AUFA PRESENTATIONS
In anticipation of the next round of collective bargaining, AUFA organized a series of presentations during the winter term on topics of particular interest. In January, our subject was part-time faculty; in February, we discussed family-friendly policies; and in March, we heard about alternative benefit plans.
Part-Time Faculty
submitted by Erin Patterson
Geoff Martin and Vicky Smallman provided an excellent national “snapshot” of working conditions, remuneration and rights of part-time faculty. Dr. Martin is the Professional Officer for the Mount Allison University Faculty Association and a part-time Assistant Professor of Political Science and Canadian Studies. He is also a member of CAUT's Contract Academic Staff Committee. Ms. Smallman is an Organizing and Collective Bargaining Officer with CAUT, where she works primarily on contract academic staff issues.
After decades of organizing, most part-time faculty in Canada are now unionized and are represented either by CUPE or by their local faculty associations. At Acadia, part-time faculty were unionized as a separate bargaining unit in 2001 and integrated into the full-time bargaining unit in 2003. They have now had three collective agreements: their first collective agreement as a distinct bargaining unit, and then the 11th and 12th collective agreements of the merged bargaining unit. While we have made many improvements for part-time faculty over the course of those three contracts, there is still a great deal to be done.
Common achievements in collective bargaining for part-time faculty in Canada include academic freedom (although this is compromised by the precariousness of their positions), transparency in appointment procedures and in procedures for renewal and seniority, rights to renewal, improved remuneration (including stipends for large classes and supervision of honours students), access to grievance and arbitration procedures, intellectual property rights, and basic working conditions such as office space and year-round library and e-mail privileges.
The list of rights still to be won is far longer; however, progress is being made on many fronts. Among these are access to benefits, access to research and professional development funds, and recognition for service.
Ms. Smallman noted that benefits are difficult to negotiate not only because administrations do not want to extend them to part-time faculty, but also because of divided interests within the part-time professoriate itself. She reported that there are vocal groups within many locals that resist the imposition of a traditional benefits plan because they would prefer a flexible health spending account instead. Flexible benefit plans are often seductive at first glance, but their initial appeal can be deceptive: CUPE, for instance, warns that over time they result in fewer benefits, an erosion of benefit levels, and increased cost and risk to employees.[1] Ms. Smallman expressed a hope that the establishment of a CAUT national benefit trust might help resolve this issue within locals. Where benefit plans have not been negotiated, many universities have secured payment in lieu of benefits, which ranges from 1-8% of the per-course stipend. Only 3 of the 24 institutions on which she provided data from CAUT do not have at least some kind of benefit coverage for at least some part-time faculty (Acadia, Brescia, and Winnipeg).
It is also difficult to negotiate access to research and professional development funds, although many associations have succeeded in doing so. Part-time faculty engage in scholarly activity to keep current in their fields, to develop curricula and pedagogical methods, and to pursue traditional research, yet employers regularly reject the notion that scholarly activity is part of the job. Support for the scholarly activity of part-time faculty yields benefits to students, departments, the university and the academic community at large as well as to the individual faculty member, and at very little cost to the employer. The refusal to support research strikes me as absurdly incompatible with the vision, values and mission of a university. At universities where part-time faculty research is supported, typical models include access to internal funds and the establishment of a certain number of research contracts, under which part-time faculty receive a course stipend to work on research projects.
Recognition and/or compensation for service is another area in which some gains are being made. Ms. Smallman reported that in Québec, for example, it is very common to have a pooled fund from which stipends for service are drawn. The employer is not the only party who can be called on to recognize part-time faculty contributions: according to Ms. Smallman, it is becoming common for faculty associations to provide a stipend for their part-time representative on the executive committee or to negotiate credit towards seniority for this service. The former is something that AUFA has the ability to implement immediately without negotiation, and I am pleased to report that the Executive voted unanimously to provide a stipend to the part-time representative that can be used for purposes of research, professional development, and scholarly activity.
The “final frontiers” where there is most yet to be done are career path progressions and pro rata models. There are a variety of ways by which part-time faculty could move from per-course appointments to something more permanent, such as automatic consideration for subsequent per-course appointments, conversion to CLT status, and rolling-term contracts akin to continuing appointments. The pro rata model is based on the principle that “an academic is an academic is an academic” regardless of the length of his or her contract, and that the part-time faculty job should be a pro-rated portion of the full-time faculty job in terms of responsibilities and compensation. A significant first step in implementing this model is tying the part-time salary to the full-time grid, which we successfully negotiated for the first time in the current contract.
Family-Friendly Policies in
the Academic Workplace
submitted by Erin Patterson
Susan Prentice, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba, took a refreshingly inclusive view of the concept “family-friendly” instead of limiting its application to parents with young children. She described a web of “intimate relations of dependance and care” that changes over a lifetime and persists long after the children (if any) are grown and out on their own. Also refreshing was her approach to the implementation of family-friendly policies: instead of seeing them as cost items that need to be extracted from a reluctant employer, she suggested that family-friendly policies can and should be opportunities for building alliances among university groups, building academic programs, and bolstering the success of the institution as a whole.
