Conflicts between the Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) and Camosun College are continuing as the college faces financial struggles in the wake of lost revenue from international-student restrictions and the CCFA attempts to mitigate impact on faculty.
The latest round of bargaining between the two groups was not successful, according to CCFA president Lynelle Yutani.
Yutani says that the college claimed it couldn’t bargain about money until it has a mandate from the government, and says that Camosun was seeking a number of concessions that would be very costly to CCFA members.
“We didn’t want to try and bargain without knowing how much money was on the table,” says Yutani. “And the only option that seemed reasonable at that time was for us to refer bargaining to arbitration. So we did that. And the employer, unsurprisingly, basically claimed that we were bargaining in bad faith, which means that we weren’t willing to negotiate on what they offered. Our argument to that is: we can’t negotiate with what they offered because it doesn’t include anything monetary… If we’re going to give up rights for something or anything, we need to know what we’re going to gain, whether that’s money or a trade-off in rights, but that’s not what their package looked like.” (Camosun College declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Yutani says that the college filed a complaint against the CCFA over bad faith bargaining, and the CCFA then filed a counterclaim of bad faith against the college. As of the time of writing this story, the CCFA had received the college’s response to its counterclaim and had until August 28 (after print time for this issue) to submit its response.
“After that point in time, the labour board will take basically both sides of the stories and decide how they’re going to rule,” she says. “If they rule that there was a bad faith component, depending on which party—and sometimes there can be on both parties, that’s not unheard of, either—then they instruct us in what we do next, whether that’s returning to the bargaining table to negotiate, going to mediation, or proceeding to arbitration. So basically, we’ll have a decision at some point, presumably in September, [about] what we’re supposed to do next.”
Among the priorities for the CCFA are a stronger focus and commitment on Indigenization from the college, issues around job security, wages and benefits, and working conditions.
“And I think what’s really important for students to know is that when your instructor’s working conditions are good, your learning conditions will be better,” says Yutani. “When the instructor’s needs are met, then they’re better able to show up and meet students’ needs. So we just want to improve our members’ working conditions.”
The CCFA also wants the college to be more open about their decision-making processes.
“So, Nexus has followed this journey of this whole past year and a half, where the college made so many decisions, sometimes very secretively, and they negatively affected students, and they’re still negatively affecting students,” says Yutani. “We’ve got courses and programs that have fewer or cancelled sections. There’s a lot less opportunity for students. And we’re still unable to tell whether or not they did that truly on the basis of the financial picture.”
Yutani says that the answers to a lot of the problems between the two organizations comes down to transparency and accountability.
“If I look back at the last year, if I were to just say the entire, maybe two years… maybe the solutions would be if we just had more transparency and accountability across the board, I think we could solve a lot of the problems and challenges together that we face,” she says. “And until some external force demands that, I think we’re going to continue having these sorts of issues and be in these tensions for a while.”