{"id":26931,"date":"2025-06-04T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/?p=26931"},"modified":"2025-06-20T09:43:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T16:43:22","slug":"camosun-college-faculty-association-seeks-open-bargaining-approach-with-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2025\/06\/04\/camosun-college-faculty-association-seeks-open-bargaining-approach-with-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Camosun College Faculty Association seeks open-bargaining approach with college"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) is hoping to find a new approach with Camosun College in their objective of reaching an agreement on alternatives to layoffs: open bargaining. The union says that after violating the terms of the collective agreement between the two parties, the college has remained steadfast in their conduct; the CCFA is hoping to promote transparency and accountability with the open-bargaining process to bring greater attention to their advocacy.<\/p>\n

In a round of mediation on Friday, May 2, the college and the union were unable to reach a negotiation, says CCFA president Lynelle Yutani.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the ways in which the college was violating our collective agreement being pointed out to them, the mediator was not able to successfully negotiate any alternatives,\u201d says Yutani. \u201cSo unfortunately, Section 54 of the labour code requires the participants to be equally willing to find solutions. And I think that\u2019s the key, is that the faculty association was willing to work hard to find solutions, any alternatives to laying people off, and better alternatives to the choices that the college was making. The college\u2019s only excuse for everything that they were choosing to do was that they were out of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Camosun College Faculty Association president Lynelle Yutani wants to see a new approach to bargaining with the college (file photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yutani says the CCFA wants to ensure all members of the union are informed of and involved in the bargaining process. A more cooperative approach, she says, could be more constructive. (A spokesperson for Camosun College told Nexus<\/i> that they did not have anybody available for an interview for this story.)<\/p>\n

\u201cA union isn\u2019t a small group of people who do work for their members. A union is all of its members together, working together to get a good contract, or working together to agree on whatever compromises we need to make to get a contract. So, if we\u2019re all making those decisions together, if everyone has the ability to provide feedback and to make suggestions\u2026 then whatever we\u2019re left with, we\u2019ve all created together,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s something that if the employer was wise, I think that they would be interested in that open approach. Because if everybody agrees together that this is the best contract that we can come up with, then it allows everyone to work together, to uphold that contract, to make sure that it\u2019s followed, and to, I think, value that work that you\u2019ve done collaboratively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the college announced a projected $5-million deficit would result in layoffs, the union has filed five total grievances for agreement violations. Yutani says this issue is, in part, a product of misinterpretation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn, I would say, the past situations, when the college has gone through layoffs, it\u2019s been the faculty association\u2019s experience that the college followed the collective agreement as we understand it today,\u201d says Yutani. \u201cBut because there are virtually no humans employed at the college in human resources that were around for the last time layoffs happened, there\u2019s almost nobody there internally that can say, Hey, you guys are doing this wrong. And they come from different backgrounds in their interpretation of what our language means. They\u2019ve arrived at [this] from a different perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result of the former Liberal government\u2019s international student cap for all Canadian post-secondary institutions, Camosun College has suffered from a decrease in funding from enrolment. Despite advocacy for financial assistance across BC universities and colleges, the provincial government\u2019s 2025 budget has not allocated funding to ease this tension.<\/p>\n

Yutani says that in periods of financial austerity, as the college is currently confronting, workers disproportionately suffer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe signature move of employers [during financial strain] is to ask workers to do more with less, whether that\u2019s less resources, whether that\u2019s less time, whether that\u2019s less compensation,\u201d she says. \u201cBasically, we want everyone to see what it is that we\u2019re being asked to concede or to compromise over. And we want everyone to see\u2026 how reasonable what we\u2019re going for is\u2026 We don\u2019t want any of what we negotiate with our employer to be behind a closed door. If we\u2019re going to agree to it, then we\u2019re all going to know what the trade-offs were. And that means that when the employer comes and says, We want you to increase class sizes 20 percent, we think that that\u2019s something that the public, and especially the students, would want to know as well. \u201c<\/p>\n

Yutani would like to see clarity from Camosun; she says the college hasn\u2019t justified to the CCFA its response to the crisis. While an open-bargaining approach concerns some, she believes it will hold the college accountable.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften, the objection to open bargaining is, well, people won\u2019t understand what we mean when we say things like that, bargaining is supposed to be secret so that you can have a frank conversation,\u201d says Yutani. \u201cOur objection to that is that what\u2019s really happening there is that they don\u2019t want everyone to know what they\u2019re tabling and the purposes behind it. Because we want everybody to know not just what we\u2019re being asked, if we\u2019re being asked to give things up, but [also] why, what\u2019s the employer\u2019s reasons? Because they\u2019ve completely failed at providing rationale for their budgetary choices. They\u2019ve completely failed at giving us rationale for their layoff choices, and we\u2019re not going to allow them to hide their rationale for bargaining proposals behind closed doors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yutani believes that through collaboration, Camosun will work best through its deficit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just going to model the behaviours that we think our employer should have been displaying all along through this crisis,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019d be in a much different place because we would all understand the problem. We would all have had a stake in solving the problem, and we would all be working together on the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) is hoping to find a new approach with Camosun College in their objective of reaching an agreement on alternatives to layoffs: open bargaining. The union says that after violating the terms of the collective agreement between the two parties, the college has remained steadfast in their conduct; the CCFA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,333],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-june-4-2025"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26931"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26933,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26931\/revisions\/26933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}