Bargaining Update: Tentative Agreement Reached

After another marathon day of mediator-assisted bargaining, AU and AUFA have reached a tentative agreement. Employer concessions contained in this new agreement no doubt reflect AUFA members’ strong rejection Monday of AU’s last ‘final’ offer. As a result, the AUFA bargaining team is recommending members vote to ratify this agreement. 

 AUFA is holding a town hall today at 2:00pm to discuss the substance of the tentative agreement, as well as what AUFA’s next steps might look like. In the meantime, this blog post provides a summary of the tentative settlement’s key items. For reference, the entire tentative agreement is attached below.  

2022 04 07 PROPOSED MEMORANDUM OF SETTLEMENT (Tentaive Agreement) (00160919).pdf

The agreement uses the mediator’s report as the basis for most of the agreement. Most items in that report remain unchanged, including: 

• Cost-of-living-adjustment:  

  • The Government-mandated COLA increase of 1.25% (April 1, 2023), 1.5% (December 1, 2023) and an increase of 0.5% (retroactive to December 1, 2023) contingent on provincial gainsharing formula remains unchanged. This 3.25% COLA increase over the life of the contract appears to be pattern across most of the Alberta public sector. 

• Working-from-home allowance payments:  

  • Anyone who has not received the full $2000 for home office start-up will receive a ‘top up’ to make up the full $2000;  

  • Home-based staff with six years of service (and who received $2000 upon hiring) will receive an additional taxable $800 immediately. 

  • All AUFA members will receive an increase to their monthly allowance for internet and other office-related expenses from what it had been (roughly $61 per month for academics and roughly $50 per month for professionals) to $35 biweekly. 

• Joint committee to study Article 3: Academic Promotion and Tenure 

• Improvements to Compassionate Care Leave  

• Improvements to Occupational Health and Safety language 

• Language to include Joint Equity Committee in development of EDI framework and pay equity review 

• Withdrawal of employers’ outstanding concession demands 

The main changes in the tentative agreement relate to Research and Study Leave (RSL) benefits for Professional members. The proposed agreement removes Professionals’ eligibility for RSL going forward, with the following conditions: 

• No RSL days will be accrued going forward. New hires will not be eligible for RSL. Approved RSL leaves will be honoured. 

• Professionals will earn 30 days professional development leave per year (up from 21). Twenty-one days can be accrued per year to a maximum of 126 days (6 months). 

• Members can apply for leaves up to a maximum of six months. Members will need to apply for leaves longer than 21 days under new language that replicates the current process under RSL Leaves. If denied once, a second application will be given priority and not unreasonably denied. 

• Professionals with more than six months leave accrued will retain that leave, with no deadline on usage. Until their accrual drops below six months, they will only receive 21 PD days per year without accrual.  

• When a professional has fewer than six months RSL accrued, the leave will be converted to PD leave according to the formula in Schedule F and added to their PD bank. 

• Librarians will continue to be eligible for RSL. 

For clarity: in return for giving up RSL leave going forward, professionals will earn an additional 9 days of PD per year and will be able to accrue up to 21 days per year to a maximum of 6 months. Current RSL accruals above 6 months will be retained and others converted with a formula equivalent to receiving 100% pay for RSL leave. 

The bargaining committee recognizes this deal does not provide a full return for professionals on the value of their RSL entitlements. It does, however, provide more than the original mediator’s report in that it retains accrued leave at full value and provides professionals with 9 additional PD days per year going forward. This equates to a value of 3.6% of annual income. 

AUFA’s bargaining team is recommending this deal because we believe it is the best that can be achieved under current circumstances. The provincial government’s secret mandate has seriously undermined the basic integrity of the bargaining process, and severely limited what can, and cannot, be achieved at the table. This is especially true in terms of matters involving money. 

As always, of course, any final decision on whether to accept this tentative agreement rests solely in the hands of AUFA members. This is, after all, your collective agreement, and AUFA’s bargaining committee works for you.  

 On behalf of the Bargaining Committee, 

Jason Foster 

More Details on Digital Picketing

Back in December, AUFA’s Job Action Committee (JAC) provided an overview of flying (i.e., in-person) and digital picketing. As a potential strike and/or lockout looms, this post provides additional details about digital picketing during the first few weeks of any work stoppage. An earlier post this week provided some additional details on flying pickets. 

