The Bargaining Team (Units 1, 2, and 3) held its weekly meeting on Tuesday, April 21. The meeting marked a milestone in the work of this incarnation of the BT: we passed for recommendation to membership our initial suite of bargaining proposals!
In total, the BT passed twelve proposals for recommendation. Nine of these proposals are “all-unit” proposals, meaning that they apply to all three of the collective agreements entering negotiations. Two were specific to Unit 1, with the last exclusive to the Unit 2 collective agreement.
All are part of a deliberate strategy to begin in our recommendations to membership with proposals relating to so-called “housekeeping” matters. In many instances, “housekeeping” refers to proposals strengthening our collective agreements by accounting for vague language, better defining terms, correcting both superficial and meaningful printing errors, and standardizing reporting and information exchange.
We therefore use the term “housekeeping” not to diminish or demean the importance of these and other proposals of this nature, but to relate the essential, everyday function we believe these changes will serve in upholding our collective agreements by strengthening protections for membership and better enforcing articles already in these collective agreements. In other words: we have made “housekeeping” one of our emphases here because we believe that changes of this kind work toward reifying the rights we have elsewhere secured in our workplaces. They help make the collective agreement real.
The Bargaining Team also passed recommendations relating to proposals on member participation on different governance bodies at York University, all of which are intended to better incorporate members into the decision-making processes we have otherwise often been excluded from.
We have chosen to begin the process of recommending proposals to membership with these “simpler” proposals as a means of acclimating everyone (the BT included!) to the sometimes complicated and frustrating processes of clearly and honestly reviewing, presenting, discussing, and voting upon proposals. It is our hope that in starting “simply” we can work together toward bettering any procedural issues arising in reconciling the virtues of open bargaining with the challenges of conducting our work in a semi-public matter, in advance of introducing for discussion proposals which will, at the very least, require lengthier explanations from the BT. Accordingly, we solicit feedback, too, on our communications and information exchange practices!
Some of these proposals will be introduced to membership at the General Membership Meeting this Thursday, April 23. Members will receive information on these proposals in advance of the meeting; access to subsequently recommended proposals will arrive with greater notice.
The Bargaining Team meets again on both April 28 and April 29 (the latter with the Executive). A May 2026 schedule will follow shortly on the CUPE 3903 calendar. And, as always, please feel free to contact the bargaining team directly at bargaining@cupe3903.org
— Corey Orszak, Bargaining Team Unit 1 Representative