Recently, FAUW announced some alarming, last-minute changes to the Policy 76 and 77 mediation and arbitration processes. Despite commitments to transparency, these changes were made without any consultation of membership and without input from Lecturers.
We continue to welcome your grass-roots feedback via our anonymous submission form, and while we will address a number of concerns that you have shared with us, we wish to note, again, that this irregular order is not what WatTSFA would be offering to its members. We hope that you will continue to keep us informed about your concerns, and we hope that you will join with us in solidarity by signing a WatTSFA card and standing up for our rights as academic workers, as we demand a regular, transparent, and democratic process for negotiations with our employer.
Lecturers Connect is currently organizing a certification drive to form the University of Waterloo Teaching Stream Faculty Association (WatTSFA). This exercise in the freedom of association is important, because it is the system-level solution we have long been searching for. It is also a test of democracy, which would truly enable Lecturers to determine our own future. FAUW has shown us time and time again how it operates and the best that it can do. We have also done our utmost best to give multiple chances to a system that has consistently failed us.
The contrast between what WatTSFA would offer Lecturers and what is happening now could not be clearer. In a unionized collective bargaining process, the appointment of a bargaining team is usually elected by a governing body, such as the executive committee (YUFA example). According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the bargaining team should reflect the composition of the bargaining unit and the association membership should vote on and ratify such appointments (see Section 5.2 “Bargaining Team” of CAUT’s Guidelines for decision-making within the academic staff association during the collective bargaining period).
We as Lecturers ultimately deserve better, especially after waiting patiently for 8 years for policy revisions. We require a system where we decide on our union’s leadership, members of our bargaining team, what our bargaining positions are, whether confidentiality clauses should exist, who forms our executive committee, what positions we bargain for and when, and what our priorities ultimately are. We will also collectively decide how we are structured and what our relationship with FAUW and other labour groups will look like.
After listening to many Lecturers in the last few days, we hope to address some of the confusion and to address some of your concerns. But our main point is to contrast this ad-hoc and unorthodox process with the kinds of regular order that could be expected from collective bargaining within a union environment that is secured by legal rights and responsibilities. Whatever you think of this particular decision, its last-minute and opaque nature stands in stark contrast to the kinds of transparency, regular order, and guaranteed timelines available to academic workers in a union environment.
So, how did we get here?
While it is important to remember where we are in the process (arbitration is imminent!), it is also important to remember how we got here and what promises FAUW and the administration have made. But don’t take this history from us. Here is how FAUW described the process from 2020 to 2023, leading up to a vote by Lecturers on the “Path Forward.” "A multi-year effort to revise policies 76 and 77 ended in 2020 without a new draft policy. In 2021, the University administration agreed to focus renewed efforts specifically on improving teaching-stream appointments. Following steady discussions throughout the fall, in December 2021, we had what we believed were firm agreements that would be the basis for subsequent policy language. In March 2022, the administration said it would no longer support one crucial aspect of this agreement—workload and the pedagogical and professional development term—and in April, we asked members to help the FAUW Board of Directors decide how to respond to this change.
In May, the Board used your survey responses (particularly those from lecturers) and proposed a new path forward to the administration, including provisions for mediation and arbitration. We are still working to reach agreement with the administration on this, but we want to share our proposal with you before any more time passes."
At the time, Lecturers overwhelmingly supported FAUW’s stated Path Forward and their stated commitments about workload and pedagogical and professional development. We knew that mediation and arbitration would not get us everything that any of us might have wanted, but we agreed together to pursue FAUW’s Path Forward and we understood FAUW’s commitments to certain concrete goals. 97% of voting Lecturers (and 57% of overall Lecturers) supported the Path Forward and the move to mediation and arbitration. Since that vote in the Fall of 2022, Lecturers have believed that FAUW would continue to act in good faith with that Path Forward and with the agreed-upon goals for mediation and arbitration. After the events of this summer and after today’s announcement, we agree with many of you who have contacted us that it is reasonable to doubt that belief.
So, where are we now?
