This week, the Bargaining Team met with the Employer on February 16 and 18, and had Bargaining Team meetings on February 17th and 19th. We would like to thank members in the room for attending as observers, as per our open bargaining practice.
February 17th Bargaining Team Meeting
On February 17th, we discussed the Employer’s proposals from February 16th, and prepared for our upcoming bargaining meetings on February 18th and 19th. We also had some discussion to prepare for our ongoing weekend mediation process with mediator Chris Albertyn (February 20th, 21st, 27th and 28th) which will be dedicated to discussing job security programs for Unit 2.
February 18th Meeting with the Employer
On February 18th, the Bargaining Team met with the Employer again, and received additional counter proposals, mostly on all-units issues. Members can see the Employer’s counter proposals, and the Union’s latest proposal package here.
All units counter proposals from February 18th:
- Paid training
- Provides anti-sexual violence training through York’s Centre for Sexual Violence Response, Support and Education to be paid at the overwork rate,
- Modifies the Unit 1 workload form for a potential Occupational Health and Safety and AODA training, and Sexual Violence training to be included under workload (instead of being paid above the contract)
- Amending the blanket application
- Includes a section for pronouns
- Does not include the “legal given name” section in the Union proposal
- Data collection
- Agrees to an additional deadline to provide the bargaining unit data to the Union
- Does not address the ask around equity data in the Union proposal
Unit 3 specific proposal from February 18:
- GAT Fund (program intended to incentivize the hiring of GAs)
- Renews the fund for the next collective agreement
- Maximum amount of individual allocations is open to negotiation (as opposed to sticking to the $2000 maximum from the previous collective agreement)
- States that a Principal Investigator has to have committed to hiring a GA and executed a GA contract in order to receive the funds
February 19th Bargaining Team Meeting
On February 19th, we met for a Bargaining Team meeting. This time slot had originally been reserved for bargaining with the Employer, but both parties agreed after the Employer’s presentation of proposals on February 18th that the time would best be spent continuing to caucus separately.
We briefly discussed how to structure our existing proposal package to reflect to the membership the content of existing passes. We spent the balance of the meeting making decisions about our monetary asks in relation to Bill 124. We passed a motion to finalize our costing and monetary proposals by the end of February. We then moved to include three proposals on benefits and a proposal for 1% wage increases in all three units.
Finally, we passed a motion to include a wage reopener clause, which would allow us to renegotiate wages should Bill 124 be struck down.