Analysis of University of Lethbridge Settlement

The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) recently ratified a new settlement following a lengthy strike. This blog post provides an overview of the ULFA settlement. Overall, this settlement extends the public-sector and PSE wage pattern but with some additional monetary and language improvements.  

Term and Money 

This four-year deal has a term of July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2024. The cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for all salaries and grids is as follows: 

July 1, 2020:	0%
July 1, 2021:	0%
July 1, 2022:	0%
April 1, 2023:	1.25%
December 1, 2023:	1.5%
Additional increase December 1, 2023:	0.5% (not guaranteed)

The additional increase scheduled for December of 2023 is contingent upon the province achieving a real GDP for the 2023 calendar year that is at or above 2.7% as of February 2024. If this condition is met in February of 2024, U of L will retroactively apply an additional 0.5% COLA to December 1, 2023. If this condition is not met, then no additional increase will be forthcoming.  

This means the ULFA settlement could see an (uncompounded) COLA increase of between 2.75% and 3.25% over its four-year term. Even with the addition of gain-sharing payments, this settlement will not maintain the purchasing power of ULFA salaries over time. For example, year-over-year inflation as of January 2022 was 5.1%.  

The ULFA settlement matches the COLA agreed to by AUPE for its government services bargaining unit, the Mount Royal Faculty Association (MRFA) settlement from late February, and the Association of Academic Staff: University of Alberta (AASUA) from early March. This appears to be the current “secret’ financial mandate issued the government. 

Extra Compensation 

In addition to the COLA settlement, ULFA was able to negotiate some additional changes. Key changes that have clear monetary implications include: 

• Grid floors rise: Effective July 1, 2022, sessionals will see an 8% increase to the minimum stipends. Assistant and associate professors and some librarian grids will see a 10% increase to their grid floor. Assistant professor and one category of librarians will also see a 2% increase in salaries.  

• Benefits: The employee and family assistance plan will be extended to cover sessional and term staff. A flexible benefit spending plan of $250 per year for all members except sessional or term staff was created. 

The value of this additional compensation is unclear. Additional compensation in non-salary form is also a feature of the AASUA, MRFA and United Nurses of Alberta deals.  

Language 

There were a significant number of language changes which vary across categories of employees. Of relevance to AUFA members include improvements in equity language that include: 

• An expansion of the definition of service to better recognize work often done by members of equity-seeking groups, 

• A larger equity committee with clearer terms of reference and purpose, 

• A requirement to perform regular EDI studies, including pay equity studies, with redress of inequities normally within 12 months, 

• Clearer language on what medical information is required for an accommodation, and 

• New Indigenous evaluation language. 

You can read the full ratification package online.  

ULFA and the U of L also negotiated a returned-to-work protocol (a common thing after a strike). This protocol includes Board agreeing to allow ULFA members to purchase their pensionable service during the period of the strike as well as the Board agreeing to pay travel, professional, and research/grant expenses incurred during the strike. The U of L also agreed to destroy all surveillance data collected during the strike, and that ULFA members will face no strike-related disciplinary measures, reprisals, or legal action. 

Analysis 

The ULFA agreement provides a cost-of-living increase of between 2.75% and 3.25%. This mirrors the provincial and PSE wage pattern (and the government mandate). This is the same deal that AU offered AUFA on February 28 after filed for mediation. Additional compensation, in the form of benefits, grid, and salary improvements, adds to the overall improvement of compensation. 

ULFA also appears to have achieved some language improvements, particularly around equity issues. Notably, the ULFA deal does not appear to contain any of the massive language rollbacks that AU is trying to push on AUFA members.  

To get this deal, ULFA was required to strike for approximately 40 calendar days. The U of L was not available to bargain for the first 23 calendar days. One way to read this delay by the U of L is as a form of punishment for ULFA striking.  

Social media comments by ULFA members also suggest that the government was very much involved in the structure of the eventual agreement. This includes reports that the U of L negotiator had to call to get permission from the government to agree to certain outcomes. Whether this was actually the case or whether this was some sort of elaborate “talking to the manager in the back” ruse is unclear. 

ULFA’s language improvements likely reflect that, in order to get ULFA to accept the government’s lousy wage-mandate, the U of L had to agree to some of ULFA’s other proposals. Time will tell if AU prefers this option to a work stoppage. 

