The College of New Caledonia board of governors on Friday approved a new contract for CNC faculty staff that will result in no wage increases.

But it won’t be long before contract negotiations between the board and faculty association resume. The new deal, which includes a few minor revisions to the previous contract, expires on March 31.

“We’re not pleased we’re ending up with what is essentially status quo, but we’re happy to have an agreement in place,” said David Rourke, president of the CNC Faculty Association.

“We thought it would be best to sign off on the agreement and look to aligning ourselves with the other workers in health care and education that will be looking at the 2012-2014 round. In this round, negotiations were protracted and often challenging due to the government’s net-zero mandate for post-secondary education workers.”

In 2010, the province introduced its net-zero mandate for all public sector unions and employees which means they had to settle two-year contracts at no additional cost to taxpayers. CNC faculty have been working without a contract since a three-year deal expired March 31, 2010.

“Unfortunately it’s taken us a long time and the reality is this contract provides for no cost incentives, so there wasn’t a lot of incentives for the unions to agree to net-zero,” said CNC president John Bowman.

“However, in the next round of bargaining the government has announced a new mandate, calling it co-operative gains, and it does allow for the possibility of negotiating some salary and benefit increases, provided the costs of those can be achieved through finding savings within the college’s existing budgets. That’s going to be a challenge we will try to meet.”

Sandra Rossi, CNC’s director of human resources, said the two sides have no plans to get back to the bargaining table for contract talks until the new contract expires in March. But Rourke doesn’t want to wait that long.

“We would prefer to negotiate our agreement before this contract expires,” Rourke said. “If we’re going to have protracted negotiation we want to see something achieved at the end rather than status quo.

“If the education and health care workers are not going to demand that the employer engage in free collective bargaining, then we are going to be in the same situation as we are at this time. Right now it’s negotiation by mandate and that was one of the big reasons why we’re near the contract’s expiration before we get an agreement. Nobody’s in a big hurry to settle if there’s nothing on the table.”