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OPSEU launches Charter challenge over cancellation of Colleges Task Force

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The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) has launched a Charter challenge to contest the government’s cancellation of the Colleges Task Force. Following five weeks of picket lines, the task force was established as part the arbitration award that ended last fall’s college faculty strike.

The task force was meant to address many of the major outstanding issues in bargaining, including faculty complement, precarious work, college funding, student success, and collegial governance.

Despite the previous government’s commitment to consider the task force’s recommendations, Premier Ford cancelled the task force on his first day in office – even though it had nearly completed its work.

Because the task force was established through the collective bargaining process, its cancellation is a violation of collective bargaining rights protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Read more about OPSEU’s legal challenge here.

CAUT releases results of first national survey of contract academic staff

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A new survey by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has found that most academic staff working on contract at Canadian universities aren’t employed that way by choice.

According to the survey:

  • Over half of respondents want a tenure-track university or full-time, permanent college job.
  • Women and racialized contract academic staff work more hours per course, per week than their colleagues and are more likely to be in low-income households.
  • Two-thirds of respondents said their mental health has been negatively impacted by the contingent nature of their employment, and just 19 per cent think the institutions where they work are model employers and supporters of good jobs.
  • The number of university teachers working part-time, part-year expanded by 79 per cent from 2005 to 2015. In contrast, regular professors increased by only 14 per cent and in the same period, the number of students grew by 28 per cent.

The study shows that many contract academic staff are underpaid, overworked, and under-resourced, and often feel trapped in a ‘gig lifestyle’ of part-time or insecure work.

Read the CAUT release and study here.

Send an email and show your support for decent work laws

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Last year saw the biggest reforms to labour laws for workers in forty years. Working with the Fight for $15 & Fairness, faculty are part of the movement that won these gains in Ontario. Now, employers and the big business community are pressuring Ford’s government to roll back decent work laws.

Send an email to your MPP and Premier Doug Ford today to show your support for decent work laws.

Faculty associations are already putting the new decent work laws into action by securing two per cent additional vacation pay for contract faculty members and by consolidating bargaining units to promote more effective collective bargaining. Across Ontario, other workers are counting on recently won paid sick days, equal pay for equal work measures, and the planned $15 minimum wage.

However, any day after the legislature reopens, the government could take steps to roll back these important measures. Until then, we can make our voices heard by sending an email to the Premier and attending events in our communities. This will help show newly elected MPPs that Ontarians support a $15 minimum wage and decent work.

Getting ready for 2018’s Fair Employment Week

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Fair Employment Week is an annual event organized by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), which provides a great opportunity to raise awareness about precarious contract working conditions on university campuses. Across Canada, faculty associations will be showing their support for fairness for contract faculty and advocating for universities to provide good jobs that include job security, access to benefits, and fair pay.

In addition to information tables aimed at students and faculty members, Ontario faculty associations will be holding events, networking with other campus and community groups and working to bring these important issues to a broader audience in campus and community newspapers.

This year’s Fair Employment Week will take place October 22–26. If you are thinking about organizing an event, or are interested in finding out more, please don’t hesitate to contact OCUFA’s Engagement and Campaigns Coordinator, Andrea Calver.

This article originally appeared in OCUFA Report. To receive stories like this every week, subscribe here.

Ontario’s faculty concerned with government effort to tie funding to university free speech policies

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TORONTO – “The Ontario government has announced that universities could face funding cuts if they do not comply with newly introduced requirements for campus free speech policies. OCUFA does not believe this government intervention is necessary and is deeply concerned with its implications for the province’s universities, faculty, staff, and students.

Threatening to withhold funding from postsecondary institutions will only serve to undermine the quality of education at our universities and unfairly penalize students. In fact, this directive could be counterproductive and actually chill free speech on campus. Members of the university community may be discouraged from speaking up for fear of being disciplined.

Ontario’s university faculty strongly support a culture of free, vibrant, and diverse speech on our campuses. The pursuit of knowledge is at the core of the university mission and, by its very nature, often leads to enthusiastic discussion and sometimes heated debate. This is why faculty have academic freedom provisions in our collective agreements that provide strong speech protections and why universities already have policies that attempt to foster free speech on campus while maintaining a safe and secure educational environment.

