Our Faculty Association has reached a Tentative Agreement with our Employer. We present this to you following thirteen months of detailed, collaborative work. We believe this package has something to support all our members, from our most vulnerable and precarious to our most senior and stable faculty.
While there is always room for improvement, this package offers more substantial improvements than we have seen for the past twenty years. This is due to the clear faculty mandate from the beginning, the ongoing engagement of our membership, and the dedication of our Bargaining Team in managing the negotiations and working collaboratively with FPSE to come to a collective understanding with the University.
Tentative Agreement Highlights
We would like to highlight significant improvements located therein:
- A salary raise for everyone: through the Provincial Mandate in an effort to keep up with the effects of inflation.
- Successfully bringing studio faculty teaching load in line with sectoral norms, moving from a 5/5 to a 4/4 load: and striking a joint committee to improve and support academic faculty teaching load in light of the larger sizes and workload of academic classes.
- Introducing a Right to Qualified Work system that will implement seniority and eventually replace Right of First Refusal: offering more clarity for precarious faculty about how courses are offered.
- Strengthening our commitments to Decolonization and Indigenization: through a joint committee to carry out a colonial audit of the Collective Agreement and relevant University policies, and through a Letter of Understanding proposing a committee to help establish a Knowledge Keeper in Residence.
- A clear path towards stability for precarious faculty by regularizing Lecturers: which would improve the working conditions for roughly two dozen faculty members on whom the University heavily relies.
- A mentorship opportunity as an Adjunct Professor: position redefined as a limited-term, 3-year, professional and academic development pathway.
- Improved language around Academic Freedom: understanding that this benefits our working conditions as a whole when these principles are shared, understood and practiced widely.
- A redefinition of the academic year as a trimester system: this shift will allow regular faculty to select their two teaching terms and one non-teaching term. Over time, this requires the hiring and stabilizing of more faculty in order to make this transition.
- Clarifying the process that occurs if faculty are accused of harassment or bullying: improving the procedural fairness and transparency of communication throughout this process.
- Improving the pay for graduate student teaching fellowships: a non-regular stipend equivalent of 2 credits per section.
- Improvements to mental health support and optical care in the Benefits program.
- Improvements to leaves of absence for domestic or sexual violence.
- And more!
Information Sessions
Information Sessions for our membership will be held via Zoom (look for zoom link in your email). Information Sessions are to educate our membership on the contents contained within, to elaborate on changes & updates, and to clarify definitions.
Faculty need only attend one of the three sessions scheduled below. Should you have the capacity to attend more, we encourage regularity so that we can best facilitate points of clarification to our members.
- Monday, October 23: 11:30AM – 12:30PM
- Tuesday, October 24: 11:30AM – 12:30PM
- Thursday, October 26: 11:30AM – 12:30PM
Ratification Process
A Ratification Vote is scheduled for Monday, October 30, 2023 between Noon and 11:59PM. The online voting system employed is Simply Voting, carried forward from previous rounds.
Invitations to Simply Voting will be delivered to your @ecuad.ca email address. If you do not receive an invitation to your University email ahead of the vote, please use that address to reach out to ecuadfa@gmail.com as soon as possible.