Bargaining Updates

From your FSA Bargaining Team: Colin Jones (Chief Negotiator), Terry Gordon, Zaa Joseph, Kenzie Woodbridge, Tom Lane, and Maria Angerilli (Operations & HR Director).  

*****Contract has been ratified and is now in effect*****

In the late afternoon of June 15, 2023, your Bargaining Team reached a tentative agreement with the employer. Following the bargaining process, the agreement will now be presented to you, the FSA membership, for ratification. The Institute’s Board of Governors and province’s Public Sector Employer’s Association will also have to ratify the deal. The Bargaining Team recommends that members vote to ratify the new collective agreement.

Presentation to the Membership

An FSA Member Town Hall, scheduled on Wednesday, June 28, 2:30-4:30pm (Zoom), will provide a walk-through of the tentative agreement and an opportunity to address questions to our Bargaining Team. Members will receive an invitation through Outlook. The Town Hall will not be recorded, however slides and notes will be available after the presentation. We will also be holding a Zoom Q&A Office Hour with the Bargaining Team on June 29 from noon to 1pm.

Ratification & Voting

Immediately following the Town Hall, all FSA members will receive voting credentials through our secure and anonymous voting system, Simply Voting. This is the same system we’ve used for our elections and previous rounds of bargaining. The ballot will include a link to the summary of the tentative agreement. Voting will open following the Town Hall on June 28 and members will have until Noon on Friday, July 7 to cast a vote.

Tentative Agreement Highlights

This section provides a high-level summary of some of the changes provided by the tentative agreement. A more detailed Bargaining Communique (login required, click through link) is now available in the Members’ Portal of our website. 

*IMPORTANT NOTE: This login is not the same as what you use for BCIT platforms. The FSA website is not a BCIT system. If you have never set up a login to our website portal, please contact us at [email protected] and your account will be activated after confirming that you are an FSA member. Thank you for your patience! 

Wages

In line with the province’s Shared Recovery Mandate, the monetary terms of our Tentative Agreement follow the pattern reached by all other public sector unions this round of bargaining, with over 90 percent of the almost 400,000 BC public-sector workers having reached at least a Tentative Agreement. Wage gains are retroactive to July 1, 2022.

• Three-year term commencing July 1, 2022, and expiring June 30, 2025
• General wage increases:
  • Year 1 (began July 1, 2022) – an increase of either $0.25/hour for hourly rates or $455 for annual salary scales, plus 3.24%
  • Year 2 (begins July 1, 2023) – 6.75% (including Cost of Living Adjustment triggered on March 21, 2023)
  • Year 3 (begins July 1, 2024) – 2% plus a potential Cost of Living Adjustment to a maximum of 3%
• An additional 3.9% increase to Part-Time Studies rates before wage increases noted above.

Benefits

Maternity and Parental Benefits

Increasing parental benefits is a key component of the tentative agreement. Multiple FSA Bargaining Teams have fought for more than a decade to first establish and then enhance our parental benefits. The existing supplemental employment benefits, outlined in Article 9.6.4 of the Collective Agreement, provided up to 18 weeks of maternity and/or parental leave top up (in addition to government payments) to 75% salary. This agreement increases that duration to 37 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing and adoptive parents (payments may also be spread out over 61 weeks) and a full year (52 weeks) of combined maternity and parental leave for birthing parents (which may be spread out over 77 weeks), in line with the norm for our sector.

Extended Health Insurance Improvements (including but not limited to)

• Increase in orthodontic treatment coverage to a lifetime maximum of $3,500 (from $3000).
• Elimination of requirement that a recommendation by a physician for massage therapy be renewed every 6 months.
• Psychologist and clinical counsellor reimbursement increase to $2,000 per calendar year (from $1,000) and the inclusion of social workers in the covered category.
• Increase wig and hairpiece coverage to $1,500 every 3 years (from $500 per lifetime).
• Addition of coverage for the shingles vaccine.

Specialized Faculty

Inclusion of Specialized Faculty in 6-weeks of paid Art. 10.6 Short-term Professional Development leave. This right is another hard-fought gain, after being rejected in three previous rounds of bargaining.

New Working Group and Committees

Several committees and a working group are to be struck following ratification, with the goals of improving:

• Art. 10.3, Professional Development Fund
• Art. 11, Institutional Placement and Advancement
• Research by Faculty teaching into Graduate Programs
  • The FSA’s Caucus on Advanced Research and Academic Studies has been pushing for additional support for these members, especially through the July 2022, release of the FSA’s ‘Report on the Impact of Graduate Studies’.
• A working group with other campus unions and management to advance reconciliation and indigenization, a measure that has the potential to meaningfully place Indigenous workers within the process.

In Summary…

In no round of bargaining will any Bargaining Team be able to achieve all the improvements members wish could have been made. There will always be items “left on the table,” but bargaining is a process, and our team is confident in the strength of our gains this round. What we left behind will be picked up and moved forward by future bargaining teams, just as we have done with proposals from the past. The wedges that we have inserted this round will be driven in by those that come behind us.

What you see coming out of this round is a reflection of the time and effort that you shared with us over the last couple years. You told us through open houses, surveys, emails, and conversations what your priorities were; you voted on a set of bargaining themes, and you were generous with your stories about why these issues matter. We engaged with you to inform these proposals and move us towards this stage: a tentative agreement. The next bargaining process begins right after we ratify this agreement, and we want you to be a part of it. Continue to reach out to tell us what’s important to you, participate as Tech Reps and at general membership meetings, fill out surveys, and exercise the rights available to you. The value in our rights and the strength of our future bargaining position relies upon being able to point to the utilization of our rights in practice.

We are grateful to everyone that supported us in this round and, while acknowledging that our vision was not fully realized, we are confident that this is the best deal to be reached under the current conditions. Thank you for your trust to bargain on your behalf!