On November 26, 2024 the Board and ULFA negotiating teams held their fourteenth bargaining session toward a new Academic Staff Collective Agreement (ASCA). Teaching obligations required two ULFA team members to be absent for portions of the session.
The session began with discussion seeking to clarify which aspects of the ASCA’s Article 11 provisions addressing research integrity have been identified as falling short of the requirements outlined in the Tri-Agency’s research integrity policy. One such issue identified by the Board team is the need for the committee that investigates alleged research integrity breaches to include a member who is external to the institution.
The ULFA team presented proposals for Article 4 (Applications and Exclusions) and Article 12 (EDI), and a package comprising interrelated proposals for Articles 10 (Appointments), 18 (Intellectual Property), 20 (Termination of Appointment) and 38 (Sessional Lecturers). The teams discussed various aspects of these proposals, including activities an ULFA Board of Governors representative should and should not be eligible to participate in during job action (Article 4) and the amount of time needed for the Board to properly evaluate a Sessional Lecturer’s initial teaching efforts before a right of first refusal becomes available (Article 38).
The Board team indicated they are continuing to work on drafting their Teaching Professoriate proposal.
The teams also discussed tentative bargaining dates for the Winter 2025 term, how to share responsibility for hosting bargaining sessions more efficiently, and whether all of the scheduled December bargaining dates are likely to be useful. The teams agreed to retain four of the six December dates for bargaining: December 3 and 4 (half-days) and December 19 and 20.The proposals presented by ULFA can be found here. A summary of the progress of articles opened in this round of bargaining is available here.
