REPORT ON THE CAUT CONFERENCE ON BARGAINING FOR EQUITY

JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 2, 2003

Chilly Climate: Negotiating provisions to ensure the workplace is free of discrimination

Anver Saloojee made a presentation on discrimination as a cause of chilly climate in universities. His major premise was that numerical representation did not protect minority members against discrimination in areas such as promotion and working conditions. Members encounter problems specific to the fact that they belong to minority groups. They can be isolated and undervalued; or, because of their minority status, they can be overused and expected to deal with equity issues in which they are assumed to have the relevant expertise. They can also suffer from tokenism. He made 9 recommendations to ensure that discrimination does not operate in the workplace. These are

• Language against discrimination should be included in collective agreements that bind both university administrations and associations.
• Universities must conduct Employment System Reviews. The committee conducting such a review should be based on equal representation of members of the university administration, the faculty association, and the equity groups. The members of the committee should be trained in equity issues. The committee should address policies and practices that act as obstacles to recruitment and retention. It should also recommend that the process of implementation of measures be both accountable and time-bound. The composition of the committee, as well as its mandate and time-table, should be written into the collective agreement.
• In the review of application files for tenure and promotion, curriculum development and counselling should be regarded as criteria of assessment.
• Recognition should be made of the fact that there is “no one path to knowledge creation and dissemination.”
• In their reference to academic freedom, collective agreements should establish a link between anti-discrimination provisions and existing provincial human rights legislation.
• Equity seeking groups should have access to pedagogical support and should have professional development opportunities.
• Equity seeking groups should be protected from discrimination from colleagues and students
• Equity seeking groups should have access to complaint mechanisms that protect them from retaliation
• Appointment and tenure and promotion committees should have equity representation

Employment Equity Language in Collective Agreements

Christiane Tardif argued that collective agreements must include equity clauses. While gender is usually the focus of equity language, other groups, such as visible minorities, persons with disability, and aboriginal people must be included. The employer usually collects data concerning the status of equity seeking groups and shares this information with a joint employment committee. Christiane Tardif provided a document compiling existing language on equity in collective agreements from across the country. In the discussion period following this presentation, participants made three major points:

• The process of data collection is difficult as candidates applying for university positions are not required to identify themselves as members of minority groups.
• Equity policies should be produced by joint committees with equal representation of university administrations and associations.
• There should be cross-reference between equity policies and collective agreements so as to allow for the creation of a grievance process.

Small Group Discussion 1

Delegates were divided into groups to discuss the purpose of negotiating employment equity into their collective agreements. The discussion revolved around how to ensure better representation of designated minority groups on campus and how to secure human resource policies that are fair for all members.

A Review of Programs: Federal Contractors Program and Canadian Research Chairs

Kristie McComb explained that the Federal Contractors Program oversees the implementation of equity laws in federal workplaces and workplaces that have business links with the federal government and that have at least one hundred employees and receive governmental funding of at least $200,000.

McComb reviewed the steps that the Federal Contractors Program devised for employers to follow. These are

• Collection of workforce information
• Workforce analysis and salary analysis
• Employment system review to identify impediments to equity
• Setting goals
• Means of implementing these goals
• Adoption of measures
• Establishing policies, fostering mentoring, and organizing multicultural events
• Adoption of monitoring procedures
• Authorization to enter premises

A survey indicated that only 10% of employers as defined above applied the 11 steps. On average, employers used between 5 and 6 steps. Of the two groups the first had better results. McComb attributed the poor results to the fact that the Program is underfunded and understaffed. In addition, there is no enforcement mechanism requiring that employers hire people from minority groups.

In the context of universities, CAUT makes the following recommendations:

· The employment Equity Act should be used to enforce the Federal Contractors Program

· Gender-based analysis should be implemented

· A review tribunal must be created to avoid employers’ delaying tactics

· Collective bargaining remains a major strategy involving both university administrations and faculty associations

Kristie McComb briefly analyzed the Canada Research Chair Programme in terms of equity. The programme provides $9 million over a five-year period (2000-2005). Candidates for the programme are nominated by members of their own university and McComb pointed out that there was no equity provision regulating this appointment process. In 2001, 15% of the appointed professors were women, and in 2002, this number slightly increased to 18%. Women are under-represented at the Tier 1 level reserved for full professors. Women are over-represented in the humanities and social sciences.

Parenting: Overview of issues to be addressed in negotiations to offer support to new parents, both male and female (i.e. leaves, benefits, workload, tenure provisions).

This was undoubtedly the session with the longest title.

Katherine Bischoping of York University was scheduled to give a paper but was absent. Jody Nyasha Warner gave a paper in the form of a diary recounting the difficulties she met trying to balance the demands of home and workplace while she worked as a librarian at York University. Although her collective agreement had a provision allowing her to apply for a 15% workload reduction, she argued that she encountered resistance of a cultural and social type.

