CUPE 3903, the union representing contract faculty, teaching assistants, and graduate and research assistants at York, is going to be re-bargaining their collective agreement with the university next year.
Once the agreement expires on August 31, 2014, either CUPE or the university could file for the notice of bargaining as early as March 2014.
Faiz Ahmed, chairperson of CUPE 3903, says the union is months away from having a specific mandate, but they are surveying their members to get a broader sense of what issues are relevant to its membership.
“Once we know the issues that are present within our membership, we are going to create a bargaining committee, and then we will serve notice to the university,” says Ahmed. “We are not expecting the notice to either be in February, March, or April; it is too early to tell at this point.”
The membership survey is going to be sent to CUPE members in December with the union going through the data in January.
Apart from these surveys, CUPE will also be holding a town hall meeting for its membership on November 20 discussing the university’s recent decision to introduce teaching-stream appointments and what impact this will have on contract faculty.
Ahmed says they are holding the town hall because CUPE is interested in hearing what contract faculty’s concerns are about York’s decision to hire teaching-stream professors only.
“We want clarification as to what exactly this means and what this is going to mean for departments, hiring additional teaching staff, and how that impacts our contract faculty,” says Ahmed. “We just want to make sure our members and contract faculty are to continue working.”
Although still early, Ahmed says one of the hot button issues is the increase of tuition fees for international graduate students that was raised in the 2013-2014 year.
“The university is saying that increases were allowed because it doesn’t conflict with our collective agreement, which clearly says that if you increase fees for graduate students, the university has to reimburse the graduate student of those fees,” says Ahmed. “There has been a fee applied to the university from the province regarding students and what they’re doing is putting it on graduates students themselves.”
York’s administration and CUPE 3903 had a meeting on November 11 to discuss this issue.
Ahmed says the tuition increase has gone up 2.5 per cent this year, and there is nothing stopping the university from increasing fees even further. This is definitely an issue CUPE is going to have to address, he says.
“This is something that a lot of international students are upset about, and we know that [if] they’re are going to do it to the international graduate students, then it’s most likely eventually going to happen to all the other students,” says Ahmed. “Although it’s still early, and I can’t say this is going to be a bargaining issue, but this is definitely a hot topic button currently.”
Joanne Rider of York media says the CUPE 3903 agreements do expire on August 31, 2014 but at this point, it is too early for the university to make a comment on the issue.
Building up to the negotiation, CUPE will be continuing to have general membership meetings each month to get a sense of the issues that are present within it membership.
Ahmed says the mandate or general set of issues CUPE will be negotiating will be decided collectively during these general membership meetings, which are open to all members.
“During these meetings, we discuss issues and actions that we want moved forward collectively, which include the bargaining notice,” says Ahmed. “So to make decisions, we need to unilaterally agree upon something.”
Hamid Adem
News Editor
