RAAS Report
RAAS REPORT
Third Anniversary Edition 🥳
Friday, February 26, 2021
PRESIDENT’S UPDATE
We all have a great deal to celebrate! This past month marked our third birthday as RAAS. Together, we have built an Association, certified as a union, negotiated our first collective agreement, and so much more. On February 5th (just shy of our 3rd birthday) we ratified our Collective Agreement by a vote of 97%! We should celebrate having built a community among us to define and protect our working conditions.
Of course, we have a great deal of work before us. Our immediate goal is to focus on the implementation of the agreement. While we are aware that it will take time to regularize new processes, the agreement is in effect right now. We will be taking steps to highlight aspects of the agreement that require action with the Employer, as well as raising sections of immediate concern for RAAS members. We encourage you to review the agreement often and to raise concerns regarding its implementation with any member of the RAAS Executive. Remember, you can find the Collective Agreement on our website. A few sections to highlight right now:
Section 33 – Faculty Compensation: The Employer has informed us that retroactive pay will be provided in the March payroll. If you received satisfactory in last year's APR process you will receive your Progression Through the Ranks retroactive pay of $4,006 (unless you are at one of the thresholds). You will be receiving additional increases as of May 1, 2021, which we will highlight closer to the time. Please check the pay floors/threshold for your category of employment in the chart provided in Section 33. If you are below floor due as a tenure-track/tenured employee, then you should be receiving (or may have already received) retroactive pay to the date of tenure/promotion this past year (likely July 1, 2020). If you are below the floor as a lecturer, then you should be receiving retroactive pay to January 1, 2021 to bring you to the floor pay with the new workload of 80% teaching and 20% service for lecturers.
Section 4 – Association Dues and Payroll Deduction: The Employer has confirmed that they will instruct campus payroll to deduct our dues rate of .8% as of the March payroll. Please refer to my informational email from last week for more details about Association Dues. The dues rate of .8% was voted upon by the membership. Prior to ratification, we had been paying the FAUW rate of .525%, which left us with some money for our work only because FAUW generously did not take their portion after paying OCUFA and CAUT on our behalf. Now that we have ratified our agreement, FAUW will rightfully keep the full .525% so we require the .8% due rate to ensure we have at least a small amount of money to do our work. You may be interested to know that .8% is a very low dues rate relative to all other universities in Canada.
Section 16.6.1 – Teaching Reduction: We have raised with the Employer that this year's applications for course releases for tenure folk should abide by this section. The section outlines that should a member have a robust research agenda then they are entitled to a 1 course reduction. Please note that research is broadly defined. This clause is not subject to finances nor is robust research limited to individual interpretation. The application for course release will need to be changed next year and we will encourage all tenure folk with robust research agendas to apply for the teaching reduction. A new provision under the same section pertains to lecturers. If lecturers are conducting research pertaining to their teaching, they may apply to have their research counted as service. I have flagged with our President that this application process needs to be implemented.
Section 2.5 – Recognition of Service. This section of the agreement notes that service to RAAS is considered service to the University. We encourage all the many RAAS members who do incredible service for our Association to highlight this work as part of this year's APR. Please also note that APR (what will be Annual Review next year) is a separate process from Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion, so should be treated as such. We encourage any member up for renewal, tenure, or promotion to submit their APR application as required.
Section 35 – Pension Plan and Share Benefit Programs: This section outlines that we follow the benefits program at the University of Waterloo. Thanks to the incredible work of our FAUW colleagues we will all now enjoy a stronger benefits package, including our first coverage for vision care. Please read more about the FAUW settlement in this report. We should note that our collective agreement has leaves that are not tied to UW. As such, we do not benefit from the increased bereavement leave negotiated by FAUW. This requires attention in our next round of bargaining.
There is so much more to discuss, but we will leave it for the next RAAS Report. If you have not already done so, please accept the Outlook invitation sent for our Annual General Meeting on Tuesday, March 30th from 1-3pm via Zoom. Both the link and agenda will be sent closer to the date. As always, please be in touch with any member of the RAAS Executive should you have questions or concerns about your working conditions.
Wishing you all well as we start to see some early signs of Spring coming...
Kristina Llewellyn
RAAS President
BRASS TACKS AND RAAS FAQs
Q: What kinds of things can RAAS help me with?
As the sole bargaining agent for regular faculty at Renison, RAAS has a duty to negotiate the terms and conditions of our work. Now that we have a Collective Agreement, the work of RAAS shifts to maintaining its integrity. Questions that relate directly to the Collective Agreement are best directed to ​members of the RAAS executive. Among other things, tenure and promotion, performance evaluation, discipline, and leaves are covered by the Collective Agreement.
