Over the last few weeks, you have received a number of emails from UPEI Administration suggesting that there has been reasonable progress at the negotiations table.
As we mentioned in our last message, we have a very different understanding of progress. While we believe that progress involves moving closer to addressing many of the significant issues you raised in your bargaining mandate, our employer believes that our prioritizing of proposals to focus on your core concerns or minor tweaks to existing processes constitutes significant progress.
To put this in perspective, despite close to 150 hours of bargaining, our employer has shown little interest in:
- Establishing a minimum number of full-time faculty, to preserve educational quality and to ensure that we have enough faculty to deliver our programs.
- Greater transparency and meaningful faculty input on hiring, promotion, and other administrative processes.
- Improving collegial (shared) governance to ensure that UPEI Administration is held accountable for their decisions now and in the future
- Establishing reasonable and equitable workloads
- Securing a fair wage, benefits, and job security for our sessional instructors and term faculty so that they can focus on contributing to the academic mission on the university
- Reasonable compensation that recognizes our unique inflationary context
- Supporting research by expanding internal funding and course releases, so that you can maintain your research programs
In the absence of gains in all or most of these areas, there is little basis for suggesting that progress is being made. With your support, we remain committed to reaching a fair and reasonable agreement that addresses many of the significant issues facing our institution.
To learn more about the state of negotiations, please join us for our next online (link to follow) negotiations meeting on Friday, December 2 (3:00p-5:00p). Bring your questions, concerns, and support for your bargaining team!
Together we can build a better UPEI. Solidarity!
