Merry Christmas, UNBC faculty.
Here's your lump of coal.
Arbitrator Stanley Lanyon has brought down a binding five-year contract on the university, offering a 10 per cent wage increase over five years.
That boils down to a paltry .5 per cent increase over the university's final offer to faculty, which was the 5.5 per cent maximum allowed under the provincial government's wage increase guidelines and another four per cent in "merit pay" and "career development increments."
From the faculty perspective, this must be a bitterly disappointing result. They got nowhere near the "sector-norm agreement" they had been demanding, seeking similar pay and benefits to what their colleagues receive at similar-sized universities across Canada.They went on strike for two weeks in March, giving up four per cent of their gross annual salary, for what boils down to an extra 0.5 per cent over five years. Put more cruelly, they won't make that up over the life of the agreement. To add insult to injury, what the university saved during the strike will not go to UNBC but back into provincial coffers.
Lanyon largely dismissed most of the arguments faculty made in their submission to justify their requests. "I have concluded that the greatest weight should be assigned to provincial comparators, followed to a lesser degree by the national or extra-provincial comparators," he wrote, rejecting faculty's demand for UNBC to fall in line with places like the University of Lethbridge and the University of Regina.
He also didn't bite on the idea of a salary grid. "The Faculty Association frankly
acknowledges that a junior member may receive no increase under its salary grid proposal
while a senior member may receive as much as $20,000 or more a year in increased salary," he wrote. " I have concluded that I will not award a Salary Grid at UNBC. Such a grid system does not exist in British Columbia."
Lanyon didn't give faculty much on the benefits front, either.
While he agreed to extend the tuition waiver to cover same sex spouses, common law spouses and stepchildren of faculty members, he declined to include part-time faculty, extend the benefit for eight years after the faculty member's retirement or death and allow the waiver to cover continuing studies or the MBA program.
He expanded the sick leave policy to include mental illness and alcohol and drug addiction but ignored faculty's request for paid sick leave to increase from 60 to 180 days, a top-up payment above the Worksafe compensation to get members to 100 per cent of their salary, a two-year leave of absence for health reasons outside of long-term disability and a "carry forward credit" for sick leave during a leave of absence for academic or professional reasons.
This "five year agreement will provide the parties with stability, and an opportunity to develop a relationship outside the context of adversarial bargaining," wrote Lanyon near the end of his 53-page decision.
That would be nice to see before this collective agreement expires in 2019 but it's hard to imagine how that will occur under an agreement that so dramatically falls in favour of university administration. Lanyon's findings did nothing to address faculty's core frustration that their wages continue to fall further and further behind their fellow academics across Canada and offered no incentive for UNBC to meaningfully address that frustration at any time between now and 2019.
The university itself will pay for this one-sided deal in the long-term, however.
UNBC will increasingly not be able to recruit elite young academics, nor will it be able to retain the ones it does attract. Many of the best and brightest professors will leave for better pay elsewhere, taking the best and brightest students with them, leaving behind some resentful faculty. Meanwhile, the university will continue to suffer from declining enrolment, decreasing government support and more cost-cutting, issues administration has already identified as major concerns going forward.
These ingredients do not lead to a growing, prosperous university. Rather, they combine into a bitter stew for the slow and inevitable decline of UNBC and future labour strife.
