WUFA's Negotiating Team reached a tentative agreement with the University Administration @11PM on Thursday, October 2nd. In accordance with the WUFA Constitution, the Executive is meeting @10AM on Friday Oct. 3rd, to be followed by Council @3PM to consider the terms of the proposed agreement. There will be a ratification meeting on Saturday @noon for all members of the bargaining unit at a location to be announced. The terms of the proposed agreement will be announced at that time. A ratification vote will follow. All members are encouraged to attend. There is no provision for advance polls or absentee ballots.

 

NEGOTIATIONS UPDATE, 2008

James Turk (CAUT) Letter to Windsor Star

Stephen Pender's Response to Windsor Star Editorial (Sept. 26 2008)

Robert Shurko's Response to the Windsor Star (Sept 26 2008)

David Toews' Email to Alan Wildeman

Carol Davison's Email to Alan Wildeman

WUFA's Response to Alan Wildeman

James Winter's Response to Alan Wildeman

NSERC/SSHRCC Update

From: Cavallin,Michel [mailto:MICHEL.CAVALLIN@NSERC.CA]
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 8:18 AM
To: James Turk
Subject: Labour dispute at University of Windsor

Dear Jim,

Recognizing the impact the strike at the University of Windsor can have on the students and researchers, NSERC and SSHRC are willing to accept applications from professors without official university signatures or endorsement if submitted by the deadline, with the understanding that we will withdraw any application not signed or e-submitted within 5 business days following resolution of the strike.

For students applying for Scholarships and Fellowships support, NSERC and SSHRC will not accept direct applications from students who do not meet the criteria for direct submission and require the normal review and selection process to be undertaken by the University of Windsor. Complete applications will also be required to ensure an equitable review. However, NSERC and SSHRC will inform the University of Windsor as to the possibility of the extension of deadlines for the university to submit applications to NSERC and SSHRC for S&F programs, if necessary.

Please note that we will be sharing this same note with management at the University of Windsor. If you have any questions or require further information do not hesitate to call on me.

Sincerely,

Michel Cavallin
Vice President, Common Administrative Services, CAS /
Vice président, Services administratifs communs, SAC
NSERC & SSHRC / CRSNG et le CRSH
Tel (613) 995-3914
Facs/Télé (613) 991-0969
Email/courriel:
michel.cavallin@nserc.ca / michel.cavallin@crsng.ca
michel.cavallin@sshrc.ca / michel.cavallin@crsh.ca

Strike Pay for WUFA Bargaining Unit

WUFA members will be able to pick up the strike pay cheques on Thursday October 2nd at the University Community Church. The address is 2320 Wyandotte Street West [in the front door, up the flight of stairs, turn to your right]. You can pick up your cheque between 9:45 am to 5 pm. Please bring proper identification.

For those who could not pick up your cheque last week you will be able to pick it up at Kerr House from 9:45-5pm on Monday or Tuesday. Also if you have not picked up your first cheque yet, you could pick them both up on Thursday Oct. 2 at the church if that is more convenient.

If you are willing to donate to a special fund to assist faculty in financial need, please contact a member of the Finance Subcommittee
(Stephen Pender, Anne Forrest, Wally Kedzierski, David Guetter, Irene Carter)

Support those who support us!

At WUFA's Executive meeting on Sept. 22, the executive unanimously passed a motion enjoining members to give back to those who have given:  executive unanimously endorsed a motion that members who are able donate at least 10$ of weekly strike pay to an emergency fund, administered by UWSA and possibly GSS, dedicated to student hardship.
On 21 September 2008 our negotiating team communicated to the mediator its willingness to counter the administration's last offer and to meet on 22 September, 2008.  As of late on the 21st Sepetember the mediator was not able to give our chief negotiator a clear response of willingness from the administration negotiating to meet at the table.

