After substantial research by the Ad Hoc Finance Committee, and following their recommendation, the Executive Committee is proposing an across-the-board 3% dues rate for all units in CUPE 3903. Based on the research of the Ad Hoc Finance Committee, our dues rate has remained unchanged for an extended time period despite dues income not keeping up with inflation and increased operating costs. Meanwhile, York has escalated its attacks on members, causing rising legal expenses. It is in this context that we believe that now is the right time to increase our dues rate.
Introduction: How CUPE 3903’s Finances Work
Like all unions, CUPE 3903 can receive income from a few sources, including special assessments (i.e., special levy; which we do not currently have in place), interest from our bank holdings, and the Equity Fund from the Employer (which is to offset the salary cost of the Staff Representative Equity). However, membership dues are the largest source of income by far. Interest income and the Equity Fund together total less than $15,000 per year, whereas membership dues provide us with approximately $1,600,000 every year.
The current dues rates are 2.8% for Unit 1 and 2.3% for Units 2, 3, and 4. Unit 5 does not currently have a dues rate. This differential in dues rates was implemented when we were under administration (i.e., when CUPE National ran the Union) in 2010. These dues rates have not changed in 14 years.
Membership dues are the bread and butter of union finances. Almost all of the expenses that we have are paid for by membership dues. These expenses include:
- Per capita and affiliation fees (to CUPE National, CUPE Ontario, CUPE Toronto District Council, and Toronto and York Region Labour Council). We pay approximately 34% of our income to CUPE National, as required by the CUPE National Constitution!;
- Support and professional fees, namely accounting firms (for audits) and legal firms (for grievances and other legal questions);
- Staff salaries and benefits;
- Office costs, such as: telephone, internet, and maintenance costs for the Atkinson office; supplies (e.g., pens, paper); photocopying machine lease and printing; furniture and computers; software (e.g., grievance database, QuickBooks account software, Microsoft Office, SurveyMonkey, Zoom, Mailchimp, Simply Voting);
- ASL (sign language) interpretation and captioning for meetings;
- Conference delegations;
- Work of caucuses and in our community (e.g. TFAC, BIPOC Caucus, First Nations Solidarity Working Group);
- Committee member and bargaining team honoraria (e.g., Ways and Means Fund Committee, Extended Health Benefits Fund Committee); and
- Donations (Lee Wiggins Childcare Centre, York University Cooperative Daycare Centre, other Locals/organizations).
The total annual income and expenses from the 2011-12 fiscal year until the 2023-24 fiscal year (the latest year with complete data) are available as a graph on our website.
Increase in Expenses Over Time
Our total annual expenses have been steadily going up each year. There are spikes in 2014-15, 2017-18, and 2021-22 that correspond to rounds of bargaining (two where there were strikes [2014-15 and 2017-18] and one where there was not [2020-2021]).
Aside from predictable increases in bargaining years, there are three factors that explain these steady increases to expenses:
- Rising inflation
- New financial commitments
- Increased Employer aggression
Rising inflation impacts everyone
Like everyone, we are feeling the impacts on inflation: our existing routine expenses now cost more than before. In the last 13 years, inflation has risen approximately 35% according to the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator [hyperlinked]. You can see a graph of the increase in inflation rates over time on our website. This means that paying for a service that cost $100 in 2011 actually costs $135 in 2024. In other words, things just cost more over time due to inflation, so as a consequence, we have to pay more for the same service.
New financial commitments to improve the union
One of the union’s main expenses is staff salaries and benefits. We now employ 5 staff members who carry out much of the daily work of the Union. From answering your emails, to advocating for members and filing grievances, to supporting stewards, to conducting research, to processing paperwork, our staff do a lot for you! We need to pay them a living wage for their work and the expertise they bring to our Union. The cost of staff has increased over time, with yearly salary increases as well as jumps corresponding to when we hired more staff members (which you can see detailed as a graph on our website).
Another newer expense relates to online meetings. As part of our commitment to make sure CUPE 3903 is accessible to all members, we have been spending money on ASL interpretation when requested and live captioning for meetings. These bills are on average approximately $600 per meeting, maxing out at up to over $2,000 for one meeting. By raising dues, we can keep making sure that all members can participate in union spaces and that our most marginalized members aren’t left out of the conversation.
Another large routine expense is software to help us track income/expenses, collect data, track grievances, issue payments, and so on. Software now costs us approximately $2,500 per month.
Lawyers Are Expensive, and York is Forcing Us to Use Them
Our legal expenses have skyrocketed over the last few years (as you can see detailed on a graph on our website). This is not just because of inflation. Instead, it is primarily because we are being forced to utilize legal services more than ever before to protect our members’ rights in the workplace.
Grievances are the formal way to make a complaint when there’s a violation of the Collective Agreement or labour law. More and more grievances need to be referred to mediation or arbitration, where previously they could have been resolved internally through the grievance process. This incurs substantial increases to costs in both staff time and, especially, legal fees.
Arbitration—a process by which each side makes an argument before a third-party—requires legal support to review the case law, prepare the legal briefs, and present the case. Without access to arbitration, the employer can refuse to hear any and all cases, and we would have no recourse. While we do try to resolve as many cases outside of arbitration as possible, not engaging in arbitration at all is not a viable option.
Lawyers are very expensive. The hourly rate for the lawyers we use (who specialize in labour issues) ranges from $190/hour to $425/hour. The cost of lawyer bills can range widely, from $100 to over $28,000.
