| New contract features wage gains, enhanced severance and partial load improvements Dear colleagues, As expected, yesterday’s arbitrated contract award announced by OPSEU and the CEC contains some modest gains, but no groundbreaking improvements (or concessions). This was forecast early on by arbitrator William Kaplan and is hardly a surprise given the current turmoil in the college sector. Despite this, there is good news in the new collective agreement (CA), which will be in force until September, 2027, and the Bargaining Team should be congratulated for all their many months of hard work getting us to a new arbitrated settlement without strike action. Your strong show of support in our strike vote last fall played a huge role in avoiding labour action and the improvements now realized. The chart sent from the Bargaining Team yesterday, which is summarized and analyzed below, highlights important changes in the new CA language. For the full details, you can use this link to the Award. You can also learn more on July 10th from 6-7 p.m. in a Zoom town hall from the Bargaining Team. You can register here. Here is a brief analysis of the main changes highlighted by the Bargaining Team (courtesy of Local 244): Term and Wages – Three-year CA duration is common, wage increases are: 3% retroactive to October 1, 2024; 2.5% effective October 1, 2025; and 2% effective October 2, 2026 (total of 7.5% over three years). The retroactive pay is to be paid in 90 days or less and applies to all current and former employees who worked after the retroactive pay date. Severance – Substantial increase, Kaplan lowers College monetary incentive to lay off employees, while increasing the value of the severance choice after layoff. Article 8.04 A &B – Partial-load professors will now be compensated for union duties, but they are not cumulative towards their teaching hours, just hourly pay Article 8.06 – Only applies to those seconded to OPSEU provincial duties WORKLOAD – All of the following won’t begin until January 2026 (almost halfway through this CA’s duration) Article 11.01 C – Our biggest loss. The Colleges wanted our teaching hours to be defined as half hours. They got their wish, except that weekly totals must be in whole numbers. Shorter classes could equal more classes. Article 11.01 D 3 – It doesn’t stipulate how much, but it does say that teaching in a new delivery mode (to you) should be a separate workload category. Article 11.01 E 1 – Evaluation factor for essays or projects, increased from 0.030 to 0.035. This is our first foot in the Workload Measurement door since the creation of the SWF! Article 11.01 F 1 – Mandatory Complementary Hours on every SWF go up to 7 hours a week (from 6). Article 11.01 F2 – For professors with more than 260 students, faculty will get more evaluation time on their SWF. Article 11.04 A2 – Counsellors and librarians now have a set monetary amount per hour payment for overtime work. Most important here, it is a first that the CA acknowledges that there is a fixed workload that can go into overtime for non-SWFed professors. Article 11.09 A 1 – If ¾ of a Faculty group want a modified workload (Article 11.09, which allows SWF parameters different from those outlined in the rest of Article 11) the local union shall not unreasonably withhold its required signature. Article 14.03 A 3 – Now the College has to canvass all relevant Full-time and Partial-load profs to offer the coordinator job, before they can go outside the bargaining unit. Article 26 Partial-Load Employees Article 26.10 D – Starting in academic year 26/27, the signing process for the Partial Load Registry will be automatic, but PL faculty will still need to communicate the number of max hours they are willing to work. Article 26.10 E – changes “currently” to “previously” to apply to the four years necessary to have the seniority protection on this entire Partial-load article. Article 26.10 F – Stipulates when the Registry does not apply. At first glance it seems fair. Article 26.10 G –A PL can now officially be granted a leave of absence. Article 26.11 – New language, PLs get $65.00 an hour for meetings and other Faculty events they must attend that are not related directly to the delivery of their courses.*The rest of the changes are improvements for the union rights to participate more collaboratively in the Employment Stability process at the college. If you don’t get a chance to read the full award from Kaplan, it is worth noting that he did a pretty thorough analysis of the current financial quagmire facing the colleges and how they got into this mess. The relevant quotes are highlighted below in italics: “In fact, between 2012/2013 and 2020/2021, Ontario’s colleges experienced a 15% decline in domestic students and a 342% growth in international student enrolment. This changing demography – and risks associated with it – did not go unnoticed. According to Ontario’s Office of the Auditor General – as set out in its December 2021 report, Value-for-Money Audit: Public Colleges Oversight – the high reliance on international students created fiscal uncertainty. This was also the conclusion of the 2023 expert panel report: Ensuring Financial Stability for Ontario’s Postsecondary Sector: Ontario’s colleges and universities were only sustainable because of foreign student tuition fees. The numbers make this manifest: In 2022/23 tuition revenue totalled $4.356 billion, with an estimated 76.6% of that coming from foreign student fees.” “The warnings materialized in January 2024 when a new cap on foreign student (and related) visas was announced by the federal government. While this cap was described as temporary, it has been extended. Not only are new foreign student enrolments down, so too are the number of existing international students progressing through years of study. Twenty-three of the twenty-four colleges have reported a 48% decrease in Semester 1 enrolment from September 2023 to September 2024: 91,306 vs. 46,555 (and the enrolment number decline brings with it a parallel revenue reduction in foreign tuition fees). The impact of these declining numbers of foreign students has been both immediate and dramatic. By the spring of 2025, more than 600 programs were cancelled/suspended, or their cancellation/suspensions announced, and four colleges have closed campuses or announced their closure. The list of program cancellation/suspensions disclosed in these proceedings is, in a word, alarming. Program after program in college after college are identified and then described as follows: “Program Suspension of All Deliveries with the intent to Cancel” or “suspended” or “teach out ends” or “program closure with teach out.” As of June 2025, nineteen of the colleges have reported staff reductions – current and planned – of more than eight thousand employees.” Despite this, Durham College has so far seen few lay-offs in comparison to other colleges. For faculty, we lost 4 probationary colleagues in the spring, but no other layoffs have yet been announced. The impact on contract faculty, however, can’t be stressed enough. Many partial load, sessional and part-time teachers have seen drastic reductions in their hours as full-time faculty are maxed out and intake suspensions take hold. The fall will likely bring more challenges, but for now, we hope you can take some comfort in having a new collective agreement in place and the relative stability that brings. Until then, I hope you enjoy the warmth of summer and your circle of friends and family. In Solidarity, Phil Raby Local 354 president *Please note: the Local 354 office is closed for the summer, but we remain on-call for any urgent issues. Please reach out to either me (president@opseu354.ca) or chief steward Mike Keith (chiefsteward@opseu354.ca) if you need assistance. |
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