STRIKE ACTION IN EFFECT SINCE WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 17, 2008

ANY QUESTIONS REGARDING THE STRIKE PLEASE CALL 519-253-3000 EXT: 4259 

Leave a message, someone will get back to you soon. Make sure you leave a contact number; a cell phone number would be the quickest method to reach you.
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Timeline:
June 3 - Contract talks began with proposal packages being exchanged.
July 8 - Contract talks broke off and a conciliator was requested by Administration.
July 28 - Aug 1 conciliation was held and no progress made. A no board report was requested by WUFA
Sept 4 - WUFA conducted a Strike vote over a 4 day period, result in an overwhelming 96% YES vote
Sept 8 - 11 - Negotiating Team returned to the table with a provincial mediator present
Sept 11 - WUFA Council endorsed a motion from the Negotiating Committee and the Executive to set a strike date.
Sept 17: The first strike date was Wednesday September 17, 2008 at 12:01am.
Sept 17 and forward: Members are posted to various strike duties. Call number above for further information. 

The proposals from Administration can be viewed at Kerr House during regular office hours - please allow time to read them as they cannot be taken out of the office. Members are welcome to send their comments and observations to wufa@uwindsor.ca after they have viewed the proposals.

The 2008 WUFA Negotiating Team members are: Emily Carasco (Law), Mike Charette (Economics), Phil Dutton (Chem & Biochem), Peter Lukasewych (Leddy Library), Jeff Noonan (Philosophy), Len Rotman (Law) and Julie Sando (Visual Arts).

James Turk to the Star

Everyone in Windsor has a vested interest in the faculty winning their current strike, contrary to the view expressed in your editorial (U of W strike; 14-per-cent in perspective – Sept 26).
Plant closures and the deteriorating American economy have devastated Windsor, but one of its bright hopes is the University. It brings thousands of jobs to the community and offers opportunities for educational advancement that can help restore the local economy and the lives of so many families affected by plant closures.
But, the University of Windsor operates in a highly competitive environment in which it wants to attract and retain the best faculty, librarians and other staff. This is essential to ensure that Windsor students get a first-rate education and that research funding continues to flow to the university so it can remain a centre for new knowledge and can create more jobs.
Contrary to the University’s misleading full-page ad earlier in the week, academic salaries at Windsor will be below the provincial average were the University’s offer to be accepted. Pay for part-time faculty would be the lowest in the province, and the salary structure for full-time faculty would be the most unattractive in Ontario.
This would be a recipe for the demise of Windsor’s first class university. By trying to pit victims of plant closures against striking academic staff, your editorial does a disservice to everyone and harms the community you claim to be defending.

Pender to the Star

To the editors,

Your editorial suggests that the need for competitive salaries at the University of Windsor is "outdated and irrelevant," that "the lower cost of living" in this area somehow justifies second-rate faculty, and that faculty are immune to the economic suffering of working people in this region. Nothing could be further from the truth. The university has a responsibility to this region, to the communities in which faculty and librarians live, but let me be clear: the surest and quickest way to a third-tier university is to tie faculty compensation to a locally depressed economy. That would be catastrophic. The university is funded and competitive on a provincial level, not a local one. It is precisely because this community deserves an excellent, research-intensive, comprehensive university that WUFA was forced to take job action against an administration that is clawing back our deferred salaries [in the form of cuts to PTR], that refuses to recognize that sessional instructors [about 45% of those teaching here] are the lowest paid in the province, and that argues that the university's deficit --- a result of serious mismanagement and a growing, bloated administration --- should be borne by those who teach and research. Who will stay or come to teach here if the administration has its way? We do not "live in ivory towers." We are attempting to preserve and sustain, develop and refine an already great university into something much, much better.

Schurko to the Star

Editor, The Windsor Star

Dear Sir:

A few days ago, the University of Windsor administration went public with their bargaining with the Windsor University Faculty Association (WUFA), taking out an expensive full page ad which was misleading and inaccurate.

This same administration was invited by the University of Windsor Students' Alliance to a public students' forum (Sept. 25), with conditions such as no media, no WUFA presence and questioning only from the UWSA executive.

The UWSA met these demands, reminiscent of a George W. Bush press conference; however, President Wildeman bailed out of this meeting hours before it happened, claiming that he had more important things to do.  No one from the administration showed up for this meeting, despite the provincially appointed mediator having left town earlier in the day.

