UPEIFA Members Concerned About Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Association Proposals Would Advance Efforts to Make UPEI An Equitable Workplace
In response to concerns expressed by FA members in consultations throughout Fall 2021 and Winter 2022, the UPEI Faculty Association has assembled a package of proposals that directly address a range of collective agreement issues related to these concerns, and to the University’s strategic priorities of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion permeate every aspect of our proposals to the Employer, and are rooted in the understanding that the commitment to equity begins with the acknowledgement of inequity and demands proactive redress for the effects of systemic discrimination. Our proposals are designed to address systemic discrimination that manifests itself in barriers to access, employment, governance, inclusion, respect, and acceptance; and to limit the privileging of particular forms of knowledge production, dissemination and pedagogy that limits excellence in teaching, research and service.
Proposals include:
- Improving pregnancy and parental leave provisions to expand access, and prevent career delay.
- Expanding caregiver and bereavement leave provisions.
- Including family violence specifically as a basis for leave.
- Eliminating salary discrimination by establishing a pay equity review process with guaranteed FA involvement.
- Eliminating the “cultural tax” paid by Faculty who are members of historically disadvantaged groups by recognizing their additional service in tenure and promotion processes.
- Mitigating the systemic barrier inherent in the use of anonymous student evaluations of teaching in hiring, tenure, and promotion processes by giving members more discretion over their use in these processes.
- Expanding definitions of qualifications and scholarly endeavours to include more under-acknowledged forms.
- Establishing pay parity, job security, and access to benefits for Sessional and Term Faculty, many of whom are women and/or members of historically disadvantaged groups.
- Establishing a tenure-track on-ramp for long-standing qualified Term Faculty.
- Giving the Joint Equity Committee meaningful and actionable tasks to be completed within reasonable timelines.
- Standardizing teaching and service workload calculations to promote equitable workloads across the University.
If our efforts to amend the Collective Agreement to create a fairer and more equitable workplace at UPEI are successful, this would provide direct, meaningful, and unprecedented support for Faculty and Contract Academic Staff in virtually every area of our working lives at UPEI. It would make UPEI a significantly more attractive employer to women and members of historically disadvantaged groups, who offer crucial perspectives and role models to our workplaces and to our students. By bringing proposals to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion to the table, UPEIFA is Bargaining For A Better UPEI.