Legal processes such as mediation and arbitration also have other costs in addition to legal support. The costs of the mediator or arbitrator are shared between the Union and the Employer. Our share is approximately $2,500 per case, but it can cost more if there are canceled meetings (we still pay for those); these fees exclude the associated lawyer costs. In recent years, we have spent upwards of $33,000 on mediation and arbitration each year.
Reviewing legal expenses over the years (Figure 4) and discussing with staff who regularly liaise with our lawyers, we observe that there is a major difference in legal expenses incurred before and after 2018 (Figure 5). That is, we had fewer legal expenses from the 2011-12 fiscal year to the 2018-19 fiscal year, and we had more legal expenses from the 2019-20 fiscal year to the 2023-24 fiscal year.
The significance of the year 2019 is that it marks a change in York’s labour relations administration. It is the year that Dan Bradshaw was appointed to the role of Assistant Vice-President of Labour Relations at York University. With his arrival, there was a marked escalation of obstructionist attitude of the Employer. You can check our website for a graph breakdown of the increase in total annual legal expenses since 2019 when Dan Bradshaw was appointed.
When it comes to grievances, the Employer’s tactics have measurably and noticeably veered further from simple resolutions to costly roadblocks: ignoring timelines, canceling or rescheduling meetings with little notice, terminating a years-long agreement to mediate as many cases as possible (costly, but less so than arbitration), and just generally forcing cases that could easily be resolved into more costly routes.
To contend with these tactics costs a significant amount: all of the time spent on preparing and reviewing documents, conferring with our lawyers, finding dates to meet, and so on. It is possible to read the increasing legal expenses needed to defend our members’ rights as part of a strategy to try to bankrupt our Union: refuse to meet to resolve grievances then spend extra money on lawyers and mediators/arbitrators.
Relative Loss of Income Over Time
As you can see detailed in graphs on our website, CUPE 3903 has had stable income over time. This includes a spike in 2017-18 and lower income in 2018-19 due to the 2018 strike. Note that dues income has remained relatively stagnant for the last several years.
This stagnant income is surprising, because we would expect monthly dues income to actually increase slightly year-to-year due to marginal wage increases in our collective agreements. Since dues are a percentage of wages, if wages go up, then dues should also.
What can explain the lack of change in dues income over time, which ultimately amounts to a loss of income when we would expect increases?
This lack of change is measurably not driven by change in membership or reduced individual income despite marginally higher wage rates across time, as per the collective agreements. You can see the statistical breakdowns for both of these facts on our website.
The remaining hypothesis ties the lack of change in the dues income over time to a broader pattern of restructuring by the Employer to reduce the number of contracts members receive. Restructuring is a systemic way that the Employer is changing its operations to cut costs (due to its financial mismanagement).
When our members have fewer, smaller, or different contracts (teaching assistantships instead of course directorships, for example), they make less money, which means that they pay fewer dues. This results in a loss in dues even if our membership numbers are stable over time. See the York Restructuring Explainer on our website for more information on York’s restructuring efforts.
What Can We Do About It?
In sum, we are receiving less income over the years and our expenses are increasing. Something clearly needs to be done about this. There are a few options we can consider: reducing expenses, obtaining a loan, and generating income.
We could reduce smaller expenses such as conference attendance, committee budgets, and centralizing software. Other expenses, such as staff salaries and per capita taxes, are fixed and thus cannot be reduced. We are taking steps to reduce legal expenses as much as possible; however, these savings are unlikely to be significant as long as the Employer continues to force us through legal processes to protect members. Moreover, it can take years for grievances that are referred to mediation and arbitration to be resolved, so we are still on the hook for these costs in the longer term because of decisions made years ago. Nonetheless, reducing expenses is part of the solution.
We could apply for an ‘external’ loan from CUPE National, but we will be charged prime + 2% (total approximately 9.2%) in interest. This means that if we borrow $100,000 from National, we will need to pay back $109,200. That’s a lot to pay back! We could ask another CUPE Local for a loan, but it is unlikely that anyone can loan us the amount of money that we need and we would still have to pay them back. Our collective agreement funds (e.g., EHB, PDF, Childcare Fund) have run surpluses for the last year, so we could do an ‘internal’ loan, but this requires approval from the Employer. In fact, the Secretary-Treasurer asked the Employer if we could do this loan and the Employer refused. The issue with any loan solution is that it does not result in ‘new’ income. We have to pay back the money that we borrow. This will not help our long-term finances.
Therefore, we are left with the option of generating more income. We could have a special levy; however, a special levy is short-term revenue and would hold us over for maybe one more year. It is not a long-term or sustainable solution. We could try to fundraise and ask for donations from other organizations, individuals, and so on. However, fundraising is more difficult when we are not on strike. Fundraising is a short-term solution at best and a one-time solution at worst. It is not sustainable to fundraise.
We are facing a straightforward quantitative problem of simply not having enough money to pay for all of the expenses we incur. The only long-term sustainable solution to generating more income is to increase our dues rates. For example, in the 2024-25 fiscal year, we will be short (i.e., have a deficit) of approximately $230,000. If dues rates are harmonized at 3.0%, we will generate ~$220,000 in income, which we can apply to our deficit. It may not be enough to fully cover the deficit, but together with reducing expenses, we project that we can be closer to balancing our budget to continue the work we do.
Make sure to vote at the General Membership Meeting on November 27th at 11AM. Check out our other Fund the Fight pages for more information.