This same administration has racked up a significant deficit for the University through its own mismanagement, and is attempting to tax the professors, librarians, sessional instructors, and ultimately, the students, for their own ineptitude.

WUFA has practiced bargaining in good faith behind closed doors.  Professors showed up at this meeting to address students' concerns.  Faculty are donating and collecting money to help students in need.

We want to get back in the class, back in our labs, back to our research and back with our students.  It is clear who is being honest in this process, and who really cares about the students and their education.

If students, parents and the public are looking for somewhere to direct their questions, concerns and outrage, I would strongly encourage them to email the University president and vice-president, and demand answers.

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Towes to Alan Wildeman

Dear President Wildeman,

I respect your office and I accept that administrators have unique challenges to face. However, I have to tell you I'm profoundly disturbed by your act of sending this email to me. If you have something to say about WUFA's bargaining position, I think it is your duty to get back to the table and negotiate.

I am shocked that you, whether intentionally or not, have delayed this process with your email and media campaign. Most people in the Windsor region including students are educated about collective bargaining enough to know that this kind of 'direct plea' is a sham and undermines the bargaining process. Everyone I've talked to in the community sees right through it. My landlord had to take a package from GM. Plenty of people in my neighborhood are underemployed. Business people downtown I've talked to. When I talk to people in the Windsor community and I tell them that I'm making less than the average Ontario elementary school teacher do you know what their reaction is? They are not shocked or surprised. They nod their heads in grave confirmation. They know, and they applaud me for standing up for myself and for standing up for Windsor. They want a real university here in the Windsor region and they know that social reality is built on collective bargaining.

I don't want you to send me any more emails until after you have started bargaining with WUFA's negotiating team.

Yours sincerely,
David Toews

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Davison to Alan Wildeman

Dear President Wildeman,

I received your recent email relating to the purported “facts” surrounding our current labour dispute here at the University of Windsor.  

First off, let me just say that I am both shocked and dismayed by the manner in which you have entered into this situation.  As you have chosen to do so, I have some pressing comments and questions for you.

Surely a President’s role at a University is to lead us in ensuring that this institution of higher learning remains a place of collectivity and dialogue undergirded by good will and a shared agenda — namely, of providing our students (both local and international) with the best possible education available? This is the JOINT enterprise of faculty, librarians, staff, and administrators and, as such, we are JOINTLY accountable to said students and their supportive parents.  Let’s not forget that they are paying the lion’s share of our salaries.  Without them, we cease to exist or function.

The administration’s recent publication in The Windsor Star not only violates the collective bargaining process, the putative “facts” are glaringly selective and designed to alienate the faculty/librarians/sessionals from a community that we have long and faithfully served.  Tragically, this “advertisement” also knowingly capitalizes on established misconceptions about the nature of a professor’s occupation.  To see fellow academics engaging in such practices is disturbing indeed as you, especially, are aware of the tremendous requirements for, and demands of, this job.

I am extremely saddened by this “advertisement” because it is indicative of the administration’s offensive and disrespectful attitude towards a faculty without whom you would have no University and wouldn’t be managing to draw your scandalously inflated salaries.  Nevertheless, the following very calculated claim is made in The Windsor Star:  “We believe our offer meets the need to be fair to faculty, financially responsible, and attentive to the realities of the community in which we live and from which the majority of our students come.”

I note that no reference is made in this “factually” skewed and bullying “advertisement” to the increasing share of the University budget consumed by administrative salaries in recent years.  Said salaries and the flagrant mismanagement of this institution by some of those who draw them are responsible for much of the financial dilemma in which we find ourselves.  While we have been told repeatedly down here in the teaching trenches that there is no money available for more much-needed professors, ads appear every other month for new administrators with minor qualifications.  Why is that?  Why don’t we make JOINT/COLLECTIVE decisions at this institution (professors and administrators) about our hiring priorities?  Further to this, why are we running off of the backs of an escalating number of poorly paid and disrespected sessional instructors?  And finally, I really must ask why, given all of the hoops we (faculty/librarians/sessionals) have to jump through to obtain and retain our jobs, the administration is never accountable to us?

