Bargaining Bulletin #13
Employer ignores members’ priorities with its monetary proposal
Your bargaining committee met with the employer’s committee on 5 September. We received their proposal for “monetary items,” in response to proposals we first tabled on 30 January and simplified into a package of monetary items on 29 May.
The employer’s proposal ignores all of the CFA’s original proposals. Instead it invents a “Wellness Spending Account” that ignores the priorities you have brought to your union. This “WSA” would put $450 aside annually for each member who is on the benefits plan, to which they can apply for reimbursement of certain expenses, such as ski passes; gym memberships; programs for smoking cessation, weight loss or addictions; and books/courses on “wellness related topics.” Reimbursement would be taxed.
This proposed WSA ignores the problems with our existing benefits plan, which was once a gold standard but has not changed (even in the dollar limits for paramedical services) since 1995. It ignores the inequitable salaries of non-regular faculty, private music instructors, and lab supervisors. It ignores the need for release for research and scholarship to be part of the income of faculty who wish to fulfil the University’s supposed scholarly mandate.
The CFA’s monetary proposals addressed those problems and needs. We based the proposals on the priorities you, our members, identified in bargaining surveys and in various focus groups. We have talked with the employer about the importance to our members of addressing these monetary priorities. And we have underscored the challenge of recruiting and retaining faculty given the barriers preventing fair pay for non-regulars and others, the loss of value of our benefits, and the lack of salary support for scholarship.
The employer’s proposal sidesteps the CFA proposals. It sidesteps our members’ priorities. We think it is unacceptable.
We also see their proposal as a waste of an opportunity. The B.C. government is offering universities and colleges a “pot” of money for proposals that would increase annual expenses (see our bulletin #9). In this round, that pot is an annual amount of $253,000–but the government will only provide that money if the CapU administration and union agree on how to spend it.
We hoped the employer would embrace this opportunity to support research and scholarship, remove the illogical cap on NREG scale placement (placement that does not occur until after a year and a half of full-time work), and at least partly restore the value three decades of inflation have eaten from our benefits plan.
Instead they have proposed to eat up the provincial money with taxable reimbursement for certain faculty of certain kinds of “wellness” expenses.
We advised the employer that this proposal is not acceptable. We insisted on negotiating proposals that actually meet our members’ needs and improve the University. We are preparing a written response to retable our proposals, but won’t know whether the employer is willing to rethink its WSA idea until we meet with them on 15 September.
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 (or Bulletins page) for past bargaining bulletins. And see topic 3 of bulletin #7 for details about the general wage increase for all faculty, which is a provincial mandate that isn’t subject to negotiation at our local table.