Four-year collective agreements between the University of Prince Edward Island Faculty Association (UPEIFA) and the school have been ratified in resounding votes by approximately 400 academic staff members represented by the union.
The UPEIFA bargaining unit #1 which includes faculty members, librarians, sessional instructors and clinical nursing instructors voted 99.4% in favour, while the second unit of clinical veterinary professionals voted 100% for the deal.
“By working together, we have achieved a fair and equitable agreement for our members that puts our salary base and benefits on a competitive footing with our colleagues from other Atlantic provinces,” said faculty association president Betty Jeffery.
Members will receive a 7.25% net salary increase over four years, as well as a 3% top-up in year one to offset increased individual contributions to the pension plan, which will now average 9.04% annually.
Announcement of the agreement came jointly from the faculty association and the university’s administration, and highlighted the commitment by the parties to work co-operatively for a fair deal, as well as acknowledging the importance of solving the pension shortfall.
Jeffery emphasized that the faculty association has worked for the past five years with other unions on campus toward improving the pension plan, and that university employees belonging to those unions will benefit from the gains negotiated by UPEIFA.
“We stood in solidarity with the other campus unions to ensure that what the UPEIFA bargaining units received on the salary and pension front was offered to the other campus unions,” she said.
Two units of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and one of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represent administrative assistants, cleaners, campus security police, and library technicians among others, have since also ratified the salary and pension offer.
The UPEI agreements were ratified within three months of the expiry of the former contracts, in contrast to stalled negotiations at another Atlantic province university — Mount Saint Vincent in Halifax — where the faculty association representing 147 faculty, librarians and lab instructors has been without a contract since July 1, 2012.
Members of the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association voted strongly in favour of strike action recently after 85 scheduled hours of negotiations produced little progress toward agreement on several significant areas including wages, benefits, retirement incentives and leaves.
Both sides have now agreed to turn to a conciliator in an effort to reach a new collective agreement, but the schedule for future meetings remains under discussion at a “glacial pace” according to Michael MacMillan, a professor in the school’s Department of Political & Canadian Studies, and chair of the association’s bargaining communications committee.
“(It’s) a decidedly desultory pace and we continue to push for more frequent meetings to expedite a settlement,” he said.
The university’s board of governors has proposed meetings at a rate of a half-day per week for the last three weeks of November which MacMillan said “illustrates the on-going foot-dragging that has characterized our administration’s approach to this whole negotiation process.”
He says union members remain frustrated in their desire to see an agreement reached in “something approaching a timely fashion,” but are hopeful the conciliator will work to accelerate the process.