Routine administrative questions unrelated to the Collective Agreement should be directed, as ever, to the appropriate office at Renison or UW, as the case may be.
If you would like to know how much money is left in a research fund administered by Renison, you should contact the Finance Office.
If you would like to know about the status of your pension, you should contact the Pensions Office at the University of Waterloo.
If you require health-related support or services, you should contact Occupational Health at the University of Waterloo.
If you have a question about your GroupNet benefits, you should contact the Human Resources Office at the University of Waterloo.
Jason Blokhuis
RAAS Grievance Officer
SATIRE
New Zoom filter adds pants, will to live
Chris Cannon, The Beaverton (February 22, 2021)
Zoom has announced a line of visual filters for the hot new market of customers who show up to meetings wondering what’s even the point anymore. The new filters include a selection of sweatpants, a pair of Hello Kitty sunglasses that lets everyone know you’re driven to succeed, and cutting-edge Clearview AI facial recognition software that provides a convincing facsimile of the will to endure one more day. “We are always researching how to address our customers’ needs,” Zoom Chairman and CEO Eric Yuan told reporters after the announcement. “Lately those needs have grown to include simulations of work attire and the ability to hide one’s cold, dead eyes from their colleagues.”
NOT SATIRE [debatable -ed.]
The Path to Failure in Academe: A Tragedy in Multiple Acts
S.M. Gavazzi, D.V. Rosowsky and C. Pezeshki, Inside Higher Ed (January 29, 2021)
More than 50 years ago, Jay Haley wrote an essay entitled “The Art of Being a Failure as a Therapist,” which cataloged the many and varied steps a clinician could take to assure a complete lack of success in work with clients... Haley wrote that “too much emphasis has been placed upon how to succeed as a therapist, and too little has been written about how to fail.” Similarly, we believe that way too much ink has been spilled by writers attempting to explain how higher education will thrive in the time of coronavirus... Hence, it is our intention to illustrate the path that administrators and faculty members alike can take to guarantee the failure of their university.
BOARD UPDATE
There is one item to report from this past Wednesday’s Board meeting. The Board ratified the amendment of by-law 4.1 to increase the number of Regular Faculty Representatives from one to two. I’ve reached out to Lisa Kessig regarding the process of submitting nominations and generating a WATVOTE election by main campus. My hope is that our second member will be elected in time to attend the next Board meeting on March 31, 2021.
Edwin Ng
Faculty Board Representative
FAUW COUNCIL UPDATE
The most recent meetings of the FAUW Council of Representatives have all focused on the contract negotiations, which went to mediation at the beginning of February. Since the last council meeting, FAUW and UW reached a contract agreement effective May 2021-2024. Key elements of the agreement include enhanced benefits for eye care, compassionate care, and bereavement leave as well as 1% annual salary increases. Contract lecturers will also be able to carry two weeks' vacation leave forward across academic years. Equity data will be gathered on faculty as a part of this agreement, and there is a promise to conduct a salary anomaly exercise using the results. For a fuller account and the text of the agreement, please see the FAUW News item below.
Meg Gibson
Renison Representative
CAUT NEWS
RAAS is a member of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), a nation-wide association of our peers.
Report highlights struggling education sector
CAUT News (February 16, 2021)
Federal and provincial governments need to step up to fix serious issues in post-secondary education (PSE), says a new coalition representing over one million students and workers. In a report released today, the coalition outlines significant challenges facing the sector and lays out a comprehensive plan to strengthen post-secondary education as key to the pandemic response and recovery.
OCUFA NEWS
RAAS is a member of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), a province-wide association of our peers.
Being Black on Campus: Why students, staff and faculty say universities are failing them
Asha Tomlinson, Lisa Mayor, Nazim Baksh, CBC News (February 24, 2021)
Students, staff and faculty at some of Canada's largest universities say they have experienced anti-Black racism on campus, and that they were targeted if they spoke out about their treatment, an investigation by The Fifth Estate has found.
The ugly side of performance-based funding for universities [Is there an attractive side? –ed.]
Marc Spooner, Ontario Higher Ed (February 22, 2021)
With the economic and labour disruption wrought by COVID-19, for a time it seemed Ontario and Alberta had realized the folly of judging their universities’ performance against metrics over which the universities themselves had little or no control. Refreshingly, both provinces made an about-face and rightly pressed pause on their plans. However, this apparent change of heart was short-lived.
