Some history of the RRCFA

The instructors at Red River College have always believed the structure of our Union limits our power at the negotiating table.  This is not an intentional failing.  It is a result of the College moving to Board Governance and growing to a large organization.  Local 73 is one of the ten largest locals at the MGEU.  The Local is comprised of nearly equal numbers of Professional, Administrative and Support Staff (PASS) and Instructors.  Management uses those numbers to their advantage at bargaining knowing that the membership is equally divided.  PASS will not go on strike or use their union strength to advance issues that pertain only to Instructors and Instructors will not withhold their labour to advance gains at the bargaining table for PASS.  Management knows this and uses it.  

Instructors have been asking to restructure the bargaining unit since the early 2000s.  The issue has never gone away.  On April 21, 2008, Peter Olfert (the MGEU President of the day) wrote a letter to the Local 73 membership following a vote held to determine the appetite of the membership regarding splitting the bargaining unit.  The letter acknowledged that despite an unrealistically high bar set by the MGEU to ensure the vote was unsuccessful, Peter Olfert admitted the vote indicated a significant number wanted to split the bargaining unit.  A promise was made to explore the options.  Nothing happened.

In 2016 the MGEU, due to pressure from the RRCFA, held another vote to test the appetite of the membership regarding splitting the bargaining unit.  MGEU held information sessions that were strangely void of information about splitting the bargaining unit.  The RRCFA was asked to sit quietly during those meetings and mis-information was allowed to be shared from the floor unchecked by Union leaders because it served to undermine the argument to split.  

An example:  In a large information meeting held in a lecture theatre an instructor said “ If we bargain separately, management will just lock Instructors  out at the end of June when they no longer need us and call us back in August when classes start again.  There goes your paid vacation.”  

The MGEU representatives and staff in the room did not correct that statement and the RRCFA believes strongly that statement caused many instructors to shy away from a desire to bargain separately.   The RRCFA spent many years correcting that single belief.  Many, many times the RRCFA had to explain in writing and in words that management needs Instructors to take their holidays in the summer and that you cannot be locked out and on vacation at the same time. That if management locked Instructors out at the end of June and called them back at the end of August, faculty would return with 44 days of unused vacation and immediately begin accumulating more vacation days.  By the following summer, Instructors would have 88 days of unused vacation. That one statement, uncorrected because it served the MGEUs desire to maintain the status quo, swayed the vote in 2016 just enough. The vote was uncomfortably close and just shy of 60%  (sorry – don’t know the exact vote count) of the membership voted in favour of splitting the bargaining unit.

The vote is evidence that many Professional, administrative and support staff (PASS) believe they are better served if they have their own bargaining unit.  Unfortunately, there are many who, when pressed believe they are stronger with Instructors because Instructors are the more important/immediately needed employees in a College.  The RRCFA believes this is also misinformation that has been poorly addressed by the MGEU because it serves MGEU’s desire to maintain status quo.  If a group of employees believes they are less important in bargaining, the Union has failed them. If HALF the members in a Local believe they are less important than the other half and therefore cling to the current structure to ensure they remain safe, the Union has failed them. If PASS believe the College can operate without them, the MGEU has failed them.  

The Union has also failed to recognize the specific interests shared by the other HALF (approximately 900 members) of the Local.  HALF of the Local share one job description – there are roughly 900 instructors.  There are 78 other job classifications shared by nearly 900 other employees. Instructors share common employment interests inherent in their work.  Their needs are diluted in the current bargaining structure just as the needs of PASS are diluted. The following  are major issues that management has successfully ignored, prolonged, given lip service and used the Union’s structure to avoid addressing.

1. In our latest round of bargaining, management presented a final offer that included something for instructors.  The offer was rejected.  The offer that was ratified was void of the (something for instructors) because management knew PASS would likely push it through ratification. This is not the fault of PASS.  It is the strategic advantage management has due to the structure of the Union. Management uses the structure to deny specific needs of both instructors and PASS.

