Share your priorities with the CAAT-A Bargaining Team at our next GMM.
Dear members,
Please Join us for our next general membership meeting (GMM) on Feb. 7th at 6:30 p.m. to discuss our top issues for the next round of bargaining with members of the CAAT-A bargaining team.
This local demand setting is your chance to communicate your priorities for the upcoming negotiations and to address any concerns or queries directly with the bargaining team members who will be present. Your attendance is highly appreciated and we encourage you to bring thought-provoking ideas and workplace concerns to share with the team.
Along with similar local demand set meetings at all 24 colleges, members will also be given a survey to rank the priorities identified across the province at these meetings. As well, members will soon receive another survey from the joint college/employer Workload Taskforce that is examining the workload demands of full-time and partial load faculty.
Additional agenda items for this meeting will also include the election of delegates and alternates for the Final Demand Set Meeting in March, the Region 3 Regional Meeting in early April and the annual OPSEU Convention in late April.
Our GMM will take place virtually on Google Meets, so please register beforehand to receive the meeting link and relevant documents. Only full-time and partial load faculty in good standing are eligible to attend and fully participate in Local meetings. Individuals without active union membership (no union membership number) are ineligible to participate in future strike or ratification votes for a new contract.
If you have not yet signed a membership card or are unsure of your union status, please visit this link: https://hub03.opseu.org/Forms/emaweb. From there you can find out if you currently have a union card on file, and if not, you can fill out the application.
To attend the meeting, please RSVP to office@opseu354.ca. A meeting link and agenda will be sent out to all registered attendees before the meeting.
A concise overview of the college sector bargaining history is provided for your review below:
The first three teacher/management agreements (1969 through 1976) were not even called College Collective Bargaining Agreements (CCBA); they are Memoranda of Agreements between the Ontario Council of Regents for Colleges and the Civil Service Association of Ontario. The next three Collective Bargaining Agreements (1977 through 1984) were actually dictates by the Council of Regents.
It wasn’t until the strike of 1984 that we had any semblance of how our Workload Articles protect us today. Before that (see attached Article 4 in 1982 Vs 1985 Agreements) teachers were regularly assigned 19-20 Teaching Contact Hours a week with no limits on class size or types of evaluation. With classes of one or two hours, a teacher could be teaching nine or more classes a week. And the 700 annual teaching contact hours were lowered to 648. The first Ontario Colleges Academic of Arts and Technology Faculty strike gave us those workload reductions.
The labour action of 1989 gave us the Teplitsky Wages and Benefits Task Force. The Task Force findings put the college Faculty salary maximum between the highest secondary school maximum and the lowest ceiling of Ontario university professors. Before that, teaching secondary school was often more lucrative than teaching college. It was the strike of 1989 that placed us between those comparators.
The labour action of 2017 produced the Partial-Load (PL) Registry, which gave our contract working colleagues contract language seniority protection. And, amongst other small gains, that work stoppage gave the system our first Article on Academic Freedom (AF). A minority of professors were against going on strike, but well over 95% of Faculty voted to continue the strike after four weeks to win those concessions, because it was clear that the College Employer Council (CEC) was bargaining in bad faith. It was the strike of 2017 that won us those new PL and AF initiatives on which we can now build and improve.
The labour action of 2021, improved the PL protections and with the subsequent Union Legislative Challenge ultimately gave us a long overdue 9.5% pay increase. The new Work To Rule labour action strategy of 2021-22 won us those increases.
The point is, when we stand together, when we give full support to our Bargaining Team with an overwhelming positive vote to take labour action, that is, by giving our Team a Strike Mandate, we win. As we have won in the past, management concessions that bring our working conditions and remuneration closer to the reality in which we work and live, are only realized when we show a solid majority of Faculty standing in solidarity. The CEC will not concede any labour gains unless we give our Bargaining Team a Strike (or Work To Rule) Mandate.