By Khadija Jagani
Labour negotiations between the OPSEU-O’s bargaining team and the College Employer Council (CEC) resumed this week under a media blackout, which was lifted on November 11 at 6 p.m.
Both parties agree that these meetings have been productive and have brought them much closer to reaching a deal. The most recent revised offer proposed by CAAT-A on Monday was used as a starting point for a conversation on their demands.
On Thursday, the CEC said it asked the CAAT-A team to agree to a continuation of the media blackout. The CAAT-A declined, as the faculty had a town hall scheduled on Thursday evening.
An agreement “could be reached in a matter of days” so long as it remained “out of the public spotlight”, according to a CEC statement released following the blackout.
In an e-mail sent on Friday to college faculty, the CAAT-A maintained that while significant compromise was made to arrive at the current settlement offer, priorities such as support part-time faculty, equity and decolonization were addressed, with room for future discussions about compensation and workload.
“We believe that this offer maintains our principles, enhances stability in the college system, and provides a balance between modest short-term changes that faculty need immediately in workload, coupled with proposals that would create bipartisan structures for researching and effecting long-term structural changes needed in the system,” said the email.
But the conversation is not over just yet according to Jeff Brown, the acting chief steward at OPSEU Local 556 and professor at GBC.
Next on the agenda for the CAAT-A team is to ensure that recommendations are binding, and that some clarity is achieved on how solutions to their demands will be executed.
“I’m confident that if the bargaining team can get the CEC to move a little bit to clarify the implementation of the recommendations of the equity subcommittees, that both parties could meet and agree,” said Brown.
As of the time of this article’s publication, the CEC did not respond to a phone or Zoom interview request sent by the Dialog.
CAAT-A has proposed three different dates for a meeting next week to continue discussions, and are prepared to share their revised offer on November 15. Ahead of this, a provincial government conciliator is to be formally appointed today.
The conciliator, according to a release published by the CEC, recommended that both parties continue a communications blackout. The CEC accused the CAAT-A team of a proposal to extend the blackout, which the employers claim is necessary to complete the work needed to accomplish a deal.
Brown says that the request was never communicated to the bargaining team by the conciliator and was therefore neither accepted nor refused. As of this moment, the union has still not received any direct communications from the conciliator.
OPSEU-O had previously postponed a virtual meeting meant to update college faculty on current bargaining endeavours from Monday to Thursday in order to allow for a past request on a blackout extension. Brown claims that the CAAT-A has been accommodating to such demands prior and as such, finds it unfair that the CEC seemingly chose to portray the college faculty team as incompliant.
As such, OPSEU-O went ahead with the province-wide bargaining update meeting yesterday following the initial 6 p.m. ending of the blackout. Over 1,500 members tuned in virtually and were given the opportunity to address questions and concerns about the negotiation process.
Brown says the overall tone of the meeting was positive and speaks to the solidarity of all its members with CAAT-A. “There was no bashing of the colleges, there was no vilifying or demonizing. It was just the bargaining team fulfilling its responsibility to update the membership on what’s happening,” he said.
While Brown says the chance of a strike vote occurring is by no means off the table, he maintained that, given last week’s discussions, a faculty strike is unlikely.