And why might we doubt that FAUW is acting in good faith? Apparently, mediation is ongoing. In a UW-affiliated MSTeams site, the current Lecturer’s Committee chair recently told the community of Lecturers that one more round of mediation was imminent. This stands in contrast with the information publicly available on FAUW’s site, where the Path Forward indicates that we are already into arbitration. Furthermore, we also know from that Teams chat that arbitration is imminent in November and that the current Policy Development Committee (PDC) is deep into the work of preparing for that arbitration. This raises many questions: are we finished with mediation or not? Are we into arbitration or not? What is the connection between this new round of mediation and the radical restructuring of FAUW’s Board? Does further mediation at this point (after we have already made so many compromises to our initial position) even work in our favour?
We do not wish to cast any aspersions on anyone involved, but these are reasonable questions. Especially when we remember that as Lecturers agreed to FAUW's Path Forward, we also explicitly agreed to the members of the PDC. They were known and shared with us, and it is reasonable to infer that Lecturers who supported the Path Forward did so in part because they were expressing confidence in the negotiating team. At the time, FAUW assured Lecturers that “The PDC representatives will be responsible for the [arbitration] brief.” Obviously, we are unclear about where we are in the process and whether mediation is complete. But if where we are in the process is “arbitration,” then we should be going into that process with the committee that we voted for last year. Adding new members in this manner raises a lot of questions.
What concerns have we heard?
As some of you have noted, any changes to a PDC must be approved by Faculty Relations Committee (FRC), which is a joint FAUW and Administration committee, meaning that administration was consulted and that administration approved the new additions. This means that administration was consulted while FAUW’s membership and Lecturers were not.
Once again, FAUW appears to be deviating from the Path Forward by changing the composition of the committee. This raises reasonable questions about what other deviations FAUW may be open to making.
FAUW suggests that it makes sense to add the chair of the Lecturers Committee to the negotiation team, but that has raised many concerns for Lecturers. Should a member of administration (an Assistant Dean) be chosen to represent Lecturers in negotiations over their working conditions with other members of administration? During a regular order election and nomination process, FAUW members would have been able to address concerns over such potential conflicts of interest and candidates would have been able to answer them, but those concerns were never brought forward to the membership, though they were clear to administration. Collegial governance cannot mean that the faculty association works more closely with administration than it does with its members. It should also not mean that faculty members who are part of administration play key roles in negotiations on the faculty side, essentially putting administrators on both sides of the negotiation table.
Finally, if arbitration really is imminent, then any changes to the membership of the negotiating team would necessarily complicate the process. It wouldn’t make sense to change the committee’s composition if FAUW were committed to the Path Forward and had faith in the current committee to advocate for that Path Forward. Does this mean that FAUW is changing their positions on the substances under negotiation, such as PPD and a non-teaching term?
Did the administration exert pressure on FAUW to engage in further mediation, or was this something FAUW requested? If FAUW requested this, what is the strategic advantage to having further mediation after years of negotiations through which we compromised on our position followed by an already extended session of mediation with the arbitrator during which we compromised even further? According to the Path Forward, arbitration was supposed to be completed by March 2023. All these extensions have allowed the administration to delay providing Lecturers with what we deserve.
Conclusion: We need systemic change
In the shake-up of FAUW over the summer, many members had high hopes that it had turned over a new leaf, but we are left to ask, “Has FAUW really learned to listen to Lecturers? If so, how are ‘Lecturers decid[ing] for themselves what happens to Lecturers’ when back-room deals are replacing an overwhelming vote of Lecturers to follow a specific Path Forward?”
At Lecturers Connect, we will continue our quest for information gathering and community building. We are more certain now than ever that a Lecturers’ Union is the only way forward to ensure a regular order process that lives up to the demand that Lecturers will always be represented by Lecturers in a fair and transparent process. Ultimately, the future of Lecturers should be decided by Lecturers, and the only way to ensure that is to join together to build a new system. We hope that you will continue to share your concerns with us, and that you will consider joining in our efforts to build a better structure in which we can all teach and work.
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