What are the issues with the Employer’s offer of settlement?

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A Message from your bargaining team

The CAAT-A Bargaining Team met with Local Presidents and the Bargaining Advisory Committee on Monday, September 20, to review the College Employer Council team’s offer of settlement, tabled last Friday.  

Below is a summary chart of the CEC team’s current offer of settlement, along with a detailed explanation of why the faculty team, after consultation with the Local Presidents and Bargaining Advisory Committee, cannot recommend the offer to members.  Simply put, the CEC offer does not address faculty’s demands, nor does it reflect the changes that are immediately needed in the system.

CEC Settlement Offer (Sept. 15, 2021) Summary

Partial-Load Demands

Below, we have included a separate summary of the faculty team’s proposals to address the demands of Partial-Load faculty, as well as what the CEC’s offer includes.  

On August 3rd, the CAAT-A Bargaining Team tabled extensive non-monetary proposals to the College Employer Council (CEC) to improve the working conditions for the thousands of precarious partial-load (PL) faculty members in Ontario’s public college system.

Our proposals included:

  1. Preference language for partial-load over part-time positions.
  2. No contracting out language, to protect faculty work.
  3. A SWF for partial-load members to more accurately measure their work and provide workload limits.
  4. One-year contracts to provide greater stability to both faculty and students.
  5. Service credits for statutory holidays on which a PL member is scheduled to work.
  6. One month’s service credit for any month in which they work (removes the current 30 hours per month minimum).
  7. Quicker progression through the salary grid.
  8. Transparency of the PL registry – both the union executive and PL members would be able to view it.
  9. Counting all courses taught, including as part-time or sessional, for the purposes of the registry.
  10. Allowing previously-employed PL members to be eligible for the PL registry if they are currently part-time or sessional.  (This eliminates a loophole management has been exploiting.)
  11. Giving PL members priority for courses that are substantially the same as ones they have previously taught, even when the course code or name of the course has changed.
  12. Entitling a PL member who has priority (under the PL registry) to the maximum possible PL workload assignment.
  13. PL members to be considered “internal applicants” for vacant full-time positions if they have worked as partial-load faculty within the previous six months (increased from the current four).

The CEC did not respond to these proposals until last week and have only addressed one of the above proposals in their extension offer of settlement – service credits for statutory holidays. Additionally, the proposals that the CEC has put on the table and threatened to return to if their offer of settlement is not accepted would only make partial load members even more precarious. Notably, the CEC proposes to attack the seniority rights that were won in the 2017 round of bargaining. In addition, they are proposing a probationary period of 1008 hours for PL members, which would allow for the employer to let a PL member go without any reason and restrict the member from being able to grieve to get their job back.

The hypocrisy of the CEC claiming that they are only looking to provide stability for students while exploiting the large contingent of precarious, contract faculty who teach these students is appalling. We will continue to bargain for much better for partial-load faculty members.