An Update on Academic Bargaining

This month, the College Employer Council (CEC), representing the Colleges, and OPSEU SEFPO CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team, who represent unionized academic employees, met over nine days to negotiate a renewal of the collective agreement.

Both the CEC and CAAT-A Academic Bargaining teams tabled proposals and engaged in respectful dialogue. To better understand the membership's demands, CEC posed questions to comprehend the perspectives, challenges, logistics, and practicality of the demands presented. The CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team provided some rationale that will help the CEC determine how the CAAT-A's demands could impact the system and affect students.

Union Demands

To date, the CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team has tabled seven “non-monetary” proposal packages, which include more than 200 changes to the current collective agreement.  A number of the currently tabled demands are, in fact, monetary in nature and many have significant cost implications. (available for viewing here).

The CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team took great care and time to assemble and present their members’ demands. The CEC will use the next month to thoroughly review the CAAT-A demands and responses to the CEC questions.

CEC Proposal

Earlier this year, the CEC consulted with College management across the 24 Ontario Public Colleges to determine areas for change and/ or improvement in the current collective agreement. During this most recent bargaining session, the CEC provided the CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team with a series of non-monetary proposals that offer practical improvements to language and provisions in the collective agreement.

Proposals were created to reflect that Colleges provide programs 12 months of the year. These proposals would facilitate the year-round teaching needs of students, industry, and the communities we serve. Management has not asked for any concessions from academic employees. The CEC is looking to modernize the collective agreement by removing spent letters of understanding, old language, and/ or practices, to keep pace with College communities across the province.

No proposals or counter-proposals were presented on workload as the data sets gathered by the Kaplan awarded Workload Taskforce are still being analyzed and the report has not yet been released.

Next Steps

In August, the CEC will be researching initial financial implications based on the CAAT-A Academic Bargaining team’s demands, along with reviewing the confidential workload taskforce report data to determine which proposals the Colleges can responsibly engage in during September negotiations.

We look forward to continuing the dialogue in September.

All proposals and demands are published on the CEC website. Academic employees, management, students, and community members are encouraged to read both the CEC and Union proposals and get informed.