LU woes highlight flaws in post-secondary system
Timmins Daily Press (February 21, 2021)
There’s no debating that the province needs a high-quality, innovative and accessible educational system to compete economically. Yet, it’s just as certain that taxpayers aren’t getting the best bang for their bucks in the current system, which is burdened with waste and a sizeable number of vested interests who are keen to protect their turf or even to expand it. That’s especially true of those who inhabit the thicket of senior administration at many schools.
Huron president says college hopes to remain a Western affiliate after split [Brexit-style? -ed.]
Kirat Walia, Western Gazette (February 19, 2021)
Huron’s president said the college plans to remain a Western University affiliate while separating its academics and handing out its own degrees, beginning with the class of 2026. If the Huron University College community and their Board of Governors, as well as Western administrators, approve the proposal, Huron would ask Western for full control over its academic standards within its own Senate — meaning the college would award degrees under their own name instead of Western’s.
Federated universities also in the crosshairs as part of LU’s CCAA process
Heidi Ulrichsen, Sudbury.com (February 22, 2021)
Although not much attention has been paid to the topic so far, Laurentian University intends to “review and restructure” its relationship with the federated universities operating on campus — Huntington University, Thorneloe University and the University of Sudbury. Laurentian is taking these actions after declaring itself insolvent and announcing plans to restructure with a deadline of April 30 under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA).
Solidarity with the Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA)
Jenny J.H. Ahn, Executive Director, OCUFA (February 22, 2021)
I am reaching out to you today to encourage you to participate in a social media week of action in support of LUFA-APPUL beginning Monday, February 22 and continuing all week. Using the hashtags #HumansofLU and #FundLU, let’s take to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) to share stories of how Laurentian's strength comes from the people who choose to teach, conduct research, work, and learn at Laurentian.
Alternatively, explain the damage the CCAA proceedings cause to the fabric of university education in Ontario and demand that Ontario's Minister of Colleges and Universities @RossRomanoSSM and the provincial government step in a provide long-term, stable funding to secure Laurentian’s future. Your activity on social media will help support LUFA and OCUFA, as we hold a province-wide advocacy week where faculty associations across the province will be speaking to their MPPs about the Laurentian CCAA proceedings. Together, let’s showcase the strength of Laurentian!
(Photo credit: Kristina Llewellyn)
This is a screenshot from a webinar on February 24 with Speaker Ted Arnott,
FAUW president Dan Brown, and Arshi Shaikh and Chris Hiller from RAAS.
FAUW NEWS
RAAS has a service agreement with the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo (FAUW), a campus-wide association of our peers
UW-FAUW Salary Settlement Reached (2021-2024)
FAUW News (February 22, 2021)
FAUW is happy to announce that we have reached a three-year salary settlement with the UW administration, effective May 1, 2021. This round of negotiations posed some unique challenges: meeting via video conferencing, the added stressors of the pandemic, and the unusual constraints of Bill 124, which restricts the University’s total spending on compensation to a 1% increase each year for three years. Despite these challenges, we’ve achieved a well-rounded settlement with significant improvements for our members, including our first eye-care and compassionate care benefits, and a significant expansion to bereavement leave, especially for the (hopefully very rare) cases when a member's spouse or child dies.
One of our objectives was to improve working conditions for lecturers and the settlement includes a change to the Memorandum of Agreement to allow lecturers working all three terms in a year to carry forward two weeks of vacation each year that will not expire until their next non-teaching term. FAUW president Dan Brown notes that “we’ve begun making significant gains in improving the working conditions of lecturers in the last few years, and this is just one more step in an ongoing effort that will continue with our work on policies 76 and 77 this year.” The settlement also includes a promise to start collecting equity data on faculty (a project that is already underway) by the end of 2021, including with respect to race and Indigenous identity, and a promise to do a salary anomaly assessment after that data has been collected with retroactive salary adjustments if needed. We are particularly pleased with these compassionate care and equity items and would like to thank the many FAUW members who have informed, encouraged, and supported our efforts on these fronts, both within and beyond formal negotiations.
Kathy Hogarth, special advisor to FAUW on racism and anti-racism, remarks that “the move to collect equity data is a significant step on the part of the university that is long overdue. While seemingly small, this act sets in motion a series of other positive steps attending to the equity needs of our members.” Jay Dolmage, chair of FAUW’s Equity Committee, adds that “it is encouraging to see the University commit to employment equity beyond gender. Waterloo will join peer institutions in identifying and resolving additional systemic inequities in University salary data on the basis of (and not limited to) race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity."  Read the full 2021-2024 salary settlement (PDF)