Mobilizing the membership around these issues

Tess Hooks, a sociology and women’s studies professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented on the challenges associations face when they attempt to rally the membership on specific issues. Her talk centered on personal experiences of serving on the union executive and negotiating team of the recently certified Western faculty association UWOFA. She described the theory of social movements in the literature and outlined three categories of people to note:

1) The support base, on which includes all those you represent, on-side or otherwise

2) The movement of people who are ‘with you’ at the time of the issue and share the same ideology

3) The movement of people who are there for you all the time, year after year

Two issues, which were brought to negotiations by UWOFA, constituted the focus of the presentation: child and family care and the issue surrounding part-time and contract employee appointments. There was much discussion, and many questions were raised by Dr. Hooks, including the following: what role should the Association take on these issues? How do you get the membership involved during a given situation? Should you set policies because they emanate from the membership, or do you create them in anticipation of need? Should the Association take “orders” from the membership, or should it take program outcomes and adapt them to respond to the specific needs of the membership? How does an association address the concerns of minorities, which may not apply to the majority of the membership?

Small Group Discussion 2

Using the UWOFA example, the same discussion groups were asked to develop strategies with regard to the theme of membership mobilization and equity issues during negotiations. Questions were raised concerning minority issues and ideas solicited to change attitudes on campus. Suggestions were made for better dissemination of information on these issues and for alerting the membership in various ways before bargaining.

Salary Equity

Rosemary Morgan made a presentation on pay equity. She began with the distinction between pay equity and employment equity. Employment equity concerns the need to provide job opportunities under the four designated groups: women, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, and aboriginal people. The aim is to avoid concentration of one group in a given occupational sector or job class. For instance, historically women have tended to be concentrated in areas such as clerical, nursing, and daycare occupations. Similarly, it has been argued that women tend to concentrate in part-time positions at universities.

Pay equity concerns the need to ensure that individuals receive equal pay for jobs of equal value. In her paper, Morgan gave the following example: “if the predominantly female job (or job class) of University Librarian has the same level of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions as that of a male job class such as University Director of Human Resources, then they could be compared. If the pay for the female predominant job class (librarian) is less than that for the male predominant job class (director), each job is not equal, and a remedy should be applied (wage adjustment) for the female job class.” In this passage, Morgan enumerates the four criteria used to establish a level of equivalence between job classes: skill (credentials, teaching skills); effort (mental and physical); responsibility (not just financial, but also in terms of supervision, mentoring, etc); working conditions (working in labs, outdoors).

Morgan argues that pay equity has not yet been achieved in the academic world. She provided a table analyzing the mean salary of full professors by sex and major discipline from 1990-91 to 1999-2000 which indicates that a salary gap persists between the two genders. Morgan recommends that faculty associations request of their university administration to conduct an employment system review to identify areas of inequity, their causes, and the means of redressing these inequities. Morgan referred to a whole context of legislation that already exists and which addresses this issue: federal and provincial human rights legislation; employment standards legislation; labour legislation; international labour organization conventions. Her point, however, is that faculty associations need to create language in their collective agreements in order to redress pay inequity.

The next speaker was Lois Haignere, of Haignere Inc., a well known advocate of salary equity and author of Paychecks: A Guide to Conducting Salary-Equity Studies for Higher Education Faculty (2002). She spoke to the conference delegates about equal pay for equal work and summarized pay equity research to date. She gave an overview of the historical perpetuation of salary bias and ongoing prejudice that is embedded in institutional processes.

Salary bias is a costly reality. Dr. Haignere’s chief example of inequity provided concrete information with a telling scenario of the actual dollar cost to employees in such a predicament. If two employees begin their careers with a $1,000 dollar difference in salary, this amounts to a hefty $210,684 loss for the lower paid employee over a forty year teaching career. This takes an even greater toll when one considers the amount of money the employee with the initial lower pay receives throughout his/her retirement. She illustrated many intricate statistical approaches, models and methods used to discover inequities and where they come from, including the variables to use in a study, how to test for ‘tainted’ variables, methods of multiple regression, and an overview of what methods to avoid in the process. Topics were outlined to find solutions for at-risk institutional groups, taking both a campus-wide approach as well as an individual approach. The complicated number examples were to the chagrin of many non-statistical minded participants! It became apparent that faculty associations would be wise to recruit statistical expertise from the membership to help play an important role and resource for negotiating such issues.

Detailed documentation concerning pay equity and employment systems reviews can be obtained from Jane Coldwell. For those interested in more information on Dr. Haignere’s talk, her publication is now available in the Vaughan Library collection.

Anne Quéma and Tanja Harrison

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