Overview of Digital Pickets 

If a strike or lockout occurs, AUFA will be organizing four kinds of digital picketing to start with: 

• recruiting individuals to sign AUFA’s online petition,  

• sharing materials on social media,  

• contacting selected individuals (administrators, university donors, MLAs) by phone and email, and  

• contacting non-striking staff to check in on them and ask them to honour our picket line. 

Each day AUFA members will receive updated instructions about digital picketing activities.  

Some forms of digital picketing will entail the use of email or social media accounts. Members interested in creating anonymous email and social media accounts can follow these instructions. 

Instructions for email: Disposable email account - How to.pdf

Instructions for social media:  Disposable Twitter account - How to.pdf

Recruiting Individuals to Sign AUFA’s Online Petition 

AUFA will be launching an online petition that emails each petition signature to key actors at AU. Petition signatories will be pledging not to enroll in an AU course and not to recommend AU to others until a fair deal is concluded. The purposes of the petition are to: 

• easily allow allies and the public to support us, and 

• apply reputational and financial pressure to settle by demonstrating large numbers of interested students are refraining from registering in AU courses until the strike ends.  

Individual AUFA members will be asked to use their networks of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to solicit five (or more!) signatures per day. This work will supplement our in-person leafletting work with current PSE students on campuses that send AU significant numbers of visiting students. 

What to do: 

• Each day, contact five people you know individually by phone, video chat, email, text, or by seeing them in person. If you are nervous about this, start close to home with family and friends. 

• Explain you are on strike, and that you need two minutes of their time to help us get a fair deal. 

• Ask them to sign the online petition (link and QR code provided). 

What not to do: 

• Do not mass email your contact list; that approach is ineffective. Personalized communications matter. 

Sharing Materials on Social Media 

AUFA will be providing a daily shareable (e.g., photos, memes, infographics) for members to share on social media. The purposes of these shareables are to: 

• generate public awareness of the strike by flooding social media spaces,  

• apply reputational pressure on the employer to settle, and  

• drive traffic to our online petition. 

What to do: 

• Share the memes on your social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and so on). 

• Where a social media platform uses tags, ensure you use: #AUFAStrike #AthabascaU 

• Express how the employer’s behaviour is affecting you, such as “I’m tired to being treated poorly”, “I miss my students”, or “I’d rather be working”. 

• If you would like to add your own comments to a post, consider making a clear demand, such as “negotiate a fair deal” or “fair wages now”. 

• Direct interested people to our online petition. 

What not to do: 

• Do not engage with online trolls; they are not making good-faith arguments, are a waste of time, and are best ignored and/or blocked.  

Contacting Selected Individuals by Phone or Email 

AUFA will be providing a rotating list of the names, emails, and/or phone numbers of selected individuals for members to contact. These individuals are people who may be able to help us get a fair deal. This list will include members of Athabasca University’s Board of Governors and Executive Group, as well as donors, and MLAs. The purposes of these contacts are to: 

• generate awareness of the strike among key audiences, and 

• apply pressure (social, reputational, and financial) on the Board to settle. 

What to do: 

• Each day, contact the identified individuals by phone or email. 

• Explain you are on strike, and you need their help to get a fair deal. 

• Ask Board and executive members to negotiate a fair deal. 

• Ask donors to stop donating to AU for the duration of the strike and to tell AU that they plan to halt any donation until AUFA gets a fair contract. 

• Ask MLAs to direct AU’s Board to negotiate a fair deal. 

What not to do: 

• Do not mass email individuals; as noted above, that approach is ineffective. 

Contacting Non-Striking Staff to Check-in and Ask for Support 

AUPE and CUPE staff will continue to work during a strike. This will be a stressful time for our colleagues. We will be asking AUFA members to call a small number of our non-striking colleagues each day to check in on them.  

During this call, you might also tell them how the strike is going for you and thank them for declining to perform AUFA work during the strike. The purposes of these calls are to: 

• ensure non-striking staff are okay, 

• convey general information about the strike to non-striking staff, and 

• ensure they are aware they can refuse to perform struck work. 

What to do: 

• Each day, contact a few non-striking staff that you know. 

• Have a short, polite chat about how they are doing and also how the strike is going. 

• Thank them for their hard work and for respecting the AUFA strike.  

What not to do: 

• Do not keep people on the phone for longer than 10 minutes. 

• Do not call anyone who has asked you not to call them. 

JAC hopes this additional information is helpful in explaining what digital picketing will look like initially. As the strike and/or lockout goes on, we may change tactics.  

If you have questions about digital picketing, please direct them to me at barnetso@athabascau.ca . 