The government should have invested more time working with university administrators, faculty, staff, and students to understand the potential consequences of this directive. Over the coming months, it will be vitally important that members of the university community have opportunities to exercise their speech rights through broad and comprehensive campus consultation about these policies, their implementation, and their likely impact on campus speech and university funding.”

Gyllian Phillips,
President, Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations

Founded in 1964, OCUFA represents 17,000 faculty and academic librarians in 29 faculty associations across Ontario. For more information, please visit www.ocufa.on.ca.

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For more information, contact:
Ben Lewis, Communications Lead at 416-306-6033 or communications@ocufa.on.ca

UOITFA first union in Ontario to win consolidation of bargaining units under new labour relations act

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On August 7th, the Ontario Labour Relations Board agreed to consolidate the three bargaining units represented by the University of Ontario Institute of Technology Faculty Association (UOITFA) into a single unit, covered by one collective agreement.

The UOITFA is the first union in Ontario to apply for and win a consolidation of units under the new labour relations provisions enacted in 2017 by the Liberal provincial government. In early April, the UOITFA filed a certification application for a group of full-time limited-term faculty, and were certified to represent the new unit later that month. The union applied for consolidation immediately after certification.

For the UOITFA, one consolidated unit means less time devoted to bargaining, and less effort devoted to fighting for the same rights three times over. As the UOITFA enters bargaining with the employer for a consolidated agreement in the weeks ahead, all its resources can be dedicated to getting industry competitive terms and conditions of employment for all its members.

This historic win results from several decades of advocacy by OCUFA in partnership with our member associations to re-instate bargaining unit consolidation as part of the Ontario Labour Relations Act. These powers were removed by the Progressive Conservative government in the mid-1990s. Since that time, many Ontario faculty associations have organized new units of contract and teaching stream faculty, temporary and limited term faculty, and librarians, despite the additional effort and resources required to administer multiple units and collective agreements.

In its decision, the Ontario Labour Relations Board articulated a clear path forward for other faculty associations wishing to pursue consolidations. The Board set a low bar for granting consolidation. It determined that it need only consider whether consolidation would result in an effective collective bargaining relationship. The existing relationship between the association and the employer did not need to be proven ineffective to justify change from the status quo.

The Board also found that the strong similarities in the types of work our members do was more important in creating a community of interest than the differences in tenure of employment or time spent on research.

Finally, the Board considered the fact that the union was the applicant, noting that the wishes of the employees for consolidation pointed in the same direction as the development of an effective collective bargaining relationship.

OCUFA congratulates the UOITFA on this path-breaking win, and thanks the association for its leadership in improving the collective bargaining environment in the university sector.

New collective agreement for University of Toronto Faculty Association

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The University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) and the administration at the University of Toronto have reached a two-year agreement. The agreement includes competitive wage increases and extensive benefit improvements in areas such as vision, dental, hearing aids, paramedical, and mental health benefits. In addition, UTFA’s agreement includes improvements in maternity, parental, and adoption leave EI top ups, as well as paid gender affirmation leave for members engaged in treatments and procedures related to gender affirmation. Finally, UTFA achieved increases in Days for Librarians to be used per existing practice.

After four years, Canadian Military Colleges Faculty Association reaches collective agreement

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The Canadian Military Colleges Faculty Association (CMCFA) has reached an agreement with the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada. The faculty association had been without an agreement since 2014. During the intervening years, their employer continuously stalled and threatened not to honour a previously agreed to memoranda of understanding. This resulted in an Unfair Labour Practice complaint from the faculty association.

After assurances that the employer would honour the memoranda of understanding for the life of the agreement, the parties were able to come to an agreement. The agreement contains across-the-board salary increases competitive with other faculty associations and an understanding that the faculty association will participate in the Employee Wellness Support Program to negotiate new employee wellness provisions into the collective agreement.

OCUFA plans Queen’s Park Advocacy Day for November

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In an effort to build stronger relationships with new and re-elected MPPs, OCUFA will be holding its annual Advocacy Day in the fall rather than the spring this year. On November 13, professors and academic librarians from across Ontario will converge on Queen’s Park to share their priorities for the province’s universities.

Over the next few months, the government, and Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in particular, are expected to formalize their plans for the universities and colleges sector. Aside from passing legislation to end the York University strike and an election campaign declaration that university funding should be tied to freedom of speech, the Progressive Conservative government has not revealed any additional details of its agenda for postsecondary education.

