Membership votes overwhelmingly for strike

The votes have been counted and TSSU members have decided with a 94 percent mandate to strike, with a total of 982 yes votes. The success of this vote was made possible by over 1000 members who showed up to cast a ballot, with dozens of volunteers who knocked on doors, worked shifts at the polls, put up posters, encouraged colleagues to vote, and did so many other tasks that made up the behind the scenes work. Thank you for this massive collective effort that has shown the employer our strength to mobilize and that we are seriously prepared to take action to get to a fair deal.

Members have received information through email about upcoming General Meetings and Greater Committee Meetings to elect and ratify a strike committee and decide how strike action will proceed.

How has the employer responded to our Strike Vote?

Rather than face our Collective Power, the Employer has used three desperate legal channels in the last 48-hours to slow down strike action. This is good news, as they can only do this one time throughout the strike, and they have used up these tactics early. The employer has:

  1. Obstructed implementation of Essential Services. The Employer has been required by the Labour Board to work with all Unions on campus to determine the very limited number of workers who are “necessary or essential to prevent immediate and serious danger to the health, safety or welfare of the residents of BC.” The Labour Board has had to intervene to start the process due to SFU HR’s long inaction. Now the Employer is trying to insist that about 10 times the number of workers are essential compared to what the Board set in 2015. 
  2. Sent a legal declaration claiming that our strike vote is void. The Employer claims that we have failed to bargain adequately, even though we have bargained for 37 sessions since March 2021. The employer thinks we should wait indefinitely and beg for their generosity, but TSSU members have shown through our strong strike mandate that we disagree. We will be going to the Labour Board soon to fight back and we will use all of our efforts to win.
  3. Sent a notice of mediation. The Employer has also filed with the Labour Board to call TSSU to a mediation session. We may be legally required to attend this mediation and cannot take strike action until this is resolved. We know that SFU HR will again come unprepared for mediation The membership is ready to strike, and this is how we will get to our contract.

We are not currently on strike, but we are one large step closer to having a strike as a legal option to get a fair contract. The Employer’s desperate union-busting tactics have revealed just how afraid they are of us, as they know the University cannot function without our teaching and research labour. We will not be deterred.

Membership calls Strike Vote for March

Last week, Contract Committee called a Special General Membership Meeting (SGM) to seek guidance from the membership on how to proceed with bargaining, given the concessions demanded by the Employer as well as their prolonged stalling tactics. At a packed SGM, our membership unanimously voted to cancel the remaining bargaining sessions for March and instead hold a Strike Vote. Polling dates for the Strike Vote have been set for March 22–28 with advance polling on March 16. See below for more details on where to vote. Members will receive detailed instructions by email.

It has been 314 days since the TSSU/SFU Collective Agreement expired on April 30, 2022 and 1211 days since the RA Voluntary Recognition Agreement was signed. For RAs, who were supposed to be included into the 2019-22 Collective Agreement, we've had 16 bargaining sessions, several "off the record" negotiation sessions, and two attempts at mediation. For the renewal of the 2019-2022 Collective Agreement we've had 18 bargaining sessions. At these sessions, TSSU has time and again put forward proposals to address our members' needs, and the response from the Employer has been to say No outright, to keep delaying, or to claim improvements would have to be offset with monetary concessions.

Many of our proposals are not new and represent solutions to problems that we've been facing for over a decade. In many cases, TSSU and SFU had productive conversations in 2019–20 towards solutions to these issues under the previous Senior Administration. Those conversations were cut short by the pandemic, and now we've seen very different behaviour at the bargaining table.

The Employer has proposed numerous concessions, including:

  1. demanding the ability to fire RAs at any time for any reason with minimal amount of severance, which violates the Labour Code;
  2. still demanding sick leave rights for RAs lesser than required in the Employment Standards Act
  3. Effectively eliminating Sessional Seniority  and the earned right of Sessionals to a temporary promotion to a Limited Term Lecturer at a higher rate of pay and with longer duration and more benefits;
  4. removing guarantees of TA priority by allowing Departments to vary how many, if any, base units they must provide to graduate student TAs before moving on to those with lower priority; and
  5. extending the ELC/ITP/ITA Instructor probation period so that it could last several years, from the existing 4 months.

In response to these concessions and the Employer’s unwillingness to bargain on TSSU’s proposals, the membership voted unanimously to hold a strike vote.

Polling Dates [updated]
Advance Poll
March 16 4pm - 8pm on Burnaby campus (pre and during General Meeting)

Fixed polling Stations (10 AM to 5 PM)

Mobile polling stations (10 AM to 4 PM)

SFU Administration is ramping up their misinformation and union-busting campaigns in an attempt to get TSSU members, faculty, and the public to believe that a Union and a fair contract is bad for research and teaching. We need to stick to the facts: SFU has a lot of money, and most of that money is generated by research work and teaching undergraduate students. RAs drive research work at SFU, and teaching support staff make up the foundation of undergraduate instruction at this institution. The only way we will win this contract is together. We need all members to make a plan to come out and vote yes. As a reminder, your first opportunity to vote will be just outside the TSSU General Membership meeting on March 16th: the polls will be open from 4pm to 8pm.

RA Arbitration Victory

Last week, over 1000 days after SFU agreed to voluntarily recognize TSSU as the union for Research Assistants and Grant Employees (RAs), the arbitrator issued a decision. This binding ruling resolves the ongoing dispute about whether this recognition includes 800 RAs primarily in the Sciences and Applied Sciences who are paid as scholarship/stipend from a grant. The entire ruling is available; the analysis and decision starts on page 112. The arbitrator has decided that:

In the words of the arbitrator:
"[SFU's] approach was not in the spirit, intention or words of the agreement." [paragraph 439];
"Often [TSSU] was treated as an interloper rather than a collaborator." [paragraph 440];
"The behaviour is not a credit to SFU as an institution or its organizational capability to act in a manner on which contracting parties can rely with confidence." [paragraph 441]; and
"[...]  it is common sense that in July 2022 the SFU research enterprise did not pay almost 800 graduate students over $250,000 a week for over 17,000 hours commitment with no responsibilities and no performance of assigned duties." [paragraph 445].

This is a monumental victory for research assistants not just at SFU, but across the country. We have long known that research is work, but for decades we have been told by those with power that graduate student RAs merely "think or meander" and thus produce nothing of value to PIs or the institution. The collective power of RAs through the 2019 organizing drive won a "sea change" in SFU's treatment through the voluntary recognition agreement, and now the arbitrator has confirmed this change must occur.

The ruling takes away SFU's last defense for their refusal to bargain about RAs, and the next step is for an immediate return to the bargaining table. Our goal remains as always, a fair deal for all RAs that respects their critical contributions to research at SFU. Subsequently, the determination of the "true scholarship" situations and the determination of the quantity of damages will need to occur. The arbitrator has ordered those determinations to be completed by the end of 2022.

For more information on the RA unionization, who is included and what we are fighting for click here!