8.5+ Years of P76/77 Negotiations …For New Titles?

On November 2nd FAUW emailed an update on Policy 76/77. This “most recent publicly released agreement” with the university administration diverges from FAUW’s previous negotiation position and its motivation for entering into mediation-arbitration.

The entire point of mediation-arbitration from FAUW’s perspective should be to ensure a favourable interpretation by the arbitrator of the past 8.5-year plus trajectory of negotiations including the agreement made between FAUW and the Provost in the December 2021 memo and in subsequent rounds of negotiation-mediation.

After 8.5+ years, what are we getting back in return? Very little beyond “teaching stream” titles. One could even argue that there are more losses than gains.

Overall Assessment of 8.5+ Years of P76/77 Negotiations

* Note: The “Guaranteed 1-in-6 terms without assigned classes” is already in Policy 76 so not included as a gain.

Importantly, FAUW is agreeing to concede the ability of lecturers to be recognized for conducting research. Fifteen percent of lecturers report having a scholarship/research component in their contracts. This change will affect all future lecturers as well as current DTLs if their contracts change to continuing. Removing recognition for research by teaching stream will not only hamper innovation and collegiality at UW by discouraging research collaboration amongst faculty, but will also frustrate the ability of teaching stream faculty to secure internal and external research grants to fund graduate/honours students (who we are nevertheless expected to supervise). With the administration expecting us to complete additional PPD, which is a form of scholarship, teaching stream faculty need greater–not less–access to grants (internal and external) to develop such activities. Fundamentally, FAUW is accepting the administration’s characterization of lecturers as teaching only faculty rather than teaching intensive faculty.

FAUW is also agreeing to a regular course load being capped at 12-courses over-two-years rather than advancing arguments for all lecturers to have a 10-course over-two-year maximum as is true already in some faculties (nearly half of all lecturers report teaching fewer than six courses per year). This comes at a time when tenure-stream faculty, who have sabbaticals, are winning teaching workload reductions to 3 or 4 courses per year (and can often pay for teaching releases through research grants).

FAUW is conceding the right of lecturers to sit on important collegial governance committees. In place of the legal/policy protections of “tenure,” FAUW is agreeing to “permanence” for lectures—but this is what continuing lecturers already have. Finally, FAUW is conceding the long-term goal of getting sabbaticals for lecturers without any indications as to when—if ever—this issue will be negotiated again.

November 2nd changes from previous agreements:

Detailed Analysis of FAUW’s November 2nd Position

According to the November 2nd email, FAUW has identified its three “priorities in coming mediation.” Below are these three priorities with some concerns highlighted:

• The wording here is misleading. FAUW could negotiate to cap courses at 2 per term (or 10-over two-years) while stipulating “unless otherwise agreed to by the lecturer.” This, along with a 1-in-6 non-teaching term, would ensure that lecturers’ regular workloads are kept to 10 courses, while still allowing individual lecturers to make alternative arrangements for their schedule (e.g., to allow for 3-3-0, 2-2-0 if desired).

• “Being subject to a decision” makes it sound like we should fear arbitration since the arbitrator could worsen our current workload cap. But FAUW has also stated that “both the FAUW PDC and the University administration” have agreed to “No more than 12 courses in two years.” Given this mutual agreement, and the two-year practice of a 12-course cap, an arbitrator is highly unlikely to propose anything less than the status quo.

• Workload is currently not encoded in UW policy and arbitrators are hesitant to create fundamental changes to existing policies and status quo practices. But if they did propose a workload policy clause, they would likely decide to create the 12-course cap already agreed to by FAUW and the university administration. In any case, nothing stops FAUW and the UW administration from putting the 12-course cap into the MOA.

• The real concern is creating protections so that 12 courses does not become the standard across all faculties for new hires rather than the “maximum.” This is why FAUW should be negotiating for a 10-course maximum and accounting for the extra workload some lecturers experience given the type of courses they teach (e.g., large courses with significant TA management; “labs” that should actually be classified as courses; etc.).

• FAUW should want all lecturers to have a regular workload of 10 courses—which some faculties already have. Failing that, FAUW should try to help as many lecturers as possible gain a workload of 10 courses. Instead, FAUW is essentially arguing that “since not all lecturers can have a reduction to 10 courses, then nobody should.” FAUW should advocate to improve all lecturers’ working conditions to the “best in class,” rather than adopt the university administration’s logic of lowering our working conditions to “no better than the worst” in a perverted appeal to “equity.”

• Rather than interpret the December 2021 memo in the interests of lectures, and in-line with long-standing demands for lecturers for a reduced workload (even before greater PPD expectations), FAUW’s stated “priorities in coming mediation” now echoes the administration’s interpretation.

As part of the November 2nd email, FAUW and the UW administration published a “most recent publicly released agreement in P76/P77 negotiations”. There are several concerns arising from the new agreement:

• Tenure does not simply denote research accomplishment. There are important UW policies that refer to “tenure” in terms of providing legal rights and protections. For example, according to FAUW’s MOA, during a financial exigency faculty “shall be laid off in the order: all non-regular faculty members …before regular faculty members, and, among regular faculty members, definite-term (funded from base budget) before probationary-term, continuing, and tenured appointments.”

