Carleton will be paying the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 4600 about $400,000 after miscalculating the Tuition Increase Assistance (TIA) rebate for teaching assistants for the past two years.
The TIA is a rebate available for teaching assistants who have been working for more than a year and is paid to them in addition to their hourly wage, according to CUPE 4600 chief steward Kevin Partridge.
Partridge said the rebate exists to compensate teaching assistants for tuition increases.
“It’s there to address the fact that TA rates don’t go up anywhere near as fast as tuition, so it helps compensate for that difference,” Partridge said.
The TIA has been an agreement between the university and CUPE 4600, the union representing contract instructors and teaching assistants at the university, since 2003. However, Partridge said the university was miscalculating the amount for the past two years.
“What [Carleton] did tell us was they believed that they had been incorrectly calculating [the TIA] for 10 years previous, and that they were simply correcting a mistake they had been making for a long time,” Partridge said. “We simply argued that if no changes were made to the language [of the TIA], they don’t get to change the way they interpret it.”
Christopher Cline, Carleton’s media relations co-ordinator, said in a statement the language of the TIA was unclear and therefore resulted in miscalculation of the fees owed to teaching assistants.
“The university discovered that the method used to calculate the TIA, in some instances, provided a bonus instead of a rebate,” Cline said in an email. “This resulted from unclear language in the collective agreement.”
However, Partridge said the fees changed without CUPE 4600’s notice for the past two years.
“They essentially decided without telling us that they were changing their idea of what that language stood for, and then when we found out, that’s when we filed the grievance,” Partridge said.
Cline said the language of the agreement will be negotiated in the next collective agreement between the university and CUPE 4600. Partridge said the agreement will be renegotiated in August 2016.
Cline said in his statement some teaching assistants will be overpaid as a result of this agreement and the amount, subject to be paid by December 2015, is still being calculated.
Some teaching assistants have already received their rebates, according to Cline and Partridge, but others remain unpaid.
The average payment for students receiving the rebate over the past two years is expected to be near $200, according to Cline.
Sacha Ghanderian, a Carleton graduate student who has been a teaching assistant for four years, said he noticed in March of this year that he wasn’t getting the correct amount of his rebate.
“CUPE sent out a notice that there was this issue as well as instructions on how to calculate the rebate to see if we were getting the full amount owed,” Ghanderian said. “Without this notice I wouldn’t have been aware that I wasn’t getting my full rebate.”
Ghanderian said the money is important to him and he gets peace of mind knowing that CUPE 4600 is looking out for issues affecting teaching assistants.
“As a grad student I have to worry about course work, my research, and my TA work . . . So there really isn’t time to worry about issues like this,” he said.
Partridge said it is important that students who face massive increases in their tuition are protected.
“I think it’s important to emphasize that for many graduate students, it’s not a lot of money, but even a small amount of money is quite important,” Partridge said.
