ULFA hosted its fourteenth Bargaining Town Hall on October 15 and 16, 2025 for this round of negotiations toward a new Academic Staff Collective Agreement (ASCA). The ULFA negotiating team began each Town Hall session with a brief recap of the bargaining process that started more than 470 days ago and so far has involved more than 30 bargaining sessions. The team summarized the status of the 47 ASCA items opened in this bargaining round, 7 of which were newly provisionally agreed at the October 2 session. Agreement has not yet been reached on many key items tied to the bargaining mandate approved by the ULFA membership. These include improved salary and benefits; creation of a Teaching Professoriate; making the salary structure and increments system more transparent, streamlined, and equitable; and workload issues.
The ULFA team touched on some of the issues discussed at the most recent bargaining sessions. These included Board team concerns about the letter campaign; the Provost’s letter to ULFA members; comparator institutions; and the Board team’s reiterated questions on matters such as research integrity, the provision for stays of procedures, the merits of retaining certain disciplinary provisions, and whether search committees for senior academic administrators should be empowered to recommend tenure and rank for candidates.
The ULFA team noted that at the end of the October 3 bargaining session, the Board team announced its plan to table a complete proposal package at the October 24 session and it proposed to cancel the October 23 session since it would have comprised only two relatively short meeting times. The ULFA team sketched a near-term timeline to prepare members for likely next steps in negotiations in the coming weeks. After a brief review of the current state of public sector bargaining elsewhere in the province, the floor was opened for Q & A.
Questions and comments raised the following issues:
- Whether and how the Board team justified their selection of comparators
- The seeming contradiction between the Board’s interest in having our research programs rival those of U of A and U of C and the Board’s desire to pay us like an online institution
- Reasons for the Board’s delay in tabling a monetary offer
- How to understand the Board’s merit proposal
- Why the Board team at one point questioned the ULFA team’s authority to bargain
- Regarding issues like discipline, reducing our ability to refuse to cross picket lines, whether these directives are from the employer or from the province
- Clarification of the sentence in the Take Action Now letter that the Board is offering “less than the full amount allowed by … government directive”
- Whether it is possible for observers to attend only part of a bargaining session and if observers can attend a session online
- Whether the Board continues to be uninterested in shopping around for a better benefits plan as they appeared to be reluctant to do in the previous bargaining round
A summary of the progress of items opened in this round of bargaining is available here. The next scheduled bargaining dates are October 24, November 12, 14, and December 11* and 12*, 2025 (* depending on final exam schedules).
