This fall, close to 300 CIEA faculty members who hold temporary positions will be in regular ongoing positions as a result of bargaining efforts by the College Institute Educators' Association of British Columbia.

In what CIEA president Maureen Shaw calls a historic development, many previously temporary faculty members will now have full access to the rights and benefits of the collective agreement.

Newly "regularized" faculty will receive salary on the provincial scale, health and welfare benefits for 12 months of the year, and other rights and benefits such as professional development and severance pay.

"In making faculty regularization a bargaining priority and persisting in our efforts at the provincial and local levels, we have bucked the worldwide trend towards casualization of academic work," Shaw said.

In the 1990s, more than 40 per cent of faculty members in BC's college, university-college, institute and agency system held temporary positions.

These positions often provided minimal or no benefits, little preparation time or support, no professional development time and much lower salary levels than those of regular faculty members.

Faculty members could spend years in temporary positions and were often laid off every summer, only to be rehired at the last minute for the next fall term. They frequently put together the equivalent of a full-time position by working at more than one post-secondary institution.

"The impact of these conditions on faculty members as individuals was enormous," Shaw said, "as they struggled to maintain a high quality of education for students."

After many years of a concerted drive by CIEA to improve compensation and job security for part-time and temporary faculty, the effort is paying off. Local negotiations on the subject of job security for temporary faculty have taken place under the umbrella of a provincial agreement and have led to settlements in six of seven CIEA locals.

Five university-college locals -- University College of the Cariboo Faculty Association (Local 2), Kwantlen Faculty Association (Local 5), University College of the Fraser Valley Faculty & Staff Association (Local 7), Malaspina Faculty Association (Local 8), Okanagan University College Faculty Association (Local 9) -- as well as the College of the Rockies Faculty Association (Local 6) have concluded negotiations. The Faculty Association of the College of New Caledonia (Local 3) hopes that regularization negotiations will be concluded in October.

CIEA's success in assuring regular work for faculty is the result of a historic common agreement signed in October 1998 between a joint union committee of 16 CIEA locals and seven instructor locals of the British Columbia Government and Service Employees' Union and an employers' bargaining committee representing 16 post-secondary institutions in British Columbia.

Participating locals now have a collective agreement that includes the common agreement and their local agreement.

The common agreement establishes a single province-wide salary scale and identifies a process for bargaining "regularization" provisions at a local level.

The agreement sets out parameters for locals to bargain local provisions for regularizing temporary part-time and full-time faculty members.

Specifically, the agreement states that faculty members who work at least 50 per cent of a full-time workload for two consecutive years where the workload is expected to continue in the third year, will now be converted to regular faculty members with salary, health and welfare benefits, and other rights and benefits of the collective agreement based on equity with the full-time regular faculty.

CIEA locals who believed that their regularization provisions needed to be improved according to the provisions of the common agreement opened negotiations with local employers.

The process has taken almost two years, but the last agreement is now almost complete. As a result, hundreds of CIEA faculty members have seen their wages and job security significantly improved. In addition, many BCGEU instructors will also be regularized this fall.

For many years, CIEA has championed the cause of temporary faculty members.

CIEA's committee on the status of non-regular faculty has been working for a decade to assist in coordination of initiatives to improve the lot of non-regular faculty. As a result of this committee's work over the years, CIEA policy and bargaining positions have strongly supported the right to equity for non-regular faculty members.

Prior to the provincially supported regularization drive, many CIEA locals had successfully bargained significant improvements to conditions for non-regular faculty and some have made progress in ensuring that faculty and positions are regularized in a timely manner.

The latest provincial initiative is the most significant, and will result in greater equity of pay and benefits and fair access to ongoing work for faculty in the BC college, university-college, institute and agency system.

The full text of the common agreement can be viewed at www.ciea.bc.ca.

Standing Together: One Prof's Story

Tom Friedman's path to a regular position is a common one in the post-secondary education system internationally. He began with a temporary contract, believing that it would turn into secure employment in a timely manner, only to find that one can be temporary for a long time in the world of academia.

Shortly after finishing his PhD in 1993, Tom was hired on a part-time temporary contract at the University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, B.C. Seven years later, thanks to the common agreement, which enabled a regularization settlement at his local, he is about to receive a letter of appointment, making him a permanent, regularized faculty member.

Tom accepted the UCC position because, like many academics, his wife was also looking for a teaching job in a post-secondary institution. She also took a job as a temporary instructor, becoming permanent in 1995.

Tom's UCC position was poorly paid relative to faculty members who had permanent positions and full teaching loads. Each April he was laid off, and usually didn't know whether or not he would be hired in the fall, or how much work would be available in the fall if he was hired. He had no benefit coverage until he became a full-time temporary instructor. However, even then, his health and welfare benefits did not cover him during the periods of summer layoffs. Many other rights and benefits of the collective agreement such as professional development time, education leave, and vacation entitlement were either reduced or nonexistent.

Within a year of arriving at UCC, he realized that the collective agreement needed improving and he became active in his union. He joined CIEA's committee on the status of non-regular faculty and eventually served as chair. Tom continued his activism at the local and provincial levels. He became the chair of CIEA's bargaining coordination and review committee and last spring, was elected president of his local, University College of the Cariboo Faculty Association (CIEA Local 2). He was actively involved in bargaining the common agreement and in local regularization negotiations.

While his activism started with self-interest, Tom says that he quickly came to appreciate the broader picture for his colleagues. He was aware of the variation in disciplines with some, such as the sciences, having a higher proportion of regular faculty members. His motto is to maintain solidarity and to bargain improved conditions for everyone.