precariously employed and lack many of the rights and benefits of their tenured and tenure-track colleagues.
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!
One key issue for tenure-track and tenured (TTF) colleagues is UBC’s tenure and promotion processes. These procedures have significant, sometimes hugely stressful, impact on our TTF members, and we think there are ways to improve them.
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.
This will be at least the third round of collective bargaining in which we have beseeched UBC to act like a university, respect the overwhelming scholarly evidence, and stop using student survey data for purposes for which they are manifestly unfit. Statistically unreliable, obviously not addressing the question at hand, and riddled with discriminatory, toxic, and uninformed opinion, anonymous student surveys (SEoT’s, or SEI’s) are deeply inappropriate for their intended purpose.
We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. You have questions, we have answers:
As we prepare for the upcoming round of collective bargaining, we need to hear from you about your issues, priorities, and concerns. Below is a list of Zoom Consultation Sessions geared to specific constituencies that we’ll be holding over the fall.
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.
The last meeting between the University’s negotiating team and the Faculty Association’s team was Thursday, February 2nd. As a result of that meeting, negotiations have now stalled.
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.
We have told UBC that we would give them until Dec 1st to see if we could achieve a tentative settlement at the table. If that didn’t happen, we said we would move toward Interest Arbitration. We are now at that moment.
Here’s how Interest Arbitration works.
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.
Almost all of us will during our career at UBC experience a life event which requires us to take time away from work. Some of these events are joyous, as when we welcome a new child; some are catastrophic, as when we face the serious illness or death of a loved one. Leaves are essential to balancing work and life in periods of these extreme demands. It is essential that these leaves be a right accessible to all.
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.
The process by which the money in the three pools is to be allocated could definitely be better. This blog explains the problems the Association is attempting to rectify, and the objectives it is attempting to achieve, with our proposals.
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.
This post focuses on the top bargaining issue for most of us: the Faculty Association’s proposal for a general wage increase in response to current inflation trends.
We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. You may have questions and we have the answers.
It would be hard to over-state how much of a problem workload is for our membership. Everybody feels it; everybody wants it fixed. So: members who have read our “Day One” proposals will have noticed our Proposal #2: “The Association proposes to modify Part 1, Article 13 and Part 5, Article 7, to create workload language that is consistent with best practices at major Canadian research universities.” What exactly do we mean by that?
We know from our consultations that workload has created significant problems for most of our members, and we are addressing those in several different proposals. Here in Proposal #2, we are asserting one broad principle that appeals to the whole membership, and two that apply more specifically to the members (librarians and tenure-track faculty) with a pronounced mix of assigned and self-directed work. We have other workload proposals to address the additional specific issues facing Lecturers and Sessional Lecturers as well; these will be the subject of future bargaining posts.
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.
Negotiations between UBC and UBCFA to renew the Collective Agreement that expires on June 30, 2022 began formally this week.
Both parties have shared all of their Day-One proposals; these are outlines of each party’s goals and objectives. The opening summaries will be followed by proposed specific contract language as bargaining proceeds…
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 pleased to announce that the Collective Agreement between the UBCFA and UBC, July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2022, has been ratified by both parties. A copy of the Agreement will be posted to our respective websites as soon as it is finalized.
We are now on a summer break from bargaining with the UBC administration. Read the answers to a few key FAQ’s…
In preparation for bargaining we have tracked the growth and changes in our bargaining unit over the past decade. Knowing who we are and how we’ve changed as a group of faculty, librarians, and program directors helps us determine how the university is evolving (or devolving) and which trends we might need to address. The table tracks the composition of our active membership in 2006, 2012, 2015, and 2017…
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.
