UMFA awaits vote on new collective agreement

Magally Zelaya, staff

Dates for the ratification of the tentative agreement reached between UMFA and the university have been delayed, because the mediator’s report was not complete on Friday, Oct. 18, as originally scheduled. Dates for the ratification meeting and the consequent vote by members of the faculty association will be pushed forward to coincide with the new release date.

The mediator’s full report could be moved back “by up to a week,” according to Brenda Austin-Smith, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA).

Until the report is in, details of the collective agreement are not final. “We just have a draft and you can’t ratify a draft. You have to ratify a full report,” said Austin-Smith.

Based on the draft, Austin-Smith said, “We’ll be recommending acceptance [of the mediator’s report].”

A tentative agreement that averted a strike of the approximately 1,170 professors, lecturers, instructors, and librarians represented by the bargaining unit was reached on Monday, Oct. 15.

Of the draft, which may change, Austin-Smith said, “It’s not a rich contract, in terms of money, but we got some matters of principle.”

At press time the university was not able to comment because the ratification vote had not yet taken place.

John Danakas, director of public affairs, did say, “This is an agreement that the university is comfortable with.”

“We were certainly dedicated and committed to doing everything possible to reach an agreement so that a strike would be averted.”

The new collective agreement set to expire March 31, 2010 sees UMFA members receiving scale increases of 2.2 per cent, 2.5 per cent, and 2.9 per cent over the three years of the contract.

Additionally, union members will receive a $500 base salary market adjustment in each of the three years.

Austin-Smith said she is particularly pleased with UMFA’s success in gaining an increase to the lowest paid people in the agreement, as the floor thresholds for lecturers and instructors will be increased by $2,000 over the old contract.

Paid parental leave will be increased from 15 weeks to 18 weeks over the three years.

UMFA chose to keep the same sick leave provisions as per the expired contract because, according to Austin-Smith, “We prefer the old ones.

“While benefits and compensation [are] important to anybody, they have never been as much of a priority for our members as have . . . other matters of principle.

“Our members also value their academic freedom to pursue research topics that interest them, to publish on those research topics as they please, and what really starts to rile our members are restrictions, when people start to talk about the possibility of restricting your right to publish under certain circumstances,” she continued.

As part of the new agreement, academic librarians now have academic freedom language.

“It’s really important because if you don’t have academic freedom for the librarians essentially you don’t have it for the entire university,” said Austin-Smith. “They’re the ones who are working . . . choosing and managing the information, so if they don’t have the academic freedoms, none of us do.”

The university and UMFA agreed to give the librarians 12 working days for concentrated research time.

The new agreement also includes language on gender balance requirements, so that women who make up a third of the UMFA bargaining unit aren’t handling a larger workload and participating in more committees than men.

Austin-Smith hopes this will compel the university to “implement a reasonable work load adjustment” and to fix “these differential workloads.”

According to Austin-Smith, UMFA wanted but failed to see improvements to members’ rights and privacy protections.

Currently the university maintains the right to access the email of employees, said Austin-Smith. “Watch what you write,” she warned.

UMFA had been fighting to change the contract length to one year instead of the traditional three-year contract, so as to be able to improve the agreement’s language more frequently.

The parties settled on maintaining the three-year contract length.

“It was a tough round of negations. We got the support of our members that we needed. We got great support from UMSU and GSA, and I’m really happy with this,” concluded Austin-Smith.

Details of the new collective agreement are not final until the mediator’s report is complete and UMFA members have the opportunity to ratify it.