October 11, 2008

On Sunday October 5, 2008, when we received the Employer`s proposal, it was prefaced with the words

"Comprehensive proposal, which if not accepted in its entirety, will be withdrawn, and the Employer will revert to its previous position, and the proposal may not be disclosed in whole or in part by either party."

The sentence was in bold and underlined as reproduced above. The first part of it is fairly self explanatory, but we found the last part a bit puzzling. It wasn`t clear to us whether they could disclose it to the Board of Governors, or we could disclose it to our members, but not wanting to be left out, we added it to our next two proposals too.

On Friday October 10, 2008, after we had returned from a meeting of the BUFA Executive, we received an email message which had been sent by Scott Lamont at 6:16 pm. It read

"For your information, the Employer has elected to lift the restriction on discussion of its position of October 8 and October 5."

First, note that position is singular. i.e. October 8 and October 5 were the same monetary position. Secondly, information about their last offer had already been placed in a press release on their website.

We presume that since they have done so, that it is now fair game that we post their last offer on our website. So, in case you haven`t heard, about the details, here they are in a nutshell.

Monetary

Year One: 3% scale increase, floors and ceilings of all ranks increase by one increment, a normal step through rank increment for eligible members, PDA to increase to $1725

Year Two: 3% scale increase, a normal step through rank for eligible members, fund one half of "joint and 2/3" pension improvement with remainder paid by members. (This would effectively lower scale increase to 1.6%)

Year Three: 3% scale increase, a normal step through rank for eligible members.

Note that according to the Statistics Canada website that the CPI increase from August 2007 to August 2008 (latest available figures) for Manitoba was 3.4%. Also, there is no mention of raising the maximum possible pension, nor are there floor and ceiling increases beyond year one.

Language

(Major Issues)

Employer will not agree to BUFA position on "Happy Workplace." Latest Employer position still involves deletion of the current Sexual Harassment article from the Collective Agreement.

Employer still refuses to clarify in the Collective Agreement that courses cannot be split for the purposes of workload assignment. I.e. Part of a course taught on load and the remainder on overload, or only part of a course assigned to a particular member.

The Employer refuses to agree to a change in the definition of "Department" to include "a) the subject areas in the Faculties of Arts, Science, and Education in which there are at least three academic members." This change has implications for replacement of faculty members and the ability to offer programs.