Dear College faculty members,
Fifteen months after our Collective Agreement negotiations began, and six months after the parties agreed to conclude the negotiations through a process of interest arbitration, Arbitrator William Kaplan has today released his award that determines our new Collective Agreement, which will be in force until September 30, 2024.
Attached below, please find his award, which identifies the new changes to our previous Collective Agreement.
As we are sharing this document with you immediately after receiving it, we can’t yet comment on the details, but a preliminary review of this award suggests that it contains more gains than anything that the Employer had offered or imposed throughout the bargaining process. We hope to distribute a Bargaining Bulletin early next week that offers a more detailed overview of the award.
As well, we look forward to hosting two Zoom Town Hall webinars in the upcoming weeks, to discuss the award with you in greater detail. All College faculty division members will be invited. Please keep an eye out for an announcement of those dates.
Lastly, although any gains that we have achieved in this round were obtained without a strike or any loss of pay, they were nevertheless obtained only by our incredible collective effort and commitment – whether by voting to authorize a strike, by undertaking work-to-rule actions for five weeks, or by voting to reject management’s forced offer.
We all have reason to take tremendous pride in our collective accomplishment.
We look forward to discussing it further in upcoming days and weeks.
Yours in solidarity,
Ravi Ramkissoonsingh, Jonathan Singer, Michelle Arbour, Kathleen Flynn, JP Hornick, Shawn Pentecost, Rebecca Ward
Your CAAT-A Bargaining Team