[UW shield]

Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Yesterday's Bulletin | Previous days | UWevents | UWinfo home page

Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Faculty, instructors, librarians vote

A vote, supervised by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, is being held today and tomorrow for the UW employees whom the UW faculty association is seeking to represent as a union. As ordered by the OLRB, polls are in the Modern Languages building and the Davis Centre, and are open both days from 9 a.m. to noon, 1 to 4 p.m., and 5 to 7 p.m.

Eligible to vote are full-time and part-time faculty members, professional librarians, and "persons holding full-time or part-time special, adjunct or staff language instructor appointments, whose assigned workload is equal to or greater than two (2) term courses per year or the equivalent".

Says the OLRB notice of voting:

If employees believe that they are eligible to vote, or have any questions as to their eligibility to vote, they should attend at a polling place and identify themselves to the Board Officer conducting the vote. If eligibility to vote is unclear, or in dispute, employees will be given an opportunity to mark a ballot, but it will be segregated, meaning it will be sealed in a separate envelope, until eligibility to vote has been determined.
Hearings starting May 13 will determine who should be in the bargaining unit and who should be out, and then the ballots of the eligible voters will be counted. If a majority votes for certification, FAUW becomes a union, and collective bargaining over salaries, conditions of employment and other issues can start.

The president of the faculty association, Ian Macdonald, pictured below, has issued a final salvo in the war of words leading up to the vote. Certification Bulletin No. 9 from the association says, in part:

Photo of Ian Macdonald The objective of certification is to obtain fair, effective and democratic representation in negotiating terms and conditions of employment. The most important advantage of certification is that it puts the rights, privileges and responsibilities of academics on firm legal ground. . . . Join the academic staff of the fifty-seven (of sixty-nine) universities in Canada who already have the legal rights provided by labour or other government legislation.
UW management has expressed a preference for a "no" vote. Said a memo last week from the president and provost:
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 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.

Honorary degrees announced

Names of nine people to receive honorary degrees from UW were announced yesterday; they were approved earlier by the university senate. To be honoured May 22-25 are David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto and federal cabinet minister; Eric Hultman, a Swedish pioneer in tissue analysis techniques; Howard Dyck, music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Philharmonic Choir; Jean Forest, Alberta educator specializing in sex and family issues; Pierre Dixneuf, French expert in organometallic chemistry; Digby McLaren, prominent Canadian earth scientist; Anne Penfold Street, Australian researcher in combinatorial mathematics and data security; Leslie Shemilt, McMaster University chemical engineer; and Madan Singh, systems design engineer at the University of Manchester.

Also at spring convocation, four retired faculty members will be named "distinguished professor emeritus": Don Brodie of physics, Wes Graham of computer science, Larry Haworth of philosophy, and Thammaiah Viswanatha of chemistry.

They're busy in human resources

Here's a memo sent to department heads across campus yesterday by the two section managers in the human resources department:
As you are all aware, staff in the Human Resources Department are involved in the SERP (Special Early Retirement Program). In order to ensure that all the required documentation is completed for individuals selecting the program before their retirement date we have had to set some work priorities. At the same time we are providing assistance to managers reorganizing their departments and are experiencing increased recruitment loads.

We are asking for your indulgence if we cannot be as timely as you would like with recruitments or reclassification requests. We will endeavour to ensure delays are kept to a minimum and will back-date any reclassification salary increases to the date the request for review was received. Your support during this extremely busy time is appreciated.

The talk of the town

The real talk of the town, though is that dusting of snow we got overnight. Can you believe it, on the seventeenth of April? Hey, there's a solar eclipse tonight over the south Pacific.

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

Comments to the editor | About the Bulletin | Yesterday's Bulletin