If the administration was accountable, a clear solution presents itself — the fair salaries we request as faculty/librarians/sessionals given current market conditions could be readily provided if someone did the hard work of trimming back on some of the administrative fat.  My business colleagues, I am sure, would readily assist in the process.  This is their area of expertise after all.

Like the vast majority of other Universities in Canada at the present time who are, against the will of their faculties, going corporate, we are in dire need here at what has become Factory U Windsor of a visionary and accountable administration of integrity.  I can tell you from my past five days on the picket line that our faculty/librarians/sessionals were hopeful that a new President might spearhead a long overdue shift in the guiding philosophy of this institution.  The calculated publication of The Windsor Star "advertisement," however, makes it glaringly apparent that no such philosophical shift is forthcoming.  

Finally, I must express my greatest sadness in relation to the offensive “advertisement.”  Did you or the administration’s negotiating team even give minor consideration to what it will take to undo the severe damage inflicted both in the university community and the Windsor community at large by its informing “divide and rule” strategy?  It may take the entire duration of your term as President to heal said rifts and alleviate community mistrust once this strike is over.  

I can tell you, with all sincerity, that it is a sad day in my academic career when I see but more of the same disrespect and carelessness guiding this cherished institution where I daily undertake what I have always considered to be my calling.

It is especially shameful to see the administration at the University of Windsor underestimate the resolve of my colleagues and the intelligence of our students, their parents, and the Windsor community.  

Remaining hopeful that it’s not too late to turn this thing around before all respect and integrity are lost, I remain,

Yours sincerely,

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WUFA’s Response to the President

 A RESPONSE FROM WUFA TO ALAN WILDEMAN’S LETTER

18 September 2008

 It is unfortunate that Dr. Wildeman has chosen to intervene in the collective bargaining process at this time, and in this way.
 
He has not been at the table; indeed, he was not an employee of the University of Windsor when this round of collective bargaining began. Collective bargaining is a complex process, with two parties managing at least twenty variables and seeking solutions that preserve the objectives of each party under difficult circumstances. A report such as the one Dr. Wildeman published yesterday risks distorting this nuanced and fluid process. What is worse, by selectively pointing to his understanding of a couple of these variables in a one-sided manner, he risks causing damage to a process in which he has been largely uninvolved.
 
Dr. Wildeman writes that the union’s concern with the Windsor Salary Standard is simply with restricting the number of comparators. That is false. The union has other concerns, and has tabled language formally to address them. For example: the administration is proposing to apply the WSS to adjust salaries to the median of the comparator group only once in their proposed three year contract. Since the administration is also proposing to clawback over 50% of the annual PTR increment, giving the University of Windsor the lowest increment rates in the province, our members will in all likelihood fall well below the median over three years. The administration says this clawback is required to solve its financial difficulties. In effect, each of our members is being asked by the administration to lend the university thousands of dollars, and the adjustment at the end of the third year will not pay that money back; it is gone. To counter the effect of a three year wait until an adjustment, the union proposed an adjustment in the middle of the administration’s proposed three year deal, and again at the end, to ensure our members do not lose thousands of dollars in career earnings. This concern about the Windsor Salary Standard did not appear in Dr. Wildeman's analysis. But it was tabled by the union in negotiations.
 
And the union will not accept the administration's clawback on PTR increments, a move that threatens to betray the salary structure under which we were hired in irreversible ways.
 
This is only one example of what the union finds are misleading and distorting depictions of the state of bargaining in Dr. Wildeman's report. Instructor positions gone from the bargaining table?  Only if the union agrees to unprecedented clawbacks in annual PTR increments.
 
The union also notes what is, in its opinion, a regrettable refusal on Dr. Wildeman's part to take responsibility for the administration’s threat to refuse to sign federal grant applications submitted by striking faculty. Dr. Wildeman’s attempt to equate this real and serious harm to researchers — and to the university itself, as overhead money from successful grants goes to the university — with some speculative harm to future enrolment is a regrettable lapse by a person entrusted with leading this university into the future. The same can be said of the offer delivered to the union at the bargaining table Tuesday night, and again of the purported summary of bargaining he offered.
 