Bob Barnetson, Chair 

Job Action Committee 

Letter to Premier Kenney Regarding Dr. Melanee Thomas

“Alberta Legislature 2” by is licensed by daryl_mitchell under CC BY 2.0

This past Monday, Premier Jason Kenney made disparaging remarks about University of Calgary professor Dr. Melanee Thomas on the floor of the legislature, questioning her objectivity in her academic work. AUFA views this attack on the independence of Albertan academics and the right of academic freedom. Below is a letter from AUFA President Dr. Jolene Armstrong to Premier Kenney on this issue.

Bill 21 turns free and open PSE collective bargaining into a fettered and secret process

In late October, the Kenney government introduced Bill 21 (Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability Act, 2019), Tucked away at the back of Bill 21 is the entirely new Public Sector Employers Act (PSEA). The PSEA gives the government new powers to intervene directly into the collective bargaining process between specified government agencies, boards, and commissions (ABCs), including Athabasca University’s Board of Governors, and the unions that represent employees, including AUFA, AUPE, and CUPE.

How will the new PSEA work?

The PSEA lets the government impose binding bargaining directives on employers, including setting the duration of a collective agreement and the fiscal limits within which the employer must operate (Section 3(2)). But that’s not all. The PSEA makes these directives confidential, and bars ABCs from sharing their mandates with anyone, unless the Minister gives them explicit permission to do so (Section 4(2)). The PSEA also gives the government certain procedural powers (e.g., to demand information and direct compliance).

This is an astonishingly brazen effort at undermining the legitimacy of the collective bargaining process. In short, the government’s proposed PSEA empowers the Minister to dictate the bottom line of putatively independent ABCs when they are in bargaining. Given this government’s well-publicized efforts to reduce public-sector spending, these secret bargaining mandates will no doubt ensure “that the costs of collective agreements bargained by public sector employers are aligned with the Province’s fiscal realities” (Bill 21 Preamble).

What will this mean for bargaining?

It is highly likely that the government will use its new powers under the PSEA to try to force rollbacks in our compensation, in keeping with the government’s current efforts to roll other public-sector workers’ wages back at arbitration by 2% to 5%..

Secret bargaining mandates will have a deleterious effect on bargaining because, although AUFA and AU will be “negotiating” at the table, the true employer-side decision maker (the Minister) will be pulling AU’s strings from behind the scenes. This creates a car-dealer bargaining dynamic, wherein the employer can use “the manager in the back” as a reason to decline AUFA proposals.

For example, AUFA may ask for a modest cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), especially given that AUFA agreed to a two-year wage freeze during our last round of bargaining. AU can afford to give all its employees a COLA because, despite the operating-grant reduction in the 2019 budget, AU will almost certainly run another multi-million dollar surplus this year.

But AU is almost certain to not only refuse COLA, but to seek a wage rollback as well. (At least one Alberta PSE has already received direction to achieve a 2% rollback in faculty wages and AU is seeking a 2% rollback in support staff wages). Unless AUFA members are prepared to accept a wage rollback on top of an inflationary cut to their purchasing power, this will almost certainly lead to impasse and, ultimately, a work stoppage.

One way to avoid impasse (and subsequent strikes or lockouts) can be for the parties to hash out some sort of trade. For example, a salary freeze might be acceptable if it was offset by a significant increase in benefits or additional vacation days. This is the very definition of bargaining. Government-directed bargaining mandates reduce employers’ flexibility to explore such arrangements. And secret mandates undermine the trust necessary for such negotiations to occur.

Does the PSE violate the Charter?

There has been some suggestion that the PSEA may violate Section 2(d) of the Charter (freedom of association). The Supreme Court has previously ruled that workers are entitled to a meaningful process of collective bargaining. The government predetermining the outcome of bargaining via secret bargaining mandates almost certainly will create a hollow bargaining process.

It is likely unions will challenge the constitutionality of the PSEA. But such a challenge will take years to unfold in court. In the meantime, the PSEA will remain in operation. This, in turn, significantly heightens the risk of work stoppages, both at AU and in the broader public sector.

Eric Strikwerda, Chair

Bargaining Team

Bob Barnetson, Chair

Job Action Committee

A Recovery & Self-Defense Budget?

The Kenney government presented its budget as part of a larger effort to recover Alberta’s fortune from the damage done by the Notley government and to defend the province against continued strangulation at the hand of Trudeau’s federal government. Whatever one thinks about Notley and Trudeau, the Kenney-story is patently false. Stirring up resentment might pay at the ballot-box, but the policies pursued behind the smoke and mirrors it creates can do harm to the people these policies allegedly serve.

