#1 Employer opens bargaining by demanding concessions

TSSU Contract Committee met with SFU Administration on November 2 & 3 to present opening positions for the 2022 round of bargaining.

TSSU opened by saying that we are committed to making SFU a better place, a place where people feel welcome and supported. As a feminist union, our bargaining priorities always reflect the need to address social and economic inequities throughout.

TSSU’s comprehensive set of proposals address our members’ key demands:

• Keeping up with cost of living 
• Addressing overwork 
• Security
• Fair work for Remote, hybrid, and blended courses
• Training, mentorship and professional development
• Strengthening our rights

Further details about these priorities are here.

The detailed TSSU proposals were all prepared according to member needs and desires as expressed to the Contract Committee in bargaining surveys, and were presented to the Employer at the table in the context of reducing financial, academic, professional, and personal precarity.

Although the Administration claimed they were “not looking for concessions,” their concepts for moving forward clearly amounted to demands for our members to give up hard fought for gains and rights won in past rounds of bargaining by the collective actions of the membership. The Administration’s goals include reducing TA base units minimums for graduate students, undermining job security for sessional instructors, and altering longstanding calculation of contact hour workload by increasing the amount of ELC/ITP instructor work without pay. The spokesperson for the Administration offered their broad outlines of their plans, without clarification, as demands that they suggested would come at a “cost.” All of these changes, regardless of whatever “costs” they have for the Administration, remain concessions because they will have the effect of increasing precarity through a combination of lower pay, increased uncertainty, and higher workloads. Overall, this demonstrates that the Administration does not perceive, let alone understand or sympathize with, the reality our members live with every day nor the value of the security they work with now.

The Employer’s bargaining team is attempting to use “concept bargaining” for certain sections. This means that rather than articulating specific proposals or contract language, they describe an amorphous vision/goal for what their proposals might be: for example, changing the base unit system, but without specifying how. Many of what the employer characterized as proposals were simply vague concepts lacking detail but still exposing a clear disregard for either a timely bargaining process or the security of our members.

Though TSSU’s proposals all seek to provide quality education at SFU, the Employer presented “higher-quality education” with TSSU getting “what it wants” as mutually exclusive competing interests. Strong labour rights do make SFU a place of educational excellence: a place where teaching staff can do their best work without concerns about precarity. Reducing the precarity experienced by TSSU members, therefore, is mutually beneficial to both parties. While the Administration offers vague concepts that would return members to precarity they have not known for ten years, TSSU has tabled clear detailed proposals articulating solutions to the problems our members face now, and will face in the future.

Both TSSU’s proposals and the employer’s concepts and limited proposals are available in the TSSU office (AQ 5129) for any member to review, and members are welcome at all bargaining sessions. Please email contract@tssu.ca for more information.