OPSEU Local 560
To:	All Members of OPSEU Local 560
From:	OPSEU Local 560 President Ted Montgomery
Date:	May 10, 2000
Subject:	Updates

LOCAL 560 ELECTION MEETING

Thursday, May 18th , 5:30  p.m. at the OFL Building, 15 Gervais Dr. North York, elections for the officers and representatives of Local 560 will be held.

Local 560 members have the right and the responsibility every two years to elect their union leadership.  These are the individuals who will be responsible for representing you both collectively and individually should that need arise.  The Collective Agreement establishes roles for the Union Local in ensuring the proper application of that contract – and the persons you elect will be responsible for defending your rights.

There will be elections for President, Vice-President, VP Employment Equity, Treasurer, Secretary, Chief Steward and Health & Safety Officer.  As well, we’ll elect the delegates who will represent us at provincial and regional meetings including provincial demand setting.  Please make your best effort to attend.

For those who may not have been there before, Gervais Drive is on the north side of Eglinton,  west of the DVP and east of Don Mills.  It can be accessed from Wynford Dr. or from Eglinton  – but only eastbound.

Time permitting, this meeting will also begin discussion about the next round of negotiations. The current agreement expires on
August 31, 2001, and formal demand setting will be held in the fall.  Now is the time to begin preparing for the process.  I know everyone’s attention has been on marking, preparing courses, counselling students, etc., but we will be in a better bargaining position if we pay attention early to the negotiation process.  Our local has had a prominent role in advancing issues of faculty control of curriculum and teaching.  We need to be active to maintain momentum for those issues. 

KPI’S

President Quinlan’s message of April 7, 2000, regarding KPI results said:  It is obvious that we must find ways to increase our satisfaction ratings, and to do this we must discover the root causes for these ratings.  This, of course, pre-supposes that the "root causes" are matters within our control.  While it’s not clear just who President Quinlan’s "we" is, let’s assume that it’s everyone employed at Seneca.

Let’s even set aside that the entire basis of KPI funding is flawed from the get-go, since it does not measure, let alone reward, performance at all.  It rewards attitudes and opinions of a sort.  There is no real measure of performance at all.  Perhaps we should  look at the "capstone questions" used to calculate student satisfaction.

1. Overall, your program is giving you knowledge and skills that will be useful in your future career.
 I would respectfully submit that no-one is  really in a very good position to know what skills and knowledge will be really useful in his or her future.  Surely, everyone of us, looking back, sees what we learned very differently in the wisdom and light of hindsight.

2. Overall, is your program giving you knowledge and skills that will be useful in your life outside of work.
 What was true for #1 is even more true for this proposition.  I shudder now to think what I thought would be important "outside of work" 25 years ago.

3. The overall quality of learning experience in the program.
 Compared to what?  This is so patently based on past experience and so completely out of the hands of the College – any College – to control that it is ludicrous.

4. The overall quality of the facilities/resources in the college.
 Let’s see — contracted out food services, contracted out security, contracted out and expensive parking, cuts to cleaning staff, overcrowding.  Great new residences for out-of-towners though.  What possible control do faculty have of these factors?

5. The overall quality of services in the college.

 I am sure that all of us would wish to improve services to our students.  But to what extent are we empowered to do so?
Maybe the 14 week and 7 week semesters are the root causes of student dissatisfaction.  Maybe the cuts in program hours are the root causes.  Maybe it’s the traffic congestion and the air quality.  Maybe the students had unrealistic expectations.
I do not oppose the principle of rewarding actual achievement and improvement.

The system of this government to reward those who score high in these opinion polls and make it even harder for those not scoring as well, punishes those that should be getting more assistance, not less.  And by now you have probably heard that colleges are looking for and finding ways to manufacture more favourable results by manipulating the system.  The promise of more dollars even coming out of the pockets of other colleges is one sweet carrot indeed.  Remember, this is not additional money.

We have already heard of some supervisors blaming faculty for results below the averages, even threatening program cutbacks
and closures.  Faculty should always be encouraged to improve the learning situations of Seneca students, in their classrooms, labs, field placements, counselling.  Where faculty are accountable for weaknesses in that learning process, they should be afforded the support needed to ameliorate the situation.  But where the college has created conditions that impair learning — where hours are cut from courses; where faculty are forced into inappropriate marking regimes and curriculum shortcuts; where time for development of new curriculum and professional development are sacrificed in order to maximize teaching loads; where library facilities are overworked and overcrowded, where the independent Voices in the Classroom Study, finds that 93.4% of teaching faculty report an increase in class size over the last five years, nearly half, an increase of over 20%, and 86% report that increase has had a negative impact on quality, and 61.6% found that "the move toward self-directed learning has hurt the quality of their program;" where last year’s employee satisfaction survey found that 40% of responding employees rated management’s performance as satisfactory,  40% unsatisfactory, 20% did not know — passing the buck for KPI’s to faculty is unreasonable and unfair.  Borders on blaming, at least, some of the victims!

To his credit, Steve Quinlan has pointed out some of the serious flaws in the KPI system.  Now he needs to take that the next step.  Openly oppose it for what it is — a scheme that can only damage the college system, all its workers, and its students.