Next Round of Negotiations Begins

Next Round of Negotiations Begins

The current collective agreement for CAAT-A, Ontario public college professors, counsellors, and librarians, will expire in less than ten months, on August 31, 2014.

On October 26-27, 2013, all 24 Ontario public colleges sent delegates to Toronto for the CAAT-A pre-bargaining conference. At the conference, a democratic vote was held to choose seven negotiators and two alternates. The task of the seven negotiators will now be to determine the wishes of the approximately 7,000 full time and partial load professors, counsellors, and librarians at the 24 Ontario colleges.

The following were chosen as our negotiating team: Darryl Bedford, Local 110 (Fanshawe); Dave Fasciano, Local 673 (Boréal); Lynn Dee Eason, Local 613 (Sault); Lana Lee Hardacre, Local 237 (Conestoga); JP Lamarche, local 415 (Algonquin); Jonathan Singer, Local 560 (Seneca); Audrey Taves, Local 562 (Humber). Alternate team members are Ed Larocque, Local 556 (George Brown) and Bert Dube, Local 732 (Confederation).

These delegates will call for meetings at the 24 colleges to listen to the membership. This process will occur over the following weeks and months, and your local leadership here at Durham College will keep you informed of the dates of these meetings. It is a democratic process, and your participation is essential to its success.

Finally, but most importantly, all Durham membership need to be aware that these seven negotiators DO NOT choose the list of demands to be brought forward to management: the members do. This process is mandated by the democratic structure of our province-wide union. All of us, as members of our union, need to contemplate our role in this democratic process: our feelings about the list of things that we want our union to pursue, and our need to be ready to fight for them, if necessary, including a commitment to back the negotiators throughout the negotiations process.

Further information on the pre-bargaining process is available in the article located here: http://www.opseu.org/caat/caat_ac/bargaining-team-2013.htm
More general information is available at the CAAT-A website at the following link: http://www.opseu.org/caat/caat_ac/caataindex.htm