• “Tenure” also is a requirement for various governance positions such as the Annual Performance Review and the ability to supervise PhD students (ADDS Status).

• A productive use of legal funds in the FAUW budget would be to hire lawyers to thoroughly review the existing UW policies that govern “tenure” and compare this to what the administration is proposing as “permanence” for lecturers. Without this type of legal opinion, FAUW is missing an opportunity to strengthen the rights of our teaching stream faculty—or worse, could be jeopardizing our rights in specific legal circumstances such as financial exigency.

• The details surrounding this “criteria” and the process involved in deciding promotion have not been clearly provided by FAUW. If progression will be decided by a promotions committee similar to the tenure committee, what guarantees are there that continuing lecturers will be represented on this committee?

• Who will get to decide what is or is not PPD (pedagogical and professional development)? How will disagreements over what is or is not considered PPD be resolved between FAUW and the administration? We have seen how drawn-out negotiations can be, and unlike collective bargaining in a union there is no automatic process of renegotiation every few years on these issues.

• Will PPD and PPD-reporting be different from what is already required of lecturers for our Annual Performance Reviews (APR)? If we expect (and want) potential overlap in assessments of our PPD for promotion and APR then it is even more important that lecturers sit on APR committees–why isn’t FAUW demanding this?

• This agreement would create two types of teaching stream faculty: those on a permanence track and those hired as contractually-limited, definite term. In certain ways this is what we already have: some units hire lecturers who are transitioned into continuing lecturer positions while other units either keep their lecturers as definite-term appointments indefinitely.

• FAUW’s hope here could be that by capping definite term positions to five years, departments that currently require lecturers to effectively reapply for their position every 1-3 years will instead be forced to convert these de facto continuing lecturers into formalized “permanence track” positions. However, there appear to be no protections or guarantees that this conversion will ever take place. Currently employed, long-time lecturers who are technically definite-term may not in fact be automatically brought into permanence tracks. By agreeing to a 5-year cap on definite term positions, FAUW could be giving the administration a mechanism for units to terminate long-term lecturers who have remained on definite-term contracts. In fact, this concern was unfortunately realized at Renison after the Renison faculty bargaining committee mistakenly agreed to 5-year caps for lecturers without clearly-defined requirements for conversion.

• FAUW should resist the creation of two-tiers of teaching stream professors and instead argue for all lecturers hired to earn tenure through their merit—in the same way that tenure-stream faculty earn tenure now.

• The current Policy 76 already guarantees lectures the option of a non-teaching term: “Lecturers shall have the option to have at least one term in six be a non-teaching term.”

• What does “as for research-stream” mean here? Is this in reference to sabbaticals? In practice there is minimal oversight over how professors choose to spend their sabbaticals.

• If teaching stream professors choose to teach in another institution during a non-teaching term (e.g., similar to a sabbatical), would they still be required to increase non-teaching aspects?

• See above.

• Why shouldn’t lecturers be eligible to sit on APR (Annual Performance Review) committees or the University Tenure and Promotion Advisory Committee (UTPAC)? For the few units that currently allow lectures to sit on APR committees, will the revised agreement mean these lecturers will be removed from their APR committees?

• FAUW should be negotiating to ensure not only our eligibility but guaranteed participation on these important committees. No justification has been provided why teaching stream faculty should not serve on collegial governance committees.

• No pathway between streams. The University hires teaching-stream faculty members to focus on teaching for a career lifetime.

• Creating this distinction in policy is unnecessary (the streams are already distinct as it is in terms of salaries, titles, etc.). Lecturers have voiced their support for flexibility if not greater convergence rather than divergence of the streams. There is no advantage to FAUW members to agree to this.

• This change will only hamper innovation at UW by discouraging research collaboration amongst faculty that currently includes lecturers.

• This change will frustrate teaching stream faculty’s ability to secure internal and external research grants to fund graduate/honours students who we are nevertheless expected to supervise.

• At the same time, no additional research funds are being offered by the university to support teaching stream faculty in supervising graduate students

• The university administration has never presented a strong rational argument for separating teaching and research. Agreeing to this will have long-term implications for all FAUW members. Scholarly activity may lead faculty closer towards teaching or research depending on the stage in their career or developing scholarly interests. This is healthy for students, faculty and the university ecosystem.

• Teaching stream faculty in most universities have sabbaticals.

• The university administration has never presented a strong rational argument against lecturers having sabbaticals. In fact, with additional PPD requirements, there is more reason to enable teaching stream faculty to be eligible for sabbaticals rather than not.

The past 8.5+ years of negotiations have clearly demonstrated that the administration has the upper hand within “collegial” governance and can simply wait it out as FAUW fatigues itself and compromises on one issue after another. We currently have no legal protections against bad faith bargaining on the part of the administration which clearly happened when the administration reneged on its December 2021 memo. This sidetracked negotiations for another two years. We also saw a lack of democracy and transparency after PDC members who had long-advocated in the best interests of lecturers were simply pushed out of the negotiation room leading up to this “agreement.” We are organizing a union that will engage in regular, legally-protected collective bargaining with the employer in your interests. Please sign a membership card today!