Ontario faculty will use Advocacy Day as an opportunity to make the case for renewed investment in public university funding, addressing precarity in the university system, and new full-time faculty hiring, in order to improve the quality of education for university students.

More details about the event will be made available in the coming months.

New collective agreements reached by faculty associations across Ontario

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Carleton University Academic Staff Association

The Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) has reached a four-year agreement with their university administration. CUASA achieved across-the-board salary and career development increases competitive with other faculty associations, along with a lump sum payment upon ratifying the agreement. A territorial acknowledgment will also be placed at the front of the new collective agreement, recognizing the Carleton campus’s location on the traditional land of the Algonquin people.

CUASA negotiated significant positive changes to the tenure and promotion process by making the dual-track process clearer and more transparent. Progress was made alleviating workload concerns by increasing research days for professional librarians, clarifying course credit values for instructors, expanding the definition of service, and formally recognizing the supervision of graduate and undergraduate students, directed studies, and tutorials as part of workload.

CUASA was also able to negotiate the constitution of committees to examine the use of teaching dossiers to determine teaching effectiveness, to examine and make recommendations on the Instructor rank, and to make recommendations on digitally-based courses. Further, an independent expert will be brought in to study the pay equity situation at Carleton and make a report to the university president in one year. From there, the president will have six months to provide the university’s plan to address any gender pay inequities that are found. CUASA will also be continuing their pension discussions with the Carleton administration.

Finally, CUASA negotiated improvements to its benefits plan in areas including dental care, vision care, orthotics benefits, and massage therapy, as well as achieving increases in compassionate leave days and changes to parental leave in line with current legislation.

Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa

The Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO) has reached a three-year agreement with their employer. The faculty association achieved across-the-board salary increases competitive with other faculty associations. The agreement also contains provisions for improving the Extended Health Plan by capping the annual out-of-pocket maximum payments for drugs covered under the plan.

APUO also improved equity language within the agreement, introduced changes to parental leave provisions in line with current legislation, and secured professional leave for Continuing Special Appointment Professors. Most importantly, the faculty association successfully protected minimum faculty complement numbers.

Northern Ontario School of Medicine Academic & Professional Staff Union

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine Academic & Professional Staff Union (Unit 1, OPSEU 677/NOSMFSA) has reached a four-year agreement with their employer. The faculty union achieved across-the-board salary increases competitive with other faculty unions and associations, salary parity adjustment provisions for years 3 and 4, as well as PTR improvements for faculty, librarians, and professional staff.

The agreement contains an anomaly fund to address salary gaps and benefits improvements for vision and dental coverage. The union also achieved increases to bereavement leave, improved harassment and equity language, and changes to pregnancy, parental, and compassionate leave in line with current legislation, along with other improvements.

St. Jerome’s University Academic Staff Association

Full-time members of the St. Jerome’s University Academic Staff Association (SJUASA) have reached a five-year agreement with their university administration. The faculty association achieved across-the-board salary increases competitive with other faculty associations, as well as an $850 increase to each member’s base salary to maintain parity with University of Waterloo faculty.

Among other achievements, the agreement counters the growing trend towards precarity within the academy by waiving the right of first refusal on overload courses, ensuring the increased availability of positions for contract faculty. Furthermore, good headway was made to improve conditions for Lecturers: The salary floor was raised, course load was reduced, and a Teaching Renewal Term was created wherein every six years Lecturers qualify for two consecutive terms free from teaching. The faculty association also successfully improved conditions for librarians by creating the ranks of Assistant Librarian, Associate Librarian, and Librarian, while identifying the qualifications necessary for promotion.

OCUFA statement on back-to-work legislation tabled by Ontario Government

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The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) strongly condemns the tabling of back-to-work legislation by the new Ontario government aimed at the striking members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903 (CUPE 3903). We firmly support the rights of all academic workers to fair negotiations and good-faith collective bargaining, and are concerned with any attempts by government to interfere with the bargaining process.

This legislation marks the third time the Ontario government has attempted to interfere in public sector bargaining within the past year. The back-to-work legislation that ended last fall’s strike at Ontario colleges breached the constitutionally protected rights of workers to freely negotiate their agreements, and this new legislation will do the same. These actions undermine the collective bargaining process and encourage employers to avoid meaningful engagement in negotiations, resulting in longer future strikes and employers who stonewall while waiting for government bailouts.

