The following message is a joint announcement on collective bargaining from the University of British Columbia and the UBC Faculty Association, sent on behalf of Dory Nason, President, UBC Faculty Association, and Benoit-Antoine Bacon, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia.
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:
We have now started table negotiations with UBC’s team representing the employer; you’ll see here posted both the Faculty Association’s and the University’s “Day One” proposals. These catalogue the particular objectives that we and UBC plan to discuss in this bargaining round.
Welcome to the start of a new collective-bargaining season! As we start preparing for the next bargaining round, here are three ways we can collectively make this a powerful and successful set of negotiations.
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.
