Bargaining Bulletin #6

Negotiating teams for GMUFA and the Board of Governors have now completed an initial round of informal mediation. This has been an expensive, grueling, and frustrating process, often exacerbated by the Board team’s reluctance to fully explain their positions or to suggest workable solutions to their concerns. 

In a show of good faith, and in order to expedite negotiations, the GMUFA signed off on several articles in the week prior to mediation. These include Article 11, which now gives members modest control over their use of student feedback reports on annual report reflections and in tenure and promotion dossiers, and Article 14 on performance evaluations. The Board of Governors has remained adamant that MacEwan faculty must be evaluated on a yearly basis, even as a biennial system of reporting and evaluation is becoming standard across other Alberta PSEs. GMUFA fought hard, however, to limit the length of annual reports and it crafted a Letter of Understanding to streamline the process and to strike a committee to develop a more sustainable and user-friendly process and interface than the current eCV.  

Entering mediation, GMUFA members’ major interests remained workload and salary. At least since course releases were introduced to the Collective Agreement in 2022, senior administration has discussed a “path to 5 courses” for TRS faculty. The Board of Governors, however, has been reticent to make the investments necessary to build that path. In Friday afternoon’s GlobalMail, the Provost indicated that MacEwan would commit “$1 million to…workload adjustments for as many as one-third of eligible members.” While the GMUFA appreciates the sentiment expressed, this statement was not entirely accurate. Using the Board’s own costing metrics (which round up the costs of a sessional replacement to $10000), course releases for one third of MacEwan’s 390 teaching faculty with rank would cost $1.3 million. More seriously, the Board’s language exchanged in mediation framed the $1 million investment as a ceiling, not a floor, with no guarantee that any of the money would actually be spent. Given the scarcity of funding for course releases over the last 3 years, this presents a serious issue of trust. Through hard bargaining, and the guidance of a patient and expert mediator, however, both parties have come closer together on language that would indeed establish 100 course releases annually as a norm that members can reasonably expect, pending financial exigencies and contingent on agreement for the full workload article. This “initial investment,” however, will not occur until 2026-27, in the third year of a four-year agreement.  

Both sides have made progress in other areas, like in Article 13, which will reduce teaching workload for Chairs to 33% of typical teaching or professional practice assignments, but which does not, unfortunately, include GMUFA’s proposal for a $250 addition to the Chair Stipend or improved release provisions. In other areas, however, the GMUFA regrets to inform its members that there remain significant roadblocks that must be overcome before a deal can be recommended for ratification. Most seriously, the Board’s team has repeatedly sought to dismantle longstanding principles that form the foundation of the university’s functioning as a self-governing community of scholars. For example, the Board’s team introduced last-minute language allowing Deans to unilaterally—and without justification—change a TRS6 member’s workload to TS8, or vice versa. This proposal poses a major barrier to any workable agreement. Trading core workload protections for a few course releases is a nonstarter that serves neither members nor the administration. The Board’s team has also attempted to entirely remove, or else severely undermine, the Workload Review Panel from Article 12. Having an avenue to dispute workload, and ensure decisions aren’t the result of bias or implicit agendas, is commonplace at universities across the country and must here too remain, especially given the grand aspirations of Strategic Vision 2030 and “smashing the calendar.” And while the GlobalMail communication on Friday afternoon indicated an interest in maintaining “peer-driven processes around tenure and promotion,” MacEwan is an outlier across the sector for not having a peer-driven process of appeal for members denied tenure or promotion. GMUFA shares the commitment to a peer-driven process for tenure and promotion. During mediation, GMUFA’s team tabled a wide variety of suggestions, adapted from other institutions, to strengthen the peer-driven process and reduce the likelihood of disputes about the outcomes it produces, but the Board’s team has consistently rejected them without proposing its own suggestions or solutions.  

Finally, on the matter of salaries, monetary settlements at Alberta PSEs are largely governed by the Provincial government. This is a challenging situation that will require faculty and other public sector unions across the province to unite in future legal challenges. If nothing else, this round of bargaining has strengthened the GMUFA’s resolve to take stronger stances in future rounds and has empowered it to coordinate with other unions across the province. As of now, it remains the GMUFA’s understanding that the Provincial Bargaining and Compensation Office has directed MacEwan to offer compensation in line with recent settlements across the province. We know these to include 12% COLA over 4 years, as seen at SAIT and very recently, the non-academic staff union at the U of A. The Board’s team appears to have accepted this direction, though monetary issues cannot be finalized until the two sides reach agreement on language. 

Where does this leave us? Formal mediation and job action of course remain possible steps down the road, but the two sides have agreed to continue talking in an effort to bridge the divide, particularly on matters of process related to determining workload, on issues of peer-driven academic decision-making, and on the priorities of a possible monetary settlement.