Jason Foster, Chair 

AUFA Bargaining Committee 

Bob Barnetson, Chair 

Job Action Committee 

Faculty strike at Concordia enters second week

Last Thursday, 10 AUFA members joined in solidarity with striking faculty at Concordia University Edmonton (CUE), walking the picket line in blisteringly cold January weather. The CUE strike is unprecedented. It is the first post-secondary strike in Alberta’s history. This post provides some background and analysis on the strike, as well as identifying the implications for AUFA.

Background

Concordia is a private university located in Edmonton that focuses on providing high-quality, mostly undergraduate degrees. The university’s faculty association is small (~82 members) and includes faculty members, professional librarians, laboratory instructors, and field placement coordinators. Concordia also employs a large number of temporary sessional instructors who are not members of Concordia University Edmonton Faculty Association (CUEFA).

Concordia’s financial situation is strong. Its 2020/21 expenditures were $35.3 million and it generated an operating surplus of $11.5m (~33%). The previous year, its operating surplus was $7.8m. Most of the surpluses come from tuition revenue (enrollment and tuition are increasing). Overall, tuition and fees account for 64.3% of total university revenue.

At the end of fiscal year 2020/21, Concordia had $39.8m in the bank. Rather than reinvest some of that surplus to compensate chronically underpaid teaching staff, the university instead used $1.75m to buy the historic Magrath Mansion on Ada Blvd. University administration insists that the residence will serve as a campus, but it’s presently zoned as residential so it can’t be used that way. The building is also more than a century old, is architecturally unsuited for university use, and requires significant and ongoing financial resources just to maintain it.

Bargaining to Date

CUEFA has been bargaining for a new contract since early 2021. Concordia faculty have among the lowest salaries in Canada, and labour under among the heaviest teaching loads in Canada (~8 courses per year). Not surprisingly, then, fair and reasonable salary improvements, as well as a workload reduction remain top issues at bargaining.

The nexus between salary and workload is especially salient, since Concordia’s administration is demanding ever greater faculty research output in an effort to enhance the institution’s research reputation. Concordia’s goal is fine. But it can’t do that on the backs of relatively low-waged and overworked staff. The parties are also negotiating intellectual property provisions.

During bargaining, Concordia proposed new disciplinary language which appears to mean that university administrators could terminate faculty without just cause. No other faculty association in Canada has disciplinary language that gives the employer so much latitude, in part because workers know an employer will abuse such discretion. It’s also just plain unfair, and violates basic principles of any collegial workplace.

In November, CUEFA took a strike vote. Ninety-five percent of members voted and 90% of them voted in favour of a strike. Subsequently, the employer and the union were able to make some progress on faculty workload issues (but not for other members).

Concordia offered to withdraw its disciplinary proposal if CUEFA agrees to sign over its members’ intellectual property to the employer. This proposal suggests Concordia’s disciplinary language is simply an effort by the employer to generate some bargaining leverage. After the first week of the strike, Concordia withdrew this just-cause proposal.

One social media report suggests Concordia was offering:

2021/22: 0%

2022/23: 0%

2023/24: 0.5%

2024/25: 1.0%

2025/26: 1.5%

For context, inflation in Alberta in 2021 was 4.3%. Concordia declined CUEFA offers in mediation and the faculty began their strike on January 4.

Concordia not only has the capacity to pay its faculty a fair wage, but, as a private institution, it is not subject to the provincial government’s secret bargaining mandates that limit what other PSEs can agree to. Essentially, this strike is entirely the making of Concordia’s Board and president. This means that Concordia can resolve this strike at any time by returning to the bargaining table (which they have so far refused to do).

Strike Impact

One way to think about a strike is as an effort by workers to attach costs to an employer’s behaviour. If the costs are high enough, the employer will behave differently and, presumably, a mutually acceptable collective agreement will be negotiated. The CUEFA strike has (so far) generated the following costs for Concordia:

• Operational: All classes are cancelled, including those taught by non-CUEFA employees (see below).

• Financial: Concordia has deferred tuition deadlines and is at risk of losing an entire semester of tuition.

• Reputational: Concordia has received negative media stories and social media coverage that contrast its decision to buy a literal mansion with its decision to grind faculty wages. This bad press jeopardizes Concordia’s reputation as a good employer and a reliable provider of education.

It is unclear what Concordia’s strategy is beyond trying to starve out to CUEFA. University administrators may be hoping that CUEFA will call off its strike before Concordia loses the semester and a large portion of its revenue. It may also be that Concordia does not have much of a strategy; it was reportedly taken aback that faculty were prepared to strike.

