Spring 2023 General Elections

The Teaching Support Staff Union (“TSSU”) is presently accepting nominations for the positions of Chief Steward-Organiser, Secretary-Treasurer, Ex-Officio, Trustee II, and GSS Representative(s)

Descriptions of the positions are below; please read these descriptions carefully. 

Nominations shall close at the February 2023 GM Meeting (TBD). All positions are open to any member in good standing. All candidates must submit this completed nomination form to Trustee I by email (trustee@tssu.ca). Candidates must submit a brief candidate’s statement by no later than 1 week following closing of nominations.

Chief Steward-Organizer 

Chief Steward-Organizer is an amalgamated position being implemented for the Spring 2023 election cycle that will replace the Chief Steward II and Organizer I positions and encompass their duties as outlined in Bylaws E.2.7 and E.2.9. Thus, the elected officer who holds this position will be responsible for 25 hours of work per week and the division of these hours will depend on necessary tasks determined jointly by the Chief Steward I, Organizer II, and Chief Steward-Organizer.

Secretary-Treasurer

The Secretary-Treasurer elected during the Spring 2023 election cycle will only be responsible for the financial duties from Bylaw E.2.2 and no secretarial duties. The elected officer who holds this position will be responsible for 10 hours of work per week. 

Ex-Officio

No changes have been made to the Ex-Officio position. Please refer to Bylaw E.2.4 for details. Please note Bylaw E.1.2 states “The Ex-Officio Officer will have served on the Executive any time during the previous twelve (12) months.”

Trustee II

Trustee II responsibilities remain the same as outlined in Bylaw E.2.3 and remains an SEO position. However, the Trustee II position is a stipend position for this Spring 2023 election cycle and will be compensated with $250 per month instead of through the usual wages. This change also affects the Trustee I position. 

GSS Representative

Please see Policy S.3 for description.

Fall 2022 Elections

Welcome to the fall election cycle for Chair, Chief Steward I, Coordinator, Organizer II, Occupational Health & Safety Commissioner, and Trustee I. Below are the statements of your candidates:

Candidate statements

Trustee I

Arkam Nusky

I am putting my name for the Trustee position for the 2022 fall executive election to work with the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU). In 2020, I worked closely with TSSU for the “Research is Work” campaign. I remember going around the campus to get research assistants to sign union cards to form the inaugural RA Collective Agreement. Additionally, I represented as a Steward for the Department of Political Science in 2020 to educate TAs and RAs about their work rights.

I love working with numbers, and in my professional career, I worked in accounting teams for companies in Vancouver, such as Vega, TallGrass Natural Health, and SAXX. I prefer to work organized while collaborating with team members with effective communication. There are numerous interpersonal and technical skills that I aim to bring from my experience to TSSU. Attention to detail, working with Excel, taxation, and month-end duties are demanding attributes I have for this position when liaising with the finance committee.

I fence at the UBC fencing club and love snowboarding down Grouse Mountain in my free time. I am proficient in two South Asian languages too. Looking forward to working with the TSSU - Thank you!

Marissa Traversa

I am a current graduate student in social psychology and the current Trustee I for TSSU and am familiar with the Bylaws and Policies as well as the internal relations protocol. In my role as Trustee I have helped implement new policies that benefit the TSSU membership and executive such as the SEO and Commissioner Benefits policy and the Conference Selection policy. I have also helped prepare rallies, participated in protest against unjust actions by the SFU administration and BC government, and sat in meetings with SFU administration regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion to ensure the university remains accountable to the community.

I have been an active member of the SSJC since 2020 and am familiar with the appropriate TSSU conduct and meeting protocol. I am also a founding and facilitating member of the No Cops on Campus Collective (NCOC), which is a newly formed abolition group working closely with the TSSU/SSJC and has been endorsed by many campus groups (e.g., GSS, SOCA, FNMISA, SFSS, etc.). Through my work with the SSJC and NCOC, I have helped plan and attended protests and rallies, actively led and participated in multiple letter-writing campaigns, including open letters and solidarity statements (e.g., Palestinian protestors, Indigenous survivors of residential schools and their decedents, open letter to SFU regarding inadequate COVID safety protocols, etc.), and have recently created and launched a Safety on Campus survey with a soon-to-be-released accompanying report. I have also helped organized panel talks that centre Black and Indigenous voices and perspectives, as well as climate protests (divestment from fossil fuels and anti-TMX protests hosted by SFU350), among other work. Outside of SFU, I am a member of the researching team within an Anti-TMX community.