While it is not the only family-friendly issue, child care is certainly a major one for us and I asked Susan to speak to it particularly. She acknowledged the significant challenge of funding child care, citing capital costs of $25,000 per new child care space (let alone maintenance!), but argued that universities without child care facilities are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining students, faculty and staff. University College of the North, for example, has realized this and is building not one but two 2-million-dollar daycare centres. She also argued that faculty associations, employers, communities and government should regard investment in child care as investment in the community in general and not just targeted assistance for people with small children. Especially in a rural environment, child care can contribute substantially to the economic infrastructure because of a significant local ripple effect: for every $1 invested in childcare, $1.58 is generated in the community. Two new child care jobs generate one new other job in the community. She also pointed out that child care can be regarded as a growth opportunity, instead of a burden, for the university. Child care facilities could be built as a part of programs in education and psychology. We could also investigate reciprocal agreements with Kingstec, which has a two-year Early Childhood Education program. (Several delegates from that program were in fact in attendance at Susan's presentation.) Finally, she strongly encouraged AUFA to work with other groups (staff, student and community) in creating and maintaining child care spaces for everyone. I believe this was the spirit of our hard-won Article 57, but regrettably the letter limits us to creating spaces for the children of faculty members only, and this has hindered the efforts of our child care committee.
Susan suggested that employers might do well to wield their political clout strategically. Rather than haggling with individual faculty associations at the bargaining table over child care and other family-friendly policies, administrations could act collectively and join forces with each other and with their faculty, staff and student associations to lobby the provincial government. Now there's an idea.
New Options in Benefit Plans
submitted by Jamie Whidden
Neil Tudiver and Bob Konopasky recently spoke at several venues on new initiatives in benefit plans. I initially heard Bob Konopasky speak at an ANSUT council meeting when he outlined the Union Trust Benefit Plan at St Mary’s. In broad strokes, Konopasky said that the formation of a union trust resulted in: 1) faculty control over what is in the plan, 2) transparency, and 3) reduced costs and better benefits, facilitated by smarter spending (better use of pre-tax dollars) or more effective negotiating.
It took SMUFU five years to set up a union trust. Konopasky explained the rationale for setting up the trust by listing some of the problems of the benefit plan previously administered by the university administration, notably that the faculty had no control over the decisions of the Benefits Plan Committee. In addition, contributions were increasing while there were caps on benefits and spending accounts remained low. When the faculty voted to “go its own way” a professional firm was hired to help the union exit from the existing plan, draft a Trust document, and identify a new carrier (Great West Life). A Board of Trustees was appointed and made responsible to the faculty union, not the university. The trust set as its goal a benefit structure not less than that in the previous plan, and possibly improved, while maintaining financial solvency.
In the process surpluses of approximately $750,000 were revealed in the old plan and negotiations were undertaken to transfer the union shares to the new plan. Also, the union was able to negotiate an increase in university contributions to the plan from 1.8 to 2.4% of salary mass (Konopasky noted that universities contribute on average 2-4% of salary mass, although Laurentian contributes 8%). The trust also secured increases in faculty contributions, resulting in an increase in the caps and health spending accounts (from $400 to $600). The new plan resulted in real improvements for low income faculty with families, but the least gains were made by those with high incomes. Contract negotiations have focused on seeking increases to university benefit contributions, not salary increases – salary is taxed, benefits are not.
At a talk sponsored by AUFA, Konopasky appeared with Neil Tudiver of CAUT. While the union trust at St Mary’s was briefly recapped at this meeting, Tudiver spoke of the national trust set up by CAUT. Its goals are similar to those of the union trust. Observing that faculty associations have to find an optimal balance between level of benefits and cost of benefits, Tudiver noted that a nationwide trust had the additional advantage of reducing costs through economies of scale. The national trust has obvious attractions for carriers. Also, Tudiver echoed Konopasky’s claim that a faculty-held trust increased control and vitiated the problem of blind faith in the employers’ capabilities.
CAUT held talks with interested universities in November 2008, appointed a board of five trustees, setup a committee with members from each association in the trust acting as advisors to the trust, and established a set of trust laws that allowed member employees’ funds to flow through the trust. The trust is open to unionized and non-unionized associations. To enter the trust, associations must know the current benefit costs (normally a percentage of salary mass). CAUT has employed consultants to work with employee associations to set up individual benefit plans through the national trust. The consultants then go to insurers for offers on benefits and costs. The goal is to achieve either better benefits at the same costs or lower costs with the same benefits. The decision is left to the individual employee association.
The advantages of the national trust are: 1) economies of scale result in reduced administrative costs; 2) insurers provide lower costs because of the size of the trust; 3) control over the benefit plan and costs belong to the employee associations; 4) and with control comes increased transparency.
The example of SMUFU indicated that faculty associations can go their own way, withdrawing from plans that include staff and administrators, and employing consultants that answer to faculty, rather than administration, thus enabling faculty to arrive at a consensus on a preferred benefits/costs package. Inclusion of faculty, staff, and administrators in the decision-making process results, according to Bob Konopasky, in agreement only on the lowest common denominator. Ultimately, at St Mary’s questions on whether faculty receive optimal benefits in relation to dues paid to the university resulted in disengagement from the other employee associations. Neil Tudiver observed also that coming to agreement on overall costs/benefits package can be divisive. Nevertheless, some associations might want to negotiate benefits inclusive of staff, which would almost certainly improve benefits received by staff. It is also significant that in overall compensation – salary, pension, benefits – contractual negotiations over benefits improved compensation for faculty at St Mary’s without even considering the thorny issue of salary compensation and grids.