On November 6, 2025, ULFA hosted its fifteenth Bargaining Town Hall in this round of negotiations toward a new Academic Staff Collective Agreement (ASCA). Two sessions were offered, one in the morning and another in the evening, in an effort to increase opportunities for ULFA membership to attend. The main purpose of the Town Hall was to discuss the Board team’s October 24, 2025 proposal package and issues raised in the ULFA negotiating team’s series of blog posts on that package:
- Part 1 outlined the Board team’s package and provided links to its contents
- Part 2 highlighted aspects of the proposals for Schedule A (salaries) and Schedule B (benefits)
- Part 3 looked at the proposals for Article 23 (evaluation) and Article 24 (increments/merit)
- Part 4 addressed some of the areas in which the package proposes to make significant changes in the ASCA’s terms and conditions of work.
The ULFA negotiating team also noted other aspects of the membership-approved bargaining mandate for this round that to date the parties have not reached agreement on.
Questions and comments from attendees included the following:
- Floors and ceilings for teaching-stream faculty are concerning, especially floors with respect to competitive recruitment.
- Incentives for Instructor II/IIIs to become teaching-stream faculty are questionable, since promotion seems to result in a pay cut for members at or near salary cap.
- Would Instructors be collapsed into a single category, given conflicting language between Article 39 and Schedule A? If so, what happens to Instructors at rank II or III who opt not to become teaching-stream faculty?
- Are teaching-stream faculty just bargain Instructors with a new name?
- Workload issues are concerning, especially with significant service creep from reduced staffing complements.
- No option to appeal a merit award decision is surprising and concerning.
- Merit by application guarantees further disadvantage to already marginalized members.
- How much room might there be to push for a response to salary erosion?
- Why don’t teaching-stream faculty receive the same professional supplement amount as research-stream faculty?
- What is a drug card?
- Implications of going to a managed formulary for prescriptions including step therapy.
- It’s desirable to see research integrity provisions include language specific to Indigenous research.
- Given recent headlines regarding a parliamentary committee’s demand to see confidential data on federal research grant applications, the proposal to tie our contract to Tri-Agency practice is concerning.
A summary of the progress of items opened in this round of bargaining is available here. The next scheduled bargaining dates are November 14 and December 11* and 12*, 2025 (*depending on final exam schedules).
