February, 2005
Salary Negotiations, Intellectual Property, Web-Based Evaluations, Mandatory Retirement, Professional Pension Plan Advisory Committee
- Salary Negotiations
- Intellectual Property
- Web-Based Evaluations
- Mandatory Retirement
- Professional Pension Plan Advisory Committee
There are several issues of interest to faculty and librarians that are being discussed in various forums. We thought that this would be a good time to keep our members updated on the status of these deliberations. Changes to policies and structures on intellectual property, pensions, student evaluations and long term salary and benefits, for example, will affect you for a long time. So, your input is welcome.
Ed Carter, Vice-President
Salary Negotiations
Salary negotiations are under way. The chief negotiator is Ian McMillan imcmilla@uoguelph.ca, who will be writing to you through his newsletter “The Negotiator”. Revisions to the Special Plan and the Long Term Salary and Benefits document are made outside of negotiations through a different process. These documents come under the jurisdiction of the Joint Consultative Committee, with equal representation from the administration and the faculty association. There are no externally imposed guidelines and mediation/arbitration does not occur on these types of revisions. For this reason it is essential that both sides work collegially or very little is accomplished. On the other hand the negotiating committee has a very specific mandate, with time deadlines. In the end, if the two sides cannot agree, then we go to mediation. If that fails, the mediator writes a report to the Board of Governors. The Board can still reject the report and impose its own settlement. This settlement can only be for one year.
Negotiations must be on a very limited and well defined set of issues. Basically this process determines the across the board scale increases to the base plus changes to the benefits.
Intellectual Property
There are a number of issues before the Joint Faculty Policy Committee (JFPC). The issue of intellectual property rights is one of them. Ownership of material developed for distance education courses by faculty is not stated in any of the current faculty policies. Similarly the ownership of research developed by a graduate student under the supervision of the advisor is also not clearly stated. Policies on these and related issues need to be developed. However, as it is a complicated area, involving other interest groups on campus, progress has been slow. Your views on the subject would be welcome. Please feel free to contact either the Association officeor Jan MacInnes.
Web-Based Evaluations
Faculty in some courses are being evaluated on the web. The validity of such evaluations is being discussed by JFPC. Currently your evaluation process is your choice i.e. on the web or distributed in lectures. Web based evaluation has its advantages and disadvantages; however, what is certain is that data acquired from different methods of evaluation are not comparable. How T&P committees address this issue is definitely not clear to us.
Mandatory Retirement
The Provost has agreed to meet with members of the faculty association on the problems that will arise if the government eliminates mandatory retirement. Robin Davidson-Arnott chairs a subcommittee for the faculty association on MR. There are a number of implications to eliminating retirement at age 65, and the actual details of the legislation are necessary to make the right changes to policies, benefits, pensions etc. As the legislature begins sitting, we hope to hear the status of this issue.
Professional Pension Plan Advisory Committee
The professional pension plan advisory group was created to provide input to the board of governors on the professional pension plan. This committee now operates separately from advisory groups for the other two pension plans. As different pension groups have different contribution rates and different ideas as to what changes are important, this new pension advisory structure should provide greater flexibility. If you would like to offer any input please feel free to contact the Association Office.