Impact on Sessionals

A largely unreported aspect of the strike is that Concordia’s decision to cancel classes has left its large complement of non-unionized sessional instructors in the lurch. These instructors, highly qualified and dedicated all, are not being allowed to teach and are not being paid even though they are not on strike.

The sessionals have few options and none of them are good. They may be able to sue for wrongful dismissal, but that is expensive, slow, and likely means they will never work at Concordia again. Alternately, they can sit tight and hope for a quick resolution. Either way, they’re facing deeply unfair financial hardships.

Settlement Prospects

Bargaining resumed after the first week of the strike. Concordia reportedly dropped its demand to fire faculty for no reason at all on the first day of renewed bargaining. Issues remaining in dispute are workloads for CUEFA members other than professors, intellectual property, and salaries.

CUEFA is reporting that its wage demands could be met with approximately $350,000 in additional funding (or, if you prefer, approximately 0.18 mansions). Concordia forcing a strike and risking its reputation over 3% of its annual surplus demonstrates astoundingly bad judgment.

One impediment to a settlement may be government pressure on Concordia to not settle for more than the government’s PSE mandate (which presently appears to mirror the AUPE government settlement). Ego may also be an issue: such a settlement would be a big step-down by Concordia bosses, including its president (and mansion enthusiast) Tim Loreman.

Implications for AUFA

The CUEFA strike has a couple of lessons for AUFA:

• Pressure works, but incrementally. CUEFA made workload gains only after it took a strike vote. CUEFA forced Concordia to drop its discipline language only after striking. Essentially, each time CUEFA has upped the pressure, the employer has moved.

• You can’t bluff. You have to be prepared to carry out your threats. If you won’t strike, you are stuck accepting whatever rollbacks the employer wants to impose. And the employer won’t take you seriously next time if you get caught bluffing.

• Effective strikes are possible, even in a pandemic. CUEFA has fully disrupted Concordia’s operations and choked off Concordia’s main source of revenue.

• Solidarity helps. Flying and digital pickets help boost strikers’ morale and amplify their message. This intensifies the pressure on the employer to bargain. CUEFA has seen strong support from other unions, faculty associations, and students.

• Pressure takes time to work. It took a week of financial and reputational pressure for Concordia to drop its disciplinary demands. Having access to the CAUT strike fund allows CUEFA members the time to let the pressure work.

• Employers often seek outcomes that they don’t objectively need. Concordia is flush with cash and doesn’t need wage freezes. So why did it trigger a strike? Common reasons include the employer wanting to knock workers down a peg, undermine growing worker power, appease someone powerful, and to protect bosses’ egos. Employers can also blunder into strikes by under-estimating worker resolve.

• Employers don’t care about students (or other workers). Concordia’s decision to force a strike is harming students and sessionals. These predictable spillover effects are an unfortunate reality of work stoppages. It isn’t up to workers to prevent these harms—only the employer can do that.

• Nonetheless, students and workers are supportive of strikes. Most have more in common with the strikers than they do with the bosses. They understand the need for fair wages and working conditions. And they understand that striking is how workers achieve those goals.

AUFA will again be joining CUEFA on the picket line on Thursday afternoon, from 1-3. If you’d like to come out, please contact me at barnetso@athabascau.ca .

You can also send CUE president and mansion enthusiast Tim Loreman and email using this CAUT mailer. So far, Loreman has received nearly 1200 emails.

Bob Barnetson, Chair

Job Action Committee

Guest post: Stop the PSE Cuts

This month, AUFA has joined a larger campaign against the cuts, layoffs, concessions and restructuring of our universities and colleges.  This campaign includes faculty from across Alberta’s diverse post-secondary institutions, as well as support staff and students: it is a coalition of organizations representing over 154,000 undergraduate and graduate students, over 11,000 faculty and instructors, and over 13,000 support staff in Alberta’s post-secondary education system. The campaign is focused around the slogan “Working conditions are learning conditions” in order to highlight that students, staff, faculty and the general public are all interconnected in the fight against the UCP government’s attempts to corporatize and diminish the world class system of universities and colleges that all Albertans value.

Maybe you have seen one of our social media or rural newspaper (including Athabasca Town and County) advertisements?  If not keep your eyes peeled, since we are running ads on transit systems, on billboards, in rural newspapers, on Facebook, and across different internet platforms.  While this is a good first step to get our message out to the general public, a single advertising campaign won’t beat back the concessions from our administrations or the drastic cuts from the UCP government.  That is going to take working together with each other, our sectoral allies and the students to provide a united front to these dramatic plans.

