AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM YOUR BARGAINING TEAM
Dear Faculty Members,
As you likely know, the College Employer Council has called for a forced offer vote on their most recent offer. The vote will be conducted by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, from 9:00 A.M on Tuesday, February 15th until 3:00 P.M. on Thursday, February 17th.
Their offer is virtually unchanged from the offer they presented in November, and the bargaining team encourages you to reach out and tell your colleagues to vote to REJECT the offer, so that the CEC will finally be forced to negotiate faculty issues, meaningfully.
The Employer’s Offer
Why reject the offer? Because it still ignores vital faculty issues, including job security / contracting out, needed changes to workload measurements, improvements for partial-load faculty, and effective processes to improve equity and decolonization.
This week, the CEC distributed a chart that tries to make an attractive offer that offers negligible improvements in some areas and no improvements in others. Attached to this email, please find the Bargaining Team’s chart analyzing the CEC’s offer, and an explanation of some of the consequences that faculty will suffer if we vote to accept that offer for the next three years.
Above all, if we vote to accept the CEC offer, negotiations will end immediately, and the Employer will have succeeded in disregarding faculty’s voted-upon priorities and the faculty’s elected bargaining team. If we vote to reject and the CEC refuses to return to the table, we will continue our phased in work-to-rule, and increase pressure on the Colleges. Our current offer to refer all outstanding issues to voluntary binding interest arbitration will remain on the table.
Rejecting the offer means that we will end up with a Collective Agreement that is better than what the CEC is currently offering.
Videos
Bargaining Team chair JP Hornick has completed two short videos explaining the fiscal health of the College system (a reported $1.6 billion in surpluses over the last five years) and an analysis of the stark differences between the two sides’ offers.
You can see the videos here:
Video One – “Costs”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w-ucW0oCEU
Video Two – “The Issues”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGQ9TCjt8Qc
Provincewide Town Hall
The CAAT-A Divisional Executive will host a third provincewide Town Hall with the Bargaining Team. These town halls have proven extraordinarily popular so far; thousands of members have attended and hundreds of member questions have been answered.
You can attend by registering here (French translation and ASL interpretation will be provided). We urge you to bring a colleague who may not have attended a previous event:
When: Feb 2, 2022 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Faculty Town Hall
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_u4oEp5JLRC6QTqY0mayguA
Please register using a non-college (private) email address.
Work-to-Rule Update
Phase Two of Work-to-Rule has proven so impactful upon managers that the CEC has resorted to a forced offer vote. In an upcoming message, the faculty bargaining team will provide guidance on how to apply the protocols of Phase 2 to our mid-semester workload, including how it applies to issues around evaluation/feedback, academic integrity, coordination, and Study Week. Faculty have shown great solidarity in standing up and refusing to cross the work-to-rule picket lines by boycotting college-initiated activities such as Presidential Town Halls and PD sessions. As a reminder, faculty- and union-initiated activities are absolutely fine to attend.
Together, we are standing up to an inflexible Employer, and insisting that our needs be addressed and our work be respected. We have done this by democratically selecting demands for bargaining; we have done this by voting to authorize strike action (including work-to-rule); and we will do it once again on Feb 15-17, by voting to REJECT an offer that puts management’s needs ahead of what’s best for faculty, our students, and the public College system.
Yours in Solidarity,
JP, Jonathan, Katie, Michelle, Ravi, Rebecca, and Shawn