BU, faculty reach tentative agreement

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This article was published 23/03/2024 (594 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A tentative agreement has been reached between Brandon University and the BU Faculty Association after almost a year of negotiations and the possibility of a strike. The last contract between the two parties expired March 31, 2023.

Faculty will vote next week on the tentative agreement. The union wouldn’t provide specifics on the proposed wage package, but did say they made gains in contract language, which had been a major item in the negotiations.

“There’s going to be a fair bit of new language, particularly around equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigenization,” Jon-Tomas Godin, BUFA’s vice-president of bargaining and grievance, told the Sun.

On Feb. 27, after a stalemate in bargaining, BU professors gave their union a strike mandate, with almost 87 per cent of voting faculty association members casting ballots. The strike was averted on March 3, and talks resumed.

Godin said Friday that it was the longest round of negotiations he’s seen in his 10 years at BU.

“The last couple of months were much more intense, and in the last two weeks in which we were operating under that strike mandate, there was a lot more going on. So, we did a lot of work on the collective agreement,” said Godin, who is also an associate professor with the School of Music.

It’s not yet known if the new contract will cover three or four years.

The bargaining team proposed overall wage increases totalling between seven and eight per cent over three years, and roughly 12 per cent for four years, BUFA president Gautam Srivastava told the Winnipeg Free Press on Feb. 17.

When asked Friday about wages, Godin said they were “definitely on our members’ minds,” but he wouldn’t share “numbers just yet” and added, “I’m going to wait until we do our ratification meeting on Monday to make any announcements on that front.”

Godin and the four other members of the bargaining team will present the union faculty members with the tentative agreement on Monday evening. They will have the opportunity to cast their electronic votes until noon on Thursday, March 28.

Godin described how the bargaining process was influenced by consultation with members, who said the language in their contract needed improving and updating.

“We did some very good work on improving process language for all kinds of things, from hiring people to how we do tenure promotion and evaluations.”

The language in the current contract was “quite old,” Godin said. Academic freedom was included, he added, because university staff is seeing challenges to it.

“We’re seeing challenges in the United States and also seeing it creep into Canadian universities where professors are fired for holding opinions that are unpopular. And so, we wanted to make sure that it didn’t start happening here,” Godin said.

Additional language is designed to be less reactive and more proactive, inclusive and equitable, he said, with protections for members whose jobs involve working with Indigenous students or working with the student accessibility office.

“We wanted to make sure that their time was protected, and that they couldn’t be sort of redeployed willy-nilly to do other things without making sure that there would be somebody else coming in to continue to serve the populations that they’re meant to serve. That’s the kind of language we were looking for,” Godin said.

During this last round of negotiations, there was a need to re-establish trust between the two sides, Godin said, adding, “Sometimes relationships go well, and sometimes they don’t go well.”

Godin said he was proud of the negotiating team and the work it did.

”We were very thorough; we were very prepared. And we really gelled as a unit, the five of us, to get this work done and to get us over the finish line.”

The Sun reached out to BU administration for a comment about the tentative agreement but received no response by press time.

However, the Sun received an email that was sent to BU students and administration from its communications department, stating the tentative agreement was “wonderful news.”

“The strong commitment by both teams allowed us to collaboratively reach a deal that was fully negotiated at the table, and a deal that both teams believe is fair for all and will positively transform our university,” said the email.

The union is expected to announce the results of the ratification vote on Thursday afternoon. If members decide to accept the contract, it will go through a proof-reading process with the final copy expected to be sent back to the membership by the end of May.

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

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