OCUFA is particularly concerned with the clause in the “Back to Class” Act that prohibits the arbitrator from including any provisions that might protect employees from being discharged or disciplined for exercising their constitutional rights. Such a provision unduly ties the hands of the arbitrator and works against the principles of reconciliation and healing that are important for all parties as they try to move on. The arbitration and remediation processes should focus on resolving the issues and points of conflict between the two parties, and not encourage targeting and punishment of individual members of the bargaining unit.

Recent strikes and bargaining impasses at postsecondary education institutions are products of government underfunding and problematic hiring practices. The increasing number of precarious positions and erosion of working conditions on our university and college campuses are direct results of such practices.

The provincial government should focus on addressing and resolving these systemic issues through a sustainable and informed approach. Growing precarity, deteriorating working conditions, and the threats they pose to educational quality can only be resolved with commitment and investment from both postsecondary institutions and the Ontario government in consultation with workers. These challenges have not, and will never be resolved by undermining constitutionally protected collective bargaining rights.

Significant arbitration decision on use of student questionnaires for teaching evaluation

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A recent arbitration award between the Ryerson Faculty Association and Ryerson University has established an important precedent for faculty associations, and lends support to others who have been arguing that student questionnaires are deeply problematic instruments for the purpose of evaluating faculty members’ teaching effectiveness.

It is telling that “student evaluations of teaching” or SETs, as the arbitrator chooses to call them, have been a “live issue” between the university and the Ryerson Faculty Association for fifteen years. In that time, not only have SETs been a recurrent point of contention for other faculty associations for reasons similar to those addressed in the arbitration, but other grounds for concern have come to the fore. In response, OCUFA established a working group to examine “SETs” and their use, broaching a number of issues, including some that were not before the arbitrator for the Ryerson decision.

Arbitrator William Kaplan lends critical momentum with his award. He accepted the expert evidence of Professors Philip Stark and Richard Freishtat that student evaluations of teaching cannot be used to assess teaching effectiveness. Kaplan’s award, and Freishtat’s and Stark’s pivotal reports are available online, and summarized as follows.

While Mr. Kaplan does find that SETs can continue to be used in the context of tenure and promotion decisions, he asserts that they cannot be used for the purposes of measuring teaching effectiveness for promotion or tenure.

He accepts that SETs do have value as the principal source of information from students about their experience. However, he states that, while SETs are “easy to administer and have an air of objectivity,” insofar as assessing teaching effectiveness they are “imperfect at best and downright biased and unreliable at worst.”

The evidence provided by Stark and Freishtat shows that SET results are skewed by a long list of factors, including personal characteristics (such as race, gender, accent, age, and physical attractiveness) and course characteristics (including class size, subject matter, traditional teaching vs innovative pedagogy, etc.).

The lack of validity (“reliability” in the arbitrator’s award) of SET results is further complicated when SET results are reduced to averages and then compared with other faculty members, the Department, Faculty, and the University. Mr. Kaplan finds “the evidence is clear, cogent and compelling that averages establish nothing relevant or useful about teaching effectiveness.” The use of averages is fundamentally and irreparably flawed. He concludes that only frequency distribution reporting is meaningful.

The arbitrator accepted the experts’ conclusion that the best way to assess teaching effectiveness is through the careful assessment of the teaching dossier and in-class peer evaluations. SETs may be ubiquitous, but this does not serve as a justification for over-reliance on a flawed tool.

In addition to identifying several items for the parties to work on together (developing guidelines, modes of presenting results, and a successor questionnaire) and requiring discontinuation of online questionnaires in stipulated situations, Arbitrator Kaplan ordered that the:

  • Ryerson Faculty Association Collective Agreement be amended to ensure that SET results are not used in measuring teaching effectiveness for promotion or tenure;
  • numerical rating system be replaced with an alphabetical one;
  • summary question of overall effectiveness be removed from the questionnaire;
  • parties ensure that administrators and committee members charged with evaluating faculty are educated in the inherent and systemic biases in SETs.

The arbitrator declared that “a high standard of justice, fairness and due process is self-evidently required” given the impact that SETs can have on faculty. OCUFA also believes that this standard applies given the impact that SETs can have on student learning.

OCUFA has been using the term Student Questionnaires on Courses and Teaching (SQCTs) to describe these evaluations. When it releases its report in October, the OCUFA Working Group on SQCTs will have more to say with respect to the methodological, ethical, and human rights implications of student questionnaires.

