Bargaining Bulletin #17
Detailed update on current Monetary and non-monetary proposals
Dear colleagues, your bargaining committee met with the employer yesterday for two hours, and are meeting again next Wednesday, 25 October.
As we described in our last two bulletins (15 and 16, available here), the employer has now begun to respond to our monetary proposals. We are close to agreement on a number of proposals, including several monetary proposals and the three remaining “non-cost” items. There are, however, two critical monetary proposals on which the employer is still refusing to move:
Removing the step-5 cap on scale placement for non-regular faculty (after 12 sections of work)
Updating the dollar limit on paramedical benefits (unchanged since 1995)—even though their own estimate is that increasing the limit per service from $750 to $1,250 would cost CapU a mere $88,500 per year
These are both critical components of the CFA proposals we tabled in January. Despite the employer’s resistance to them, we now see signs that there is room to negotiate. This will take sustained pressure at the negotiating table, but we are hopeful that reason will prevail.
Below is a detailed summary of where things stand: first monetary then non-monetary proposals. You will see more specifics than we usually include in bulletins. At this stage, we want all interested members to be able to see all the details.
We are going to review the proposals with CFA area stewards on Tuesday, 24 October, before we meet the employer on Wednesday. Our plan is to table a full written response on the remaining proposals. We will also post that response to our website.
Monetary proposals
On 26 September, the employer responded to our monetary package with a set of proposals worth $526,004 of new money for this round, plus proposals for a pot of $140,000 that is carrying over from the last agreement. This was an improvement over the amount of money they had long been claiming as an upper limit. We believe their change of tack is due to support from you, our CFA members, to make real improvements this round.
On 19 October, the employer’s amended proposals went down in value, with no explanation for the change. Their revised proposals are worth (by their own estimate) $473,689. We pointed out the $52,000 deficit. They did not have an explanation for it. We are hoping it was an error in their calculations. We advised that we expect to maintain the total value of the proposals they tabled on 26 September, as we negotiate the specific uses of the money.
Update on monetary proposals
The CFA proposals that the employer is now willing to accept include improvements in benefits, travel funding, and private music instructor pay (details below).
Their proposal did not include changes to paramedical benefits (which they are still refusing to amend) or the non-reg salary cap (on which they are now expressing willingness to negotiate). On both of those, we again urged the employer to do a more careful comparison of CapU to our sector, while also emphasizing that the University should live up to its current marketing slogans and demonstrate leadership and “courage”—i.e., the willingness to stand out in our sector in some way, even if only to a small degree.
Summary of CFA monetary proposals the employer is currently agreeing to:
(a) PMI pay: Increase the hourly rate of pay for private music instructors to reflect 88 hours of direct instruction being the equivalent of a section.
(b) Benefits–Health Care Account: An annual pot of money placed into the Health Care Spending Account for every employee. The HCSA is an existing part of our benefits package, and can be used for almost any paramedical service as well as other healthcare needs. Under this proposal, all faculty would get the annual amount, not just those on the benefits plan. Unspent money is, however, clawed back into CapU general revenue after two years. On 26 September their proposal was for $425 each year. On 19 October they lowered this to $350, with no explanation. We believe there is enough money available for the original $425/year.
(c) Benefits–Psychological care: Increase the limit on our Canada Life coverage for psychologist care from $1,000/family member/year to $1,500. The employer now says that Counsellor is included in this coverage, and they are willing to add Psychotherapist to it—but with the $1,500 limit for all three services combined. They are not willing to add Counsellor or Psychotherapist to our paramedical services list.
(d) Benefits–Nutritionist added to paramedical coverage. (See the end of this bulletin for the full list of services currently covered by our plan.)
(e) Travel compensation for multi-location work: Improvements for those who work in more than one geographic location, and a more reasonable geographic definition of locations.
(f) They are also offering a one-time amount of money (averaging to $350/person), with its use to be determined.
Update on the two major points of disagreement:
(a) Paramedical: The employer has finally provided Canada Life’s estimate of the annual cost of increasing our coverage from $750 to $1,250 per person per year: $88,500. This is a small cost to the employer, relative to the whole package–not to mention CapU’s average annual surplus of $5,000,000. Yet they refuse to agree to this, claiming that our paramedical coverage, which has not changed since 1995, is still the “gold standard” in the province, and therefore should not be improved.
(b) NREG scale placement (removing cap of step 5): Geoff Tierney, the employer’s hired negotiator, claims that step 5 is a higher salary than any other B.C. university or college pays sessionals at top of scale.
We have collected data from all the other locals. We have shown the employer that their claim is wrong, and asked them to confirm our data. So far they seem to have looked at only one other local—Langara College. They admitted that Langara may pay higher than step 5, but they have yet to make a counter-proposal, or to confirm how other locals pay.
Because of their resistance to our proposal, we offered an alternative, which they initially seemed interested in: placement on scale at the time of hiring, up to step 5 (currently, placement does not happen until after 12 sections of work). However, they now claim this is prohibitively expensive–it would mean, they suggest, giving up all the other cost items.
We have asked for detailed costing, so we can see where we have room to negotiate. In short, there is movement on the scale-placement issue, but the movement is slowed by the lack of data from the employer. Ten months into negotiations.
Non-monetary proposals
There are three CFA non-cost proposals still being negotiated (along with 10 already agreed). Here are notes on their status:
(a) Change academic year to start on 1 September (instead of 1 August). After months of insistence from the employer that regular faculty would have to pay for this change by having a month of income cut, we are finally close to agreement on this.
They have now proposed that regular faculty will do an extra month of PD in the first year after the change takes effect. There is still a question of timing to work out (i.e., does the new academic year begin in 2024/25?), but we are confident of solving it.
(b) Diversity on search and dispute resolution committees. One of the CFA’s original proposals was that the chairs of search-hire and dispute resolution committees “make reasonable efforts to include at least one person from a racialized or other equity-deserving group” on committees.
The employer initially accepted this, but in September backtracked and claimed it was “offensive,” without articulating how. To find a compromise, we offered to rephrase the proposal as “reasonable efforts to have racialized or other equity-deserving groups represented on the committee.”
The employer claimed it has spent hours on this proposal, and that they lack the expertise to address this issue. We thought the proposal was lost, but yesterday they proposed to try our revised language as a pilot project, adding the language only until the end of the 2024/25 academic year.
(c) Support people for Indigenous faculty: One of the CFA’s original proposals was for Indigenous faculty to have the right to invite an Elder and a union steward to meetings with administrators. Our goal was to enable the University to develop a culturally and psychologically safe workplace that adapts meaningfully to Indigenous cultures and fully supports faculty members’ needs and rights.
The employer initially rejected this and other CFA proposals to support Indigenous faculty, unless we agreed to the narrow process the employer proposed for decolonizing our collective agreement (not the University, just our agreement).
In September the employer withdrew that demand and said they were willing to agree to this proposal—but only if we removed from it the right of Indigenous faculty to have a steward present.
We are concerned about this response in light of the resignation over the past few years of 13 Indigenous employees (faculty and staff). We think we need to do more. We are standing behind our original proposal.
We will update you after our meeting next Wednesday.
In solidarity,
Bargaining Committee members Tim Acton, Doug Alards-Tomalin, Eduardo Azmitia, Michael Begg, and FPSE representative Monica Staff
See https://www.capilanofaculty.com/bargaining for past bargaining bulletins.