THE
AUFA PRESIDENT COMMUNICATES
February 1, 2004
Open Letter to the Board of Governors of Acadia University from the Executive of the Acadia University Faculty Association (AUFA)
Dear Board Members,
We write to invite you to become more informed about the current state of affairs at Acadia University. We are committed to achieving a negotiated settlement between Acadia's Board of Governors and our Faculty Association. We want to negotiate, but have been forced to use the prospect of a strike to convince your representatives to negotiate with us in good faith.
The AUFA executive is in complete support of our negotiating team which recommended rejection of the Board's so-called "Best offer". Our team has informed us that they are prepared to return to the bargaining table once the conciliation officer has filed his report.
We know you share our love of Acadia and our desire to enhance rather than hurt our reputation. The process to date has led us to wonder if your representatives at the negotiating table realize the damage to our reputation-yours, ours, Acadia's, and the students'-that their refusal to negotiate openly and honestly has and will produce.
Last spring and early summer, negotiating teams representing Acadia's Board of Governors and the Acadia University Faculty Association reached a tentative agreement that was subsequently rejected, for very many reasons, by 90% of those AUFA members who participated in the ratification vote. After this vote in early September new members replaced the former members of AUFA's negotiating team, and they attended the Negotiating Table anxious to communicate the reasons why faculty so strongly rejected the proposed agreement. Your representatives at the Negotiating Table promptly restricted bargaining to only three articles, despite the fact that the faculty's reasons for rejecting the agreement were many and varied.
At the October meeting of the Board of Governors, you were told negotiations were proceeding as they should and that your representatives looked forward to Conciliation as a part of the process. Two days later your representatives filed a complaint at the Labour Relations Board including the expression of a desire that Conciliation be prevented from occurring until after a hearing at the Labour Relations Board. The Minister of Labour saw fit to appoint the Conciliator and insist that the process go forward, despite the complaint filed with the LRB.
Prior to conciliation, and based on the state of negotiations, faculty voted 92% to authorize a strike in the hope that this would prompt your representatives to negotiate in a more serious fashion. Sadly, six days of Conciliation failed to produce any meaningful movement toward a settlement.
Conciliation ended by the Provincial Conciliator insisting that the Board of Governor's "Final Offer" (in Conciliation) be presented to the AUFA membership for acceptance or rejection. On January 28, AUFA voted 95% to reject this most recent offer. It was rejected for as many and as varied reasons as was the offer rejected in September.
It is worth noting that each of these votes represents a higher percentage of the membership than the previous vote. AUFA members are becoming increasingly angry with the way your representatives are conducting negotiations, with the public statements issuing from the President's office, with the exorbitant legal expenditures for LRB hearings and to pay a lawyer to attend Conciliation at a time when the University is reporting financial hardship.
The membership is also increasingly angry that the administration is characterizing this labour dispute as one concerned solely with money. As noted above, our concerns are many and varied. In some instances, we simply want to preserve language and practices from previous Collective Agreements. In other cases, we are attempting to ensure that Acadia University can once again become competitive in the national academic marketplace. According to all reliable sources, the demand for qualified academic candidates will increase greatly over the next decade. To keep Acadia strong by recruiting first rate new faculty, and by retaining the first rate faculty currently here, it will indeed be necessary to ensure that the salary and benefits offered in an acceptable proposal moves us halfway toward the national average for academics at similar ranks. But to insist that this dispute is only about money is to miss the point entirely of how we will eventually reach an agreement.
In conclusion, we encourage you to investigate AUFA's positions on these matters by consulting our website at http://www.caut.ca/aufa , and to communicate your feelings to the Executive of the Board.
Sincerely,
Janice Best, AUFA President
on behalf of the Members of the Acadia University Faculty Association Executive