There are many reasons why collective bargaining works at the bargaining table, and not through community messages. One is that the administration’s bargaining team cannot ignore or forget union demands made formally at the table; another is that positions disseminated through websites are not solutions to problems until they are put in writing and handed across the bargaining table to the union.
 
If Dr. Wildeman is sincere in his desire for a settlement, he will give his bargaining team appropriate instructions and send them back to the bargaining table, where the union team awaits them, and eagerly awaitsa new collective agreement.
 
On behalf of WUFA

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From: James Winter
Sent: 09/22/2008 11:47 AM EDT
To: PRESIDENT
Subject: A response to your letter of September 15

Sept. 22, 2008

Dr. Alan Wildeman,
President, University of Windsor

Dear Dr. Wildeman:

As a senior member of the faculty, I feel compelled to respond to your letter of September 15th. I will declare at the outset that although I am on strike, I am not a part of WUFA's executive or leadership, and nor am I a member of WUFA's negotiating team.

To begin with, no fewer than 16 times in your letter, you refer to your own views and those of a very small group of administrators, as the position of "the University" in the current dispute. You write, "The University has sought..." and "the University is committed..." et cetera.

You, sir, are not the University. The University of Windsor is the faculty, students, librarians, and staff. Above all, it is those of us who have dedicated our adult lives to this institution.

Please, do not presume to write on our behalf.

Secondly, you indicate that WUFA's negotiating team and/or its leadership has mislead the University community by indicating that two major stumbling blocks to negotiations persist, when the administration has allegedly withdrawn them from the bargaining table.

I'm afraid that you are either misinformed, disingenuous, or both.

The issues here are the Windsor Salary Standard, and the teaching-only instructor positions.

Although you write that "the University withdrew [these] request[s] from the bargaining table," and that "WUFA's negotiating team knows this," this is simply untrue.

Your administration's negotiating team has merely offered to remove those proposals if WUFA agrees to other unacceptable demands which have been made.

Since WUFA's team has not accepted these proposals, the highly objectionable WSS and teaching-only instructor proposals are still on the table.

As you are not at the bargaining table, it's possible that someone is misrepresenting to you what is happening at that table. If so, you should be very careful about the public statements you make, based upon such unreliable information.

Additionally, in your letter you have drawn a specious analogy attempting to equate the "long term impact of missing grant applications" with the "long term impact" a strike might have on future student recruitment. You indicate that faculty going on strike are doing as much or more harm as administrators who foolishly block grant applications.

This is specious because your administration is responsible both for this strike, and for blocking grant applications. It is the complete refusal by your administration to negotiate seriously over the past four months which has led to this strike. And then, in the 11th hour, your VP Academic threatened faculty who strike with blocking grant proposals, and removing pension, health care, sick leave and maternity benefits, et cetera.

Although you write that "it is in everyone's best interest that a settlement be found as quickly as possible," your negotiating team has refused to negotiate seriously for the past four months. Since going out on strike, WUFA has announced its willingness to go back to the bargaining table, but your administration team has done nothing.

Finally, you indicate that this strike has produced "the saddest day" of your academic career. Well, what have you done since July 1st to prevent this strike from happening? And what have you done since the strike began, besides sending out an insulting and misleading letter to the university community and the general public? Is this your idea of how the "University will be doing everything it can to see the bargaining process continue to a successful conclusion"?

You can be of real assistance to this process by insisting that your negotiating team get back to the bargaining table and seriously negotiate a fair and equitable agreement, as we have done so very often in the past at this institution.

Sincerely,



Dr. James Winter, Professor,
University of Windsor

The union regrets that the university administration continues to insist that its last offer was its best offer and can only be accepted in its entirety. WUFA calls on the university administration to return to the table in order to proceed with meaningful negotiations. 

WUFA tabled proposals intended to obtain a clear commitment from the administration to implement principles of employment equity as recommended in the Coulter Report commissioned by former President, Ross Paul. We understand that the so-called ‘best offer’ does not contain such a commitment. Instead, and we have been down this road before, they offered a letter of commitment from the new president of the university to the president of WUFA. What weight should be given to such a letter?

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