Goals and Priorities
(not rank ordered)
Our leadership team at work
Salaries
Bargaining forcefully for across-the-board salary increases that keep pace with inflation.
In the recent round of negotiations, the University Administration’s final offer was only 4.75% over three years, less than half of the 10% UTFA obtained via arbitration. This demonstrates how essential it is to have a strong UTFA Negotiating Team when dealing with economic issues.
According to its audited financial statements, the University of Toronto continues to be in a strong financial position with a considerable, $551M annual carryover. It has billions of dollars in net assets and hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves to cover contingencies. In short, the University of Toronto Administration can readily afford to provide all UTFA members—and indeed all U of T employees—with fair compensation and benefits.
Benefits
Vigorously defending equal health benefits and other benefits for retirees. The Administration wanted to create a two-tier system with lower benefits for retirees. It also deprived retirees of automatic access to Microsoft 365 without reasonable explanation or discussion, a move that UTFA is firmly contesting. It is essential that UTFA vigorously defend equal health benefits and other benefits for retirees, and our team is committed to doing so.
Extending recent gains in mental health and other health benefits. The recent gains in mental health and other health benefits have been of enormous value to our members and their families, but it is important to understand that such gains do not arrive automatically. The Administration offered far less than UTFA ultimately achieved for you in the last round. UTFA’s Team in this round has only recently received relevant disclosure from the Administration to inform our benefits proposals, but we have already tabled significant improvements in Librarian Research Days and Childcare Benefits, proposing to the Administration a doubling of per diems, per child maximums, and overall investment in the plan. It is worth noting that our proposals for improving childcare benefits are significantly stronger than the ones proposed by the other candidate, and our bargaining team submitted these proposals before he announced his candidacy and advanced his own ideas about childcare. We will also table improvements to Mental Health, Vision, Dental, and other benefits.
Housing
Developing a joint UTFA-Administration comprehensive, multi-year, faculty and librarian housing strategy. In this round of bargaining, UTFA has already been in substantial discussions with the Administration about housing, in addition to advocating for a revival of the housing loan program over several years. Our goal is to develop a joint UTFA-Administration comprehensive, multi-year, faculty and librarian housing strategy to address affordability requirements, to provide access to family-sized units, and to ensure that University funds are transparently and equitably distributed. As housing has become a burning issue for our membership, we have worked diligently to push for action from the Administration. By putting member housing on the agenda and drawing on the extraordinary expertise of our membership on this topic, our advocacy has already borne some fruit.
For the first time ever, the Administration has accepted that UTFA has a role to play in the future of UofT’s housing provision and financing support. Never before has the Administration acknowledged the substantial benefit to housing quality and sustainability and to program effectiveness that would come from involving our leadership and our membership in this work. Yet the Administration has begun to engage more meaningfully with us in bargaining on this issue and to respond directly to our proposals for a collaborative approach. In a special session at the bargaining table with lead UofT real estate actors and UTFA member-housing experts, we opened the doors to a whole new terrain of collegial governance. In response, the Administration proposed to consult UTFA about development plans and share information in a regular and accountable manner. They also promised that current housing developments across the tri-campus will offer an adequate number of ‘attainable’ units for UTFA members who want them. After years of effort, we are expecting a formal announcement about a new initiative in the coming days which should offer significant benefits to UTFA members.
This is path-breaking, but it is still not enough. Despite the important direction indicated above, the Administration does not have a comprehensive plan and vision for faculty and librarian housing. As the UofT real estate portfolio is increasingly organized as a key revenue stream in a scarce resource landscape for the very future of the institution, we must take a firm and principled stance on our role in shaping the content and process of that vision.
Resisting Precarity
Protecting secure, full-time, and Tenure-Stream faculty and Librarian positions as the norm.
Many units increasingly supplant Tenure Stream positions with more precarious sessional, part-time, and CLTA appointments. Part-time faculty lack the same degree of job security that comes with a full-time appointment, and this vulnerability has negative effects not only for them but also for full-time faculty.
Part-time members must have a path to permanency and UTFA’s precarious members must have improved workload protections. Part-time and other precarious faculty and librarians are currently vulnerable to exploitation by being expected to work a full-time (or more) equivalent without the same compensation, opportunities, and job protections that their full-time—and not-term-limited, e.g., CLTA—colleagues have.
Defending Core Values
Defending our core values of academic freedom, collegial governance, and non-discrimination.
