Proudly representing GA's, TA's, Contract Faculty & part-time Librarians and Archivists at York University
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CUPE 3903 represents the contract faculty, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and research assistants at York University. With almost 3,700 members, CUPE 3903 is the largest trade union on campus. Our local is a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Canada’s largest union with over 628,000 members across the country. CUPE represents workers in health care, emergency services, education, early learning and child care, municipalities, social services, libraries, utilities, transportation, airlines, and more. CUPE has more than 70 offices across the country, in every province.
CUPE 3903 works and organizes to improve the working conditions of the nearly 3,000 education workers at York University who comprise our membership. Improvements in our working conditions also improve the learning conditions and environment of the wider York University community. York University is credited with having one of the best funding packages for graduate students. This package is the result of hard-fought organizing efforts to win these rights and benefits in our Collective Agreements.
In order to sustain these gains, and through the democratic mandate of our membership, our local has used strike action and other tactics to oppose the administration’s attempts to cancel tuition indexation language and to erode job security. While we organize to defend our progressive contract, we also recognize the need to defend the learning conditions of all students who seek accessible, high quality education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Unions and the labour movement are committed to social justice and improving the lives of communities and working people. Our local is proud to be active in the struggle for living wages for all, an end to homelessness, for a women’s right to choice, for fair trade policies, for protection of the environment, and for good public services. We believe our social mandate is to improve the conditions of not only our members, but also the wider working class.
In a unionized work environment, workers have written and legally-binding guarantees covering our wages, funding, and health benefits. Collective agreements give members of our local rights and protections which are often stronger than non-unionized workplaces. The collective bargaining agreement governs the relationships between education workers and the employer. Our work and learning environments are directly tied to the level of our mobilization and commitment to organize and defend gains made through our contract. Members challenge violations of the collective agreement by pursuing our established grievance procedure.
Our local has on average higher pay than other comparable locals in our sector in education.
Women with union representation earn an average of 89 percent of the wages earned by men. In non-unionized workplaces, the rate is 71 percent.
Our union’s collective agreement provides us guaranteed extended health, vision care and dental coverage.
Our collective agreement also contains tuition indexation language, which protects our members from tuition fee increases and helps preserve accessible, high quality education for incoming graduate students at York University.
Although CUPE 3903 is a single union local, we have four separate collective agreements. Each includes what is called a scope clause: it defines which employees are covered by each agreement. Two basic principles guide the way our collective agreements divide us into units: the type of work we are contracted for and our student status (if any) at the time of receiving the contract. A worker is only ever in one unit at a time, but because it is common for a member’s type of work and student status to change from year to year, it is possible for members to switch units over time. Included below are the actual scope clauses from each collective agreement, but in general they are defined as follows:
Unit 1 members have a teaching contract (teaching includes demonstrating, tutoring and marking) and are full-time graduate students. Please note that Unit 1 members who receive a graduate assistantship in order to fulfill their guarantee of summer work are still considered Unit 1 members. That is, Unit 1 members do not become Unit 3 members during the summer.
Unit 2 members have a teaching contract (or a teaching assistantship; a contract as a practicum leader, a music tutor or a design tutor; or other kinds of assistantships) and are not full-time graduate students.
Unit 3 members have a graduate assistantship or a research assistantship and are full-time graduate students.
Unit 4 members are part-time librarians. They joined the union as a new unit in January 2015, and bargained their first collective agreement in January 2017.
There are differences between the agreements. For example, Unit 3 members are eligible for the same health coverage as other members. However, some benefits and funds are unit-specific. There are many other differences: pay rates, summer work guarantees, available funding, etc. See the collective agreements for more details.
To ensure representation of all units on union-wide bodies, our Executive Committee, our Bargaining Team, and some committees are required by our bylaws to include members from units 1, 2, 3 and 4. Although we organize as one union, each unit votes separately on whether to strike, for unit-specific positions on the Executive Committee and the Bargaining Team, and whether to ratify a tentative collective agreement.
The following members comprise the Executive Committee for 2022/23:
| Name | Title | |
|---|---|---|
| Stephanie Latella | Chairperson | cupe3903chairperson@gmail.com |
| Kaitlin Peters | Recording Secretary | recsec.cupe3903@gmail.com |
| Nilloofar Golkar | Secretary-Treasurer | sectreasurer3903@gmail.com |
| Ali Gholami | Vice-President Unit 1 | cupe3903vpu1@gmail.com |
| Julie Allen | Vice-President Unit 2 | cupe3903vpu2@gmail.com |
| Kerry-Ann James | Vice-President Unit 3 | cupe3903vpu3@gmail.com |
| Matt Lomas | Chief Steward Unit 1 | cupe3903csu1@gmail.com |
| Chris Bailey | Chief Steward Unit 2 | cupe3903chiefstewardunit2@gmail.com |
| Vacant | Chief Steward Unit 3 | cupe3903csu3@gmail.com |
| Peter Gorman | Chief Steward Unit 4 | cupe3903csu4@gmail.com |
| Vedanth Govi | Communications Officer | cupe3903comms@gmail.com |
| Parbattie Ramsarran | Grievance Officer | cupe3903go@gmail.com |
| Kelsey Ioannoni | TFAC Co-Chair | tfac.cupe3903@gmail.com |
| Thania Vega | TFAC Co-Chair | tfac.cupe3903@gmail.com |
For more information about the union’s committees, including current elected committee member, click below
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