Chair

Kayla Hilstob

My name is Kayla Hilstob and I am a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication. I am currently the outgoing TSSU Chair. It has been a great year serving as Chair, and I would love the opportunity to continue for another year. I think it is important that our general meetings and our executive meetings have as much democratic participation as possible, while still maintaining attention to people's time. Our union is only as strong as our democracy, which comes through member engagement and ensuring everyone's voice is heard. Alongside you all, I hope to continue building an environment of direct democracy, non-hierarchy, feminism, together. As Chair, I also hope to continue participating wherever else I can, such as on TA/TM Days, at rallies, and doing member outreach.

Sherif Salem

Hello! I am Sherif Salem, a graduate student in the Philosophy department and the Philosophy TSSU steward for the past year, so have a general experience of how TSSU functions as an organization. Also, I have been participating in the TSSU RA unionization campaign over the past year, and am a member of the TSSU Solidarity & Social Justice committee. 

I have been diligent with social justice movements in Egypt and UK for the past ten years. I have written op-ed articles, organized events, pitched grassroots campaigns and spent a lot of time organizing academic workshops and conferences. For instance, in 2018, I co-founded the Middle East Society for Analytic Philosophy (MESAP) to promote philosophy in the Middle East. Thanks to partnerships with various research centers and societies, MESAP has been able to hold public workshops and lecture series, among other activities. Additionally, I co-organized MESAP’s 2019 Inaugural Conference, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Skepticism,” which brought together pioneering philosophers all the way from the USA and Turkey to Cairo. I helped establish is Bel Arabi Falsafa (“Philosophy in Plain Arabic”), which received a $50,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 2018-2019 to popularize philosophy among the general Arabic-speaking public. Activities include translating philosophical texts to Arabic and organizing free philosophy workshops (attended by 2,400 participants so far!) in cities all across Egypt.

The TSSU Chair’s primary responsibility is to facilitate all general and executive Meetings, and I believe that I have the necessary skill sets to help us further our mission. I will bring a breadth of organizational experience to this position as well as a deep commitment to the moral ideals of the union. I would be honored if you choose me as the TSSU chair, and look forward to continuing our social justice struggle here at SFU!

Chief Steward I

Amal Vincent

After an eventful first year, I am here asking for one more year as Chief Steward. We have much work to be done in bargaining, including the first contract for Research Assistants. I hope to help TSSU bargain our next contract successfully during my next term.
My involvement with TSSU began in 2017, during my first month at SFU, when I was elected as one of the TSSU stewards in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. I have been proactive in taking up union work and presently serve on multiple TSSU committees including the Grievance Committee (2017 - present) and Contract Committee (2018 - present). In the past, I have also served on the TSSU Executive as one of the Trustees (2019 - 2021).
I am thankful to past and present TSSU members, executives and staff for constantly mentoring and training me to serve the union better. If re-elected, it will be an opportunity to repay the faith put in me.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at amal_vincent@sfu.ca.

Organizer II

Catherine Dubé

My name is Catherine (she/her) and I have been active in our Union since the fall of 2019 when I first joined SFU’s School of Communication as a Master’s student and almost immediately ran for the open TSSU Steward position in my department. I was encouraged to run by the two departmental Stewards at the time after I had asked them for help figuring out how to get health insurance and getting my paycheck from SFU on time. I quickly began to realize that being part of a Union meant much more than having a place to turn to when I needed help dealing with an exploitative employer. Those two Stewards helped me, of course, but they also became my friends, people I knew would have my back and work hard for all of us to have better working conditions, no matter what. Being part of a Union thus came to mean solidarity, being on the same side of a fight - a fight we all know isn’t over. We also know collective power is the only thing that’s ever gotten us anywhere. 

I’m running for Organizer II because I believe I have the skills to help bring people together and facilitate building solidarity among TSSU members across departments and job categories. My focus as Organizer II, if elected, will be to work with TSSU members, the Member Mobilization Committee (MMC), the Organizer I, and the TSSU executive to keep increasing our momentum in our fight for a fair contract for all job categories, including a first contract for Research Assistants and for the Library Makers Commons employees. It