Sometimes defending these core values leads UTFA to work with the University Administration to protect the University against private actors or government officials seeking to control what scholars think and write and teach. On other occasions, it is the University Administration itself that takes courses of action in conflict with these core values.
UTFA is committed to defending these core values when either is the source of the danger to them.
Amplifying Members’ Voices
Hearing our members’ expert advice on health & safety, pensions, housing, and more—and having it inform our Association’s positions. The University is full of scholarly experts with detailed knowledge about concrete problems and how best to address them. Too often the University Administration fails to take advantage of this local and available expertise—UTFA does not and will not.
Expanding membership engagement and participation. It is important to democratize UTFA further through membership outreach and participation via ongoing Town Halls, surveys, focus groups, expert panel events, and more. If it is the will of UTFA Council, Terezia would also support introducing membership-wide elections for UTFA’s senior Executive officers.
Workload
Addressing the significant, growing, systemic, and persistent workload challenges UTFA members face with new data and enhanced transparency.
We need to address the significant, growing, systemic, and persistent workload challenges that UTFA members face, and which compromise their ability to focus and produce high-quality research and teaching. To do this, we need more data and new data. In bargaining, UTFA proposed a joint workload case study that invited a collaborative investigation of the workload problem through a genuinely collegial approach between UTFA and the Administration, to produce knowledge and action jointly. The Administration Negotiating Team rejected our premise that faculty and librarian overwork is a serious or widespread problem and refused to commit to our solutions-based approach. Instead, the Administration leads stated that any issues with overwork could be resolved by redistributing work amongst members of the same unit—effectively seeking to pit members against one another.
Enhanced transparency in the criteria used to govern workload will enable us to demonstrate the substantial gap between the principles that are supposed to guide workload assignments including fairness, reasonableness, equity, and transparency (i.e., the ones identified in the Workload Policy and Procedures (WLPP) and the realities of how workload is assigned in practice. This will allow us to advocate for remedies and solutions more effectively via Association grievances, at the bargaining table, and in interest arbitration.
Our Pensions
Ensuring that our pension plan invests ethically and responsibly.
UTFA has a very active and well-informed Pension Committee that has been pressing the University Pension Plan (UPP) to pay serious attention to climate change as well as other ethical issues and to adopt investment guidelines that are clear and transparent.
Health and Safety
Advocating for safe and healthy workplaces via central health and safety policy-making that is collegial, transparent, evidence-based, and aligned with science.
UTFA needs to hold the central Administration to account where their policies and responses fall short and challenge the Administration to step back from uncoordinated or ill-considered efforts that merely waste time and money without positive effect.
Research Equity
Continuing to identify and address systemic obstacles (including discriminatory approval criteria and processes in the MRA [My Research Applications & Agreements] system) preventing our faculty and librarian members from equally engaging in self-directed research, scholarship, and creative professional activities at the core of the academic mission. UTFA is currently working out the final wording of a resolution that will remove the restrictions on academic freedom in the MRA system.
Fixing the MoA Dysfunction
Working with the membership, with negotiators from other Associations, and with scholars and legal experts to explore solutions or alternatives to our dysfunctional Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), including certification.
The limitations of the current MoA make it much more difficult to pursue the preceding goals effectively. (For example, Arbitrator Eli Gedalof noted in his recent arbitration award that the MoA and the WLPP, in their current form, are ill-equipped to meaningfully address overwork.) Too often the U of T Administration faces no timely, enforceable, legal obligation to provide UTFA with the information it needs, or to consult with UTFA on matters of fundamental importance to faculty, or even to bargain in good faith.
Our Negotiating Teams need the right to bargain all terms and conditions of employment for our members and to do so within an efficient, modern mediation/arbitration framework (as needed). This includes enforceable timelines, as well as an expedited arbitration process, to eliminate what are now routine lengthy delays in bargaining, grievances, and the resolution of other disputes.
For more details on this issue, see UTFA’s 2022-23 AGM Newsletter.
Association Grievances
When collegial efforts to resolve systemic issues are unsuccessful, UTFA files Association grievances. There are currently 14 such grievances active right now, on issues including workload, health and safety, academic freedom, and student evaluations (SETs).
Some of the largest and most complex of these are the pay equity and salary discrimination grievances, which underscore UTFA’s UTFA is committed to eradicating the root causes of significant, persistent, pervasive, and systemic pay gaps. Terezia and her team will continue to lead UTFA’s ongoing, complex, Association grievances on pay equity, salary discrimination, and student evaluations (SETs), especially when these are connected to gender, racialization, Indigeneity, LGBTQ2S, and/or disability.