The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 4600, which represents teaching assistants and contract instructors at Carleton, held a vote from March 20-22 to ratify the new collective agreement reached with the university earlier this month.
The new agreement will provide contract instructors access to their Carleton email accounts for two years and library access for a year following their last contract placement. It will also mean higher wages for both contract instructors and teaching assistants (TAs), according to the CUPE 4600 website.
Janne Cleveland, media relations officer for CUPE 4600, said although she could not speak to the details of the agreement, she is pleased with the results of the bargaining process. She said that she credits their success at the bargaining table to their negotiating team.
“Anytime you have negotiations and bargaining, of course you always ask at the start for the moon and hope for a few stars and I think we did achieve that,” she said. “This particular bargaining team went in well-armed. They worked extremely hard and they stuck with it, and I think they got us a very good deal.”
The tentative deal, which was reached on March 6 after a marathon bargaining session and after CUPE 4600 went on strike for an hour, addresses many of the grievances the union had, Cleveland said.
“Broadly speaking, in terms of the salary increase, it is much more in line with what happens in the rest of the province and down the street at [the University of Ottawa],” Cleveland said. “It was a much better monetary agreement than I have seen at this institution.”
The tentative deal would see an 8.1 per cent wage increase for contract instructors over the course of the new agreement. In February, the university was proposing a 2.6 per cent increase, with 1.0 per cent in the first year, 0.8 per cent the next, and 0.8 per cent in the third year.
Graduate level teaching assistants will see a 5.3 per cent increase over the next three years, while their undergraduate counterparts will see a 6.7 per cent raise. In February, the university was offering a 2.4 per cent increase for TAs, with a 0.8 per cent increase over three years.
Despite these increases in pay, Cleveland said contract instructors will still be making less then those lecturing at the University of Ottawa.
“We still don’t have parity with them,” she said. “Now this will change, but they’re also going into their own next agreement so we still have not got parity with them.”
Carleton’s media relations officers declined to comment until the agreement is ratified. The ratification vote on the new agreement is slated to end on March 22.
Some other demands made by the union concerning pay are absent from the new deal, including salaries that take into account rising tuition fees and the cost of living for contract professors as well as equal pay to all TAs, regardless of hours.
Despite these shortcomings, Cleveland said she will still vote to ratify the agreement.
“Nobody is interested in dragging this out any longer than it already has,” she said. “There will always be some things that are given up for concessions and other things are gained that help us move forward and be much stronger.”
Cleveland said she is hopeful this latest round of talks has sent a clear message to the administration.
“I recognize that as universities . . . become more corporate, the method has been to put people off, wear people down until they will accept just about anything,” she said. “People were clearly ready to go out . . . to demonstrate that we have a membership that is more than willing to do this this time. It doesn’t mean we want to but we are in fact willing to take it to that extent if it has to be that way.”
– Infographic by Shanice Pereira