2. The JJEC is an article in the collective agreement (Article 69).  It is a long-standing HR mechanism for new positions to be evaluated for salary when newly created.  It is also a mechanism for all staff (non-instructional) to have their positions reviewed when they believe the scope of their position has crept up and they now have greater responsibility and are therefore entitled to an increase in their salary.    In 2016, instructors had a new job description introduced and all instructors were required to sign the job description.  The new description was a five-paged document and replaced the two-page document Instructors had for years.  Because instructors were not included in the JJEC, there was no means to ask for a salary increase due to the new job description that formalized the increased responsibilities and complexities of an instructor position. Instructors simply got new job description and the same increases won in bargaining (0%).  

3. Instructor workload is very poorly defined.  Article 58 “Academic Coordinator” allows management to arbitrarily designate Instructors to perform administrative duties and pay an allowance of $2900.00 and be given a reduced instructional load.  This means management is allowed to off-load administrative and, in some cases, management responsibilities to Instructors.  This causes the Instructional responsibility to be distributed to other Instructors.  The RRCFA believes that Instructional roles are poorly defined and management uses this lack of clarity to reward some instructors with extra pay to do the administrative work of management. 

Currently, we have many instructors who get paid overtime annually for teaching over 800 contact hours.  This often happens in trades areas.  We have other departments where the majority of instructors have less than 400 contact hours annually and some of those have fewer hours and get paid the academic coordinator stipend.  There are departments that routinely have difficulty assigning all the contact hours to the number of instructors available. This caused some individual courses to be split across two or more instructors to avoid any one instructor being put in an overtime situation.  Article 62:05(n) (see below) addresses this issue but does not address the bigger issue of inequitable distribution of instructor positions across College departments.

62:05(n) Individual sections of a course will not be shared across more than one (1) Instructor for the purpose of complying with Article 62:05(j). (Added to the CBA ended in 2021)

4. In 2016, the RRCFA members attended the MGEU Local 73 annual meeting and elected many Instructors to the Local 73 executive.  During the next round of bargaining the Union representatives tabled their most important proposal behind wages.  The proposal was to have management make available to the College community a list of all Instructor workloads with contact hours.  The proposal required that the data not be aggregate data - if a department had 20 instructors, then 20 workloads with contact hours (without names) would be posted.  The goal was to force management to better distribute the instructional workload as defined in 62:05. The workloads are to be reasonable and fair but Instructors were unable to determine what was reasonable and fair because they did not have adequate information and there were so many appointed coordinators.  Further, the contact hours to be distributed across instructors in some departments seemed to be significantly more than in other departments.  Instructor workloads within and across departments were significantly unequal. 

The Union had a strike mandate.  Management knew HALF of the bargaining unit would not go on strike to ensure faculty workloads were posted publicly.  The result in bargaining was the Letter of Intent on Instructor Workload Taskforce.  This Taskforce was to define contact hours so when management shared the Instructor workload data college-wide, the information reflected a common understanding of an instructor’s workload.  The Union agreed to the taskforce to build a tool using a common understanding of an instructor’s workload.  It was the best we could achieve at the time BUT, the TOOL has become the end goal rather than the shared data on instructor workloads.

5. Page 136 of the current Collective Agreement is the latest Letter of Intent “Faculty Workload Assignment Implementation Advisory Group”.  It is clear in this letter of intent that the focus of the initiative is the workload tool for ASSIGNING instructional workload.  There is no longer any discussion of publicly posting instructor workloads accessible for the entire college community.  The public posting of workloads was to ensure management distributed the work fairly within and across departments.  The RRCFA believes the MGEU dropped the ball on this initiative and has allowed management to shift the focus to building a tool for distributing individual instructor workload.  The RRCFA believes this is another example of management using the structure of the Local 73 to prolong issues to ensure they fall off the radar. 

6. We are planning to verify that the following is true but we understand that RRC instructors are among the LOWEST paid instructors in the country.

7. Every other Unionized post-secondary institution across Canada has faculty and instructional staff bargaining separately from PASS except in Manitoba where MGEU represents the three Colleges.

8. Local 73 bargaining has required mediation in nearly EVERY round of bargaining for 30 years.  The shortest bargaining period in recent memory has been 9 months.  The current collective agreement took two years to negotiate and required the standard mediation to achieve ratification. This is a strong indicator that something is wrong.  The RRCFA believe the structure of our Union is the problem and management uses it to their advantage.