Daily Bulletin

Wednesday, April 10, 1996

Management writes to labour board

The employer is seeking to exclude librarians, language instructors, part-time faculty who have less than 50 per cent of a full load, lab demonstrators, and department chairs, among other people who would be included under the faculty association's proposal.

It will now be up to the OLRB to decide who's in and who's out. If the decision can't be made quickly, the people whose status is disputed will vote separately from regular faculty members, and the votes won't be counted until the OLRB makes its decision about exactly who will be included in the bargaining unit.

Date of the voting still isn't clear, which means it probably won't be tomorrow. Both the faculty association and the management have suggested next Wednesday and Thursday, April 17 and 18. In addition, UW is suggesting that faculty who are away on sabbatical or "long-standing professional commitments remote from campus" be allowed to vote by mail; the faculty association doesn't support that request.

Top brass give their views

Either this week or next there will be a vote to decide whether the University of Waterloo will have a faculty union. It will be a decision with immense and to all intents and purposes irreversible consequences for the institution.

This critical choice will be made by a simple majority of those who vote. It therefore merits the highest possible voter turnout, so that whatever the outcome we can all feel that the wish of the majority has been expressed.

Should that vote support the application for certification and a faculty union come into being, we shall do all we can, consistent with what we believe to be in the interest of the University as a whole, to ensure that the transition to a new way of conducting faculty-administration business goes smoothly and that the essential work of the institution--its teaching, research, and service--continues unimpeded.

Should the vote be to reject unionization, we will work with the Faculty Association and all others to ensure that desirable change comes about in both the policies and the procedures through which the affairs of the university are conducted.

We would be less than forthright, however, if we did not express our preference for the latter outcome. While unionization has some advantages for both the Faculty Association and the administration, it will have the effect here, as it has had elsewhere, of strengthening the university as corporation while weakening both the collegium and the sense of community. With Senate removed from its traditional role in many areas of policy making, that body's significance would be greatly diminished. With faculty interests represented by a union rather than an association, the division between faculty and staff would be more sharply drawn. And with the encoding of policies in a collective agreement, some of the administrative informality and flexibility this highly decentralized University has had would be lost. What will be gained is a greater standardization in the way things are done, reflecting the binding legalities of collective agreements.

Faculty unionization, by its very nature, has tended to accentuate and institutionalize adversarial roles for the faculty and the administration. In some institutions this has been useful in clearing the air and putting relations on a more business-like basis. In others it has had the opposite effect. It is our view that in this regard Waterloo and its faculty are risking more than they stand to gain from unionization.

That said, we wish to reiterate our commitment to respect the will of the faculty as expressed in the vote, and to do everything in our power to ensure that the welfare of the University and all its members is advanced regardless of the outcome.

This year's salary negotiations

"At the request of the faculty association, we have suspended the faculty salary negotiations until the certification issues are settled," provost Jim Kalbfleisch said this morning.

The staff compensation committee -- in which management and staff association representatives negotiate -- has had two meetings and has four more scheduled, says associate provost (general services) Bob Elliott, who chairs that committee. "We've begun looking at survey data," he added.

Negotiations between UW and Canadian Union of Public Employees local 793 are carried on in a formal way under the Labour Relations Act.

And on a lighter note

Chris Redmond -- credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 ext. 3004

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