It wasn’t Rachel Notley

The Kenney-story starts with the claim that the Notley-government created piles of debt that weighs heavy on entrepreneurs’ propensity to invest. Fact is that government revenue, like in any other oil producing country or region, took a hit when oil prices plummeted from 105 USD per barrel West Texas Immediate in July 2014 to 45 USD in January 2015. The oil price had bottomed out before Notley was elected in May. Nothing she did in office caused the oil price collapse. Oil prices are hovering around an average of close to 60 USD ever since, no matter who is in office in Edmonton, Ottawa or elsewhere.

In 2014, when the oil price peaked, the government ran a 0.3 percent surplus compared to GDP. Revenue shortfalls turned this into a 1.9 percent deficit the next year. Contrary to the Kenney-story, this wasn’t the opening act of an unprecedented accumulation of debt. By the end of Notley’s term in office, Alberta’s debt-to-GDP-ratio stood at 7 percent, followed by British Columbia with 15 percent. At top of the list: Newfoundland with 47 percent.

It wasn’t Justin Trudeau either

High debt-levels in Newfoundland and other eastern provinces lead to the second part of the Kenney-story: Albertans struggle harder than anybody else because they have to pay Eastern Canada’s bills and are denied access to the world market.

There surely are Albertans who struggle, either because they can’t find work, don’t have access to unemployment benefits or because wages are too low to pay the bills. However, these are not the problems the Kenney-government has on its agenda. Their concern is not the plight of many at the bottom of the social ladder, let alone the stark contrast between them and the few rich at the top. Their concern is the exploitation and suppression of Albertans by Eastern Canadians.

If one isn’t interested in the distribution of income and wealth between the rich and the poor in any jurisdiction – one looks at averages. In 2017, the average income in Alberta was 78,214 CAD. The highest of all provinces, only the Northwest Territories, registered even higher incomes: 108,065. At the bottom of the list: Prince Edward Island with 44,180 CAD. Even after taxes, which include monies going into fiscal transfer payments, average incomes in Alberta are substantially higher than in any other Canadian province. The reason that a lot of people struggle in Alberta is not because they are exploited by people in the East, it is because of inequalities within the province.

But they won’t let us sell our oil

One of the reasons that average income in Alberta are the highest amongst the Canadian provinces despite the collapse of oil prices in 2014/5 is that many of the workers who lost their jobs over this went back to their home provinces in the East. Another reason is that the oil industry in Alberta, though only creating around six percent of jobs in the province, is generating solid profits for its shareholders, including those residing in Alberta. In 2015, in the midst of collapsing oil prices, the five largest oil companies operating in Alberta paid record dividends of 5,079 million CAD. This figure dropped to 3,320 the following year, but was already back to 4,159 in 2017, above the 3,941 paid out in 2013, the last year of booming oil prices.

Apparently, these profits are still not high enough to trigger investment, employment and prosperity for all. At least not in the Kenney-story that charges Trudeau with not building the Transmountain Pipeline and thereby impeding Alberta’s oil exports. Even if one disregards environmental concerns, as Kenney and his cabinet members proudly do, the argument is wrong. A little-known fact, but a fact nevertheless, is that the existing Transmountain Pipeline operates well below capacity. Which might be one of the reasons that Kinder Morgan was happy to sell it to the Trudeau government. Before the deal, Kinder Morgan stock languished at 15 USD per share. After the deal was signed, it swiftly rose to 18 USD and now sits around 20 USD. Meanwhile, the federal government sits on the bill for a project for which, as the existing pipeline operating below capacity indicates, there is no demand.

Beyond smoke and mirrors

Kenney’s budget spin is plain wrong. Notley did not cause a fiscal crisis and Trudeau is not strangling the province. If anything, both tried to appease the oil lobby but didn’t get the electoral rewards that the Kenney government uses to push cuts through parliament before too many people notice that it is these cuts, not Notley and Trudeau, hurt them. These cuts will make work and life more difficult for everybody but the few rich, but particularly those at the bottom of a society already plagued with inequality and insecurity. The former is the result of an underdeveloped welfare state, the latter by the province’s overreliance on the oil industry. These problems can be fixed – by stopping Kenney’s scapegoating, curing widespread tax-phobia and building a diverse economy.

Ingo Schmidt

Assistant Professor, Labour Studies