The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 4600, is holding a strike vote from Jan. 24 to 26.
The union, which represents contract instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) at Carleton, has been involved in collective bargaining with the university since the summer.
“We aren’t at this point saying we’re going on strike; that’s a tool, that’s all it is,” Micheal Ostroff, a member of the bargaining committee, said in regards to the ongoing negotiations.
After months of no progress, the union is hoping the strike vote will be the tool they need to turn the negotiations in their favour.
According to Gurdeep Singh Jagpal, the media spokesperson for TAs at Carleton, the vote is meant to show the university they have the support of their members.
“Right now, we’re just having the strike vote to try and get the membership together to show that we have the backing of the membership,” he said.
Ostroff, a contract instructor of nine years, said he is determined that this year the union will make a difference.
“Basically, the negotiations have gone nowhere,” Ostroff said. He said he hopes the union will get an 80 per cent “yes” vote from their members.
“If that number is reasonably high, it puts pressure on the employer to seriously negotiate for the first time,” Ostroff said. “If the number is terrible, we will get wiped out.”
According to Jagpal, Unit 1— which represents TAs at Carleton— is currently bargaining for better classroom environments. The TAs would like more notice for assignments and more instructions for how to teach their classes, he said.
Other bargaining demands include a cap on class sizes, so TAs are able to spend more time with individual students, and the workload won’t exceed the actual hours they’re paid for. Jagpal said the group is also pushing for a pay increase to match both inflation and the rising cost of tuition.
The contract instructor’s main concerns at the bargaining table are job security and a pay increase. Ostroff said he believes that teaching evaluations are an ineffective measuring standard, and said that some teachers have received racist, homophobic and misogynist comments through them.
The contract instructor bargaining committee is pushing for an evaluation that asks more questions and will allow for greater feedback to improve the courses.
The instructors are also fighting for multi-year agreements, which would allow them more job security, and a pay increase Ostroff said.
“We are the second lowest paid in all of Ontario,” he said. “More importantly, we are far behind our colleagues at the [University of Ottawa].”
In an email statement to The Charlatan on Jan. 19, Steven Reid, Carleton’s media relations officer, said the university pays contract instructors a rate above the national average.
“At Carleton, the minimum pay per course for 2015-16 was $6,745,” Reid said. “The most recent data available indicates that the pay per one-term course for contract instructors across Canada for the same period was $6,244 . . . the average was $6,392.”
Ostroff said on average, he receives $1,000 less per half credit course than instructors at the University of Ottawa. While Ostroff said that not all contract instructors rely entirely on their contract work for income, he added that their surveys showed “40 per cent of us are in desperate need of a pay increase.”
According to Reid, contract instructors at Carleton aren’t the second-lowest paid in the province, based only on salary, since there are certain other elements includes in their compensation package that other universities in Ontario don’t have.
These include things like compensation for mandatory training and the option to opt into a health and dental benefit plan, Reid said.
“The university has requested that the provincial government appoint a conciliator,” Rob Thomas, Carleton’s vice-president of human resources said in email statement forwarded by Reid. “The university is looking forward to future productive discussions with the goal of reaching a negotiated settlement as soon as possible.”
The results of the strike vote will be available in the morning of Jan. 27, and CUPE 4600 will be meeting with a conciliator on the same day.
If the two parties are still unable to reach an agreement, the union may take the next step and decide to strike, which they can do 17 days after the strike vote is in.
“I don’t want to do any harm to the students that I teach, but I don’t want to do any harm to the members that I’m representing,” Ostroff said. “As a union, we have our rights and are going to negotiate for a good a contract as we possibly can get.”
– File photo
