Dear TSSU members,
Your Contract Committee has met with the Employer in bargaining sessions every day this week to fulfill the terms of the settlement at the Labour Relations Board (LRB). In spite of SFU’s desperate attempts to delay at all costs, the resounding success of our strike vote has forced the Employer to finally respond on outstanding issues and provide a full wages and benefits proposal for Research Assistants. The Employer also has to meet a noon deadline on May 8 to propose wage and benefits improvements for all other job categories.
Our goal this week was to reach a full settlement agreement for RAs so that they could finally be properly included into the Collective Agreement with fair wages and benefits and we came prepared to engage with the Employer to make the tradeoffs to do so. The Employer met their LRB obligation to make a monetary proposal on April 24th, but then moved no further despite TSSU’s substantial move towards them on wages. Frustratingly, when it came time to discuss which RAs would be included in the Collective Agreement, they refused to engage at all. Instead, the Employer doubled down on their position that graduate students cannot also be workers, in clear and direct defiance of Jim Dorsey’s arbitration decision. Effectively the Employer crossed their arms and said that they will not come to an agreement at the bargaining table unless the LRB forces them to, and until then, they won’t budge on monetary.
The Employer’s single monetary proposal was a minor movement from their 2021 $17 / hour proposal and major insult. They said RAs labour is only worth a $22.22 minimum hourly wage for RAs, and $17 /hour for Work Study RAs and Undergraduate Student RAs, which is barely above the provincial $16.75 minimum wage, effective June 1, 2023. They also made clear this proposal doesn’t include any of the graduate student RAs paid scholarship/stipend, who they effectively say are worth $0 / hour. All of these numbers are substantially lower than the current $27.18 / hour average for RAs, and $24.08 living wage for Metro Vancouver. This shows that Joy Johnson’s announcement of a living wage was purely superficial marketing. The Employer seems to think that TSSU will cower and agree some RAs can be paid peanuts, just to get a deal. They clearly have forgotten our strikes of 2012 and 2015.
Moreover, the Employer wants to limit medical, extended health, and dental benefits and sick leaves to only those RAs working at least 40 bi-weekly hours with appointments over 4 months. By our estimates, their proposals would exclude over 80% of RAs from basic health benefits that all workers deserve. Moreover, they justify lowering the “SFU living wage” to $22.22 from the normal $24.08 / hr on the basis that these benefits are in place, yet they deny them to almost all RAs. TSSU says researchers are as important as teachers, and if all TAs can have benefits, then all RAs should too.
In these sessions our collective power initially produced meaningful movement on protection from early termination and the use of volunteer RAs. For years, the Employer insisted on the ability to terminate RAs at any time for any reason. Through bargaining we’ve dramatically narrowed that only situations “due to operational or funding changes that result from exceptional circumstances outside the control of the PI” and in that case the Employer would need to try to find alternative work and provide notice or pay-in-lieu. The Employer backed out of the progress we had made because they were unwilling to extend this notice period a meager additional two weeks, which we say is the minimum to allow people time to find a way to pay their rent.
This week of bargaining has shown that the way we make progress at the table is by asserting our collective power—in fact, it’s the only way. The Employer now has a legally enforceable deadline to table monetary proposals for all other job categories by noon on Monday, May 8. Come to this bargaining session to hear for yourself the paltry wages that the Employer will surely offer and confront their insults with solidarity. We have seen immediately that our collective power produces results at the bargaining table. Soon we will see how much more we can win.
In Solidarity,
TSSU Contract Committee