All across the province, local organizing committees are popping up, with active committees in Athabasca, Edmonton, Calgary, and Lethbridge. These committees are planning a series of virtual and, hopefully, in-person events to put pressure on decision makers to reverse the devastating cuts to our post-secondary education system.  If you want to get involved, please contact the Membership Engagement Committee, and we can put you in touch with the committee in your region.

We need the UCP government to stop the cuts and invest in post-secondary education.  For that to happen, we need all of us to organize together because as our slogan says: working conditions are learning conditions and we need all of Alberta to get this message.

We’re asking students, faculty, and staff to this survey here on the PSE cuts.

Brendan Bruce

Executive Director, Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations

Letter from AUFA President regarding post-secondary funding model

In response to the announcement of new performance-based funding for Alberta post-secondary institutions, AUFA President Jolene Armstrong has written the following open letter on behalf of AUFA.

Message from AUFA President Regarding the Alberta Budget

Dear AUFA members,

As you are all likely aware, last Thursday, the Alberta government released its 2019-2020 budget.

In a nutshell, Athabasca University will take 3.6% hit to base grant and loses infrastructure funding. All in all, about $3.4m loss in 2019/20. The glib explanation offered for how the budget was devised is that cuts are based on the capacity for an institution to absorb cuts.

Given that AU is running an approximately $14m surplus, the relatively modest cut that Athabasca received in the budget is likely a manageable cut. To date there has been no discussion offered regarding tuition increases beyond lifting the tuition cap.

For comparison, The U. of A. and U. of Calgary received 6.9% cuts, while Grant MacEwan received a 7.9% cut, with Athabasca and Lethbridge receiving 3.6% cuts. Mount Royal only received a 1.3% cut. Inexplicably, the four faith based institutions and Concordia University Edmonton did not suffer any cuts whatsoever.

This is not to say that we should not be concerned. Quite the opposite. The projected cuts to the post-secondary budget over the course of four years, factoring the cost of inflation will be much higher by the time the four year cycle is completed.

“The multi-year Business Plan goes on to suggest suggests that by 2022-23 the cut in net operating will be over 38% from last year’s actuals. Now, net operating results in the business plan aren’t quite the same thing as transfers to institutions in the estimates, but they’re close ($2.57B vs $2.27B). It’s hard to tell exactly what that means, but to me it sure raises the possibility that additional cuts of 20%-25% are baked into the plan for the next three years.”

Higher Ed Strategy

The 2019 provincial budget projects 764 fewer jobs at post-secondary institutions and government agencies by March 2020. The budget when read along side the four year business plan is indeed alarming.

I think that we should be concerned not only about the budget for the post-secondary, but also the entire provincial budget which demonstrates a lack of concern—or rather to be blunt—punitive disdain for the public sector. In addition to the cuts to K-12 education, AISH, health care, and seniors, the province transferred the administration of the pension plans for the Alberta Teacher Association, and Alberta Health Services employees to AIMCo -- without any consultation or warning whatsoever to the administrators of those plans. In the case of the ATA, whose plan is worth nearly 18 billion dollars, the plan had been administered by the Alberta Teachers' Retirement Fund Board (not unlike the UAPP, under which AUFA members’ pension are administered) since 1939.

Furthermore, the government has indicated that they will be mandating a 2-5% rollback on wages in the next rounds of public sector bargaining. We simply can not absorb any further freezes or rollbacks to our wages. This has serious implications for pensions for many of our members and day to day budget planning for the rest of us.

The most distressing part of the Post-secondary budget is two-fold. The massive cuts to the infrastructure funding to post-secondary institutions will make meeting the student and research demands extremely difficult. The lifting of the cap on tuition may mean that the cost of tuition will rise beyond the cost of inflation, a scenario that will mean that education in Alberta, unsupported by government investment, will become overly costly and will drive students elsewhere.

Also of concern is the suggestion that universities will be placed on a performance based funding model in 2020-2021. However, it is entirely unclear what this is and how this will be measured and funded. As we know from other jurisdictions, such as Ontario, who has since nearly abandoned this model, these types of metrics based funding are doomed to fail.

My take on the budget is that the provincial government does not see the value in investing in the public sector in general, and in our case, post-secondary education specifically. Nor are they keen to learn about why that would be good for the economy.

As for where that leaves AUFA? I believe that we are in for the fight of our lives—a fight to defend the principles of post-secondary education, our jobs, our research and our role in the social good and well-being of the communities in which post-secondary institutions across the province reside.

This is a fight we can not, and will not lose.

In solidarity,

Jolene