CBA Training Camp
On March 27-29, AUFA sent members to Ottawa, Ontario for a forum for those involved in the bargaining process.
If you have time, please consider reading the report back to the membership here.
First paragraph reads:
What are the opportunities during times of fiscal restraint?
Neil Tudiver opened the Forum by advising us that the employer will be tough on money. Economic crises put pressure on negotiations, so we should expect Administrations to make arguments that they have less money due to a drop in endowment funds, decreased government funding, and budget shortfalls.
I would assume that Acadia is under the very same financial pressures as most other small universities in the country right now. Did we really need to send representatives all the way to Ottawa to have them discover… the obvious?
Thankfully, the conference went on to talk about items that Faculty Associations may be able to negotiate with their employers that don’t sound absurd - seemingly, it appears that AUFA is going to fight for “equity” this time around.
Equity - interesting word isn’t it?
According to Wikipedia, employment equity is defined by the following statement:
“…refer to policies that take race, ethnicity, or gender into consideration in an attempt to promote equal opportunity.”
Now, it’s been awhile since this member of our passionate blogging group has been at Acadia, however, I don’t recall seeing any sort of discrepancies with this particular definition on campus. In fact, there always seemed to be a fair split of female and male faculty members, as well as a well represented group of professors from other countries. Maybe it’s no longer the same?
Either way, let me be clear, I’m all for equity, but what I do hope, is that the principle of equity does not interfere with the pedigree of professor that Acadia tends to, and hopefully still does attract. What I mean by that is, if there was ever a gender imbalance on our faculty and a position was open, I would hope that they would hire the most qualified individual as opposed to hiring the next best, or third best (whatever the case may be) just to balance the gender teeter-totter.
Finally, looking at the most recent (12th) collective bargaining agreement, it appears that Article 3.0 on page 9 mentions equity exclusively. Wouldn’t this mean theoretically that Acadia already promotes equitable practices amongst its faculty?
Aside from this, if AUFA is in fact positioning itself on the items found within the report, this negotiation process appears that it could be successful for all parties involved. Let’s not forget - we are all in this together and no one party, is better than another!
What are your thoughts?
