After a short break from the bargaining table, your Units 1, 2, & 3 Bargaining Team and the Employer’s Bargaining Committee met again on October 29. Having made productive use of our time away from each other, the Union returned to the table with a number of counters; the Employer did not.
Employer Unpreparedness
The chronic unpreparedness of the Employer’s Bargaining Committee remains the greatest frustration to the efficient resolution of this round of bargaining. The Bargaining Team expressed as much to the Employer on Thursday, as we did earlier that morning, when we met, for the first time, with the Conciliator appointed by the Ministry of Labour. Between the two parties, there remain unreconciled visions of the future of work, study, and research at York University. There also remain portions of that future which are consistently rendered opaque by the Employer’s refusal to discuss anything “monetary”, except when it is convenient to them.
The greatest barrier to progress so far remains — after approximately 120 hours at the bargaining table, and however many hours of work away from it — how little preparation the Employer appears to do before each meeting. Certainly, the Union is not privy to the work of the Employer’s Bargaining Committee away from the table. We can only gauge output and wonder at the kind of process which, given a two-week break to prepare for the next meeting, results in them returning to the table with nothing more than a single sentence.
It would be churlish, of course, to evaluate the Employer’s performance on word count alone. Volume, however, remains a fair target; readers are encouraged to browse the Union’s running count of proposals exchanged between the two parties and gauge the Employer’s productivity by the speed at which they reach the bottom of the page. Our members must integrate bargaining into their regular working hours whereas to many on the Employer’s team, bargaining is quite literally their job. Hence our description of the Employer’s Bargaining Committee before the Conciliator: unprofessional.
Updates from the Bargaining Table
Grievance Process
While the Bargaining Team remains dismayed at the pace of bargaining, some positive progress can be reported. The Union tabled a counter on the Employer’s earlier proposal to add a third step to the grievance process. It appears likely that both parties will be able to reach a mutually-agreeable revision to this article — one which mollifies the Employer’s practice in recent years to compel grievances to arbitration and defer their resolution for years on end. The Employer has also agreed to delete language in the Unit 2 Collective Agreement allowing for the Employer to request two free hours of labour after a member’s contract concludes.
Ticketed Course Directorships
On Thursday, the Union tabled a counter building upon the Employer’s suggestion that the Ticketed Course Directorship application process be made discrete from the blanket application all Unit 1 members complete. While sympathetic to clarifying the process around ticketed applications and appointments, the BT rejected a related proposal to increase the total number of tickets to eighty full-course equivalents (FCE) each year.
Although we encourage the Employer to find opportunities for PhD students interested in teaching their own courses, we were suspicious about this significant proposed increase from the current maximum of fifty-five FCEs. This increase was especially suspicious beacuse the Employer has, over the previous collective agreement, failed (by about 14-18 FCEs each year) to meet the current quota and also failed to reach the equity standards required of by the language currently in the collective agreement. Given that history, where would these additional courses come from?
Setting Expectations for November
We have been promised by the Employer that they will return to the table on November 10 with additional language on the Ticket process and, at minimum, topics of discussion (how conversational!) on those articles in the Unit 2 agreement relating to the Affirmative Action pool. We hope they do, much as we hope they bring other counters to the four additional bargaining dates scheduled for November, given the many outstanding unaddressed proposals from the package we delivered to them on July 13. We hope as well, though, that we won’t have to schedule many more meetings after November. We therefore reiterate: we do not wish to be bargaining in 2027.
In solidarity,
CUPE 3903 Bargaining Team (Units 1, 2, & 3)
bargaining@cupe3903.org
Click here to read previous BT reports, and check the calendar for upcoming bargaining-related happenings.