Greetings all and good news:
Over 2/3 of college faculty voted 59% in favour of labour action in an extremely short time frame at the end of a difficult semester. We hope that this sends a clear message to the colleges and the College Employer Council to come back to the table and negotiate faculty demands. We are very pleased with this result, and with the work that you’ve done to get out the vote. We have a lot of information to work with going forward in order to build on this foundation.
We are bargaining for better supports for students, and better supports for ALL faculty to ensure they can support students, as well as fairness for all faculty.
Faculty are serious about making immediate improvements to workload, to job security for full-time and partial-load faculty, and we’re serious about creating structures for long-term change around workload, equity, and Indigenous faculty issues. The system had profits of $1.65 billion in the last five years, and much of that came from contracting out, from faculty’s unpaid overtime and from the uncompensated work of Partial-Load faculty. We need a Collective Agreement that updates our workload formula from 1985, and one that addresses the new threats to job security that are presented by recent changes to education.
Faculty have continued to extend our invitation to the CEC to either bargain these issues at the table, or to refer them to binding interest arbitration to avoid additional stress on students. We certainly hope that the employer agrees that either of these is the best path forward.
We will be able to circulate the Local results soon, along with the official press release from OPSEU/SEFPO.
In sol,Your CAATA Bargaining Team