What are the priorities for Unit 3 in this round of bargaining?
Since the launch of the Fellowship Model in 2016, Unit 3, which used to have around 700-800 members, now has a few dozen. This is because of changes York has made to how research is funded. The problem, beyond denying Masters’ students an opportunity to work and to access union funds and benefits, is that graduate students are still involved in research at York University. The employer is engaging in repeated violations of the scope clause to meet its research needs without having to give the graduate students who do this research the proper compensation and union protections. To address these violations, the union is proposing two broad but interrelated solutions: fixing the GA Training Fund (GATF), and establishing a process to make sure GAs are not misclassified.
What is the GATF fund?
The Graduate Assistant Training Fund (GATF) is a fund that was established in 2018 through the Hayes arbitration award. It is meant to incentivize the hiring of Graduate Assistants (GAs) through grants of $2000 to Principal Investigators (PIs) who have external funding and want to hire a GA to work on their research. The original intention of this fund was to make up for the artificially inflated cost of hiring a GA: in 2016, York unilaterally decided to increase the benefits cost a PI must pay for a GA from 15% to 80%, in a transparent move to make the hiring of GAs prohibitively expensive, and thereby attempt to bust the unit.
How has the GATF fund been mismanaged by York?
After months of dodging the union’s queries, the employer admitted that of the $80,000 in the GATF, they could only account for $6000 that had gone to a faculty member who had verifiably hired a GA. This means at least $74,000 was disbursed from the fund without proper oversight; at best, this amounts to gross negligence on York’s part.
How are we proposing to fix the GATF?
The GATF needs proper management. Since the last two years have shown us that York cannot be trusted to disburse CA funds, joint oversight of the Fund is a must. We are also proposing that some money be moved from the Masters Bursary Fund, which is routinely over-funded, to the GATF, so that more disbursements can be made, and the amount of the disbursement could perhaps be raised above $2000 per PI.
What is the Problem with Misclassification of RA/GAs?
The Unit 3 scope clause clarifies that research work that is done to advance one’s own degree progress (i.e. working in your supervisor’s lab when your dissertation is also dependent on the data produced in said lab) is not included in Unit 3, and therefore cannot be a GA appointment. An RA, or Research Assistantship, is a grant to aid in your own graduate research, and does not include hours of work, reporting of tasks to a supervisor, and is not employment income for tax purposes. However, research not tied to graduate student projects still needs to happen, and since the imposition of the fellowship model, PIs have been encouraged (explicitly or implicitly) to frame work that should be done by a GA as research to be done by an RA. This is apparent in the proliferation of RA job postings. This is a clear violation of our scope clause: graduate students should not be required to do unrelated work for PIs under the guise of advancing their dissertation research. Furthermore, this misclassification robs the students performing the work of union protections and benefits.
What is the Solution to the Misclassification of GA/RAs?
The employer’s current approach to these misclassifications is a whack-a-mole approach: it’s up to the union to find them and grieve them, at which point we are often left waiting for months for a response from Faculty Relations. Clearly this approach is not solving the issue. Therefore, we are proposing that some form of an accountability system be put in place so that no contract is drawn up and no payment is made until someone in the York administration has done a cursory check to make sure the job is properly classified. This is a simple solution that builds on the employer’s already existing legal responsibility for the correct administration of our collective agreements.