References:

Acknowledgement: This story incorporates and adapts a summary prepared by Emma Phillips, Partner at Goldblatt Partners, LLP.

Merrilee Fullerton appointed the new minister of Training, Colleges and Universities

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On June 29th, Merrilee Fullerton was appointed Minister of the newly retitled Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, in the new Premier’s Cabinet. Minister Fullerton is a first-term Progressive Conservative MPP from the riding of Kanata-Carleton. She is an alumna of the University of Ottawa’s medical school and a formerly practicing doctor.

Ms. Fullerton does not have any previous professional background in the field of postsecondary education and it remains unclear what the PC government and Minister Fullerton’s plans are for the sector, outside of the previously announced freedom of speech protection measures.

OCUFA is hoping to meet with Minister Fullerton in the coming weeks to discuss her vision for the future of higher education in Ontario and current issues facing the higher education system, including the rise in precarious jobs and the need for government re-investment in universities.

Faculty Association Contingent Joins Thousands to Rally for Decent Work

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On Saturday, June 16, 2018, a contingent from faculty associations across Ontario joined thousands who gathered in front of the Ministry of Labour at 400 University Ave. in downtown Toronto and marched to Queen’s Park. Themed as “WE the people”, the rally delivered a strong message to the incoming Doug Ford government to keep its hands off public services and to not undermine the hard-fought rights of the precarious workers and minimum wage earners, particularly the new labour laws passed under Bill 148. Prior to the election period and during the PC leadership race, Doug Ford went on record speaking against new changes to labour law introduced under Bill 148, Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, as well as the plan to increase the Ontario minimum wage to $15 an hour. The PC caucus also unanimously voted against Bill 148 at its final hearing.

The rally was organized by $15 and Fairness and the Ontario Federation of Labour. It featured a wide array of speakers including Naomi Klein, co-author of Canada’s Leap Manifesto, Chris Buckley, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, Sandy Hudson, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Toronto, Dr. Ritika Goel, member of the Decent Work and Health Network & OHIP for All, Gobinder Singh Randhawa, chair of the Ontario Sikh and Gurudwara Council, Anita Agrawal, member of the Better Way Alliance, and Sarah Jama, co-founder of Disability Justice Network of Ontario.

The rally for Decent Work marks the first big public demonstration to take place since the election of a PC majority government under Doug Ford and has sent a loud and clear message to the incoming government. OCUFA has been a strong supporter of the Fight for $15 and Fairness movement and has advocated tirelessly, through its Fairness for Contract Faculty campaign, for the rights of contract faculty and campus workers to fair employment, equal pay and job security.

Equal Pay for Equal Work Now: OCUFA Joins College Contract Faculty Meeting on Bill 148

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OCUFA was pleased to join the College CAAT-A contract faculty and Fight for $15 & Fairness on June 12, 2018, for an event entitled “Equal Pay for Equal Work Now: Equal Pay for Contract Faculty under Bill 148”. Approximately 100 Ontario contract faculty and college faculty union representatives attended this event to discuss the new rights available to contract faculty under Bill 148.

The event was the first step toward creating a broad coalition of university and college contract faculty to lead the charge against precarity in post-secondary education and fight for fairness for all contract faculty province-wide.

The evening began with welcoming remarks from the event hosts including OCUFA’s chair of Contract Faculty and Faculty Complement Committee, Kimberly Ellis-Hale. Following an overview of contract faculty’s new rights under Bill 148 and the process for filing equal pay complaints with the Ministry of Labour by a legal expert from Parkdale Legal Clinic and equal pay activists from the $15 & Fairness campaign, the discussion centered on different ways and strategies for enforcing these rights, particularly the right to equal pay for contract faculty.

The Fight for $15 & Fairness campaign and the movement they have built has made great advances in recent months with the passage of new legislation in Bill 148 that will bring more fairness to Ontario workplaces. Among these changes is new equal pay legislation for contract, part-time, temporary and casual workers, which came into force for non-union workers on April 1, 2018 and will be implemented for unionized workers on the earlier of their collective agreement expiration or January 1, 2020.

OCUFA remains committed to the fight to achieve fairness for contract faculty and will work with partners in the college sector in leading and supporting the campaign for equal pay for contract faculty.