***** Final offers sent to Arbitrator *****
***** Bargaining Update 2012-12-21 *****
Today the Admin and SFUFA exchanged our final offers and sent them to
the Arbitrator. Our Arbitration will likely take place sometime in February
2013.
A copy of the SFUFA final offer can be viewed at
http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/SFUFA
There are two parts - a 23 page description of our offer and rationale
and a much longer (over 150 pages) set of tables and supporting
documents. You may wish to start only with the first part.
SFUFA's proposal is for
(a) 2%/1.95% over the life of the contract
(b) A four step remap of our salary grid that will increase floors and
ceiling by about $10,000. No member's salary would change during the
remap but it provides room for members to move to higher ceilings.
(c) Increasing psychological counselling benefit to $1000/year at 80%
of customary fees. This accounts for the remaining 0.05% in (a)
There are 3 items that have been agreed upon by the Admin and SFUFA
that will form part of both of our final offers
(d) New ranks of Teaching Professor and Professor of Professional
Practice. Negotiations on the policy changes to implement these will
start in the new year.
(e) Market Differential Review committee to examine salaries of
Librarians/Archivists. This will take place in the new year.
(f) Changes to Extended Health Benefits where the deductible will be
raised to $125 in exchange for a drug card and coverage of
contraceptives.
Full details of our proposal are in our brief with examples of how the
remap will work in practise.
Our Arbitration is called Final Offer Selection (FOS). In FOS, the
Arbitrator must choose, in its entirety, either the proposal from the
Administration or the proposal from SFUFA. There is NO opportunity in
FOS for the Arbitrator to "split the difference". It is generally
recommended that in FOS, proposals be small in scope, targeted, and
easily understood.
SFUFA's proposal is modest in scope and targeted to address serious
shortcomings in our average salaries and salary scales relative to
comparator universities. SFUFA members have demonstrated that their
performance is on par with the top Universities across Canada. We have
heard many times how pleased the University is with the strengths of
our members. Higher compensation is needed to attract and retain high
quality faculty and librarians. Our members deserve compensation
commensurate with our talents.
Our proposal will NOT solve the problems identified in our brief in a
single agreement. It will take many future agreements to reverse the
effects of many years of salary restraint imposed by PSEC. Our
proposal is a modest step on the road to redressing these inequities.
Our proposal aims to accomplish the following:
- Partially compensate for inflation during 2010-2012 when we received
0%/0%.
- Partially keep up with other institutions whose total ATB over the 4
year period (2010-2014) range around 6% to 8%.
- Partially reduce the continual erosion of our salaries relative to
our comparators due to a non-competitive salary scale and
non-competitive ceilings.
- Partially reflect the high caliber of members as reflected in
rankings of quality.
- Reduce the need for market differentials and retention awards, which
are currently used to attract and retain members whose salary is
inadequate when using the current salary scale.
SFUFA sees this proposal as part of a long-range plan to attack these
problems.
The Administration has asked that its final offer not be made public,
excepting for the three items previously agreed upon.
SFUFA believes that with negotiations having reached an impasse, any
protocols we might have accepted regarding table confidentiality would
at this point be void, especially after submission to the Arbitrator.
Nevertheless, SFUFA has agreed not to post the Admin's
final offer.
Generally speaking their proposal is consistent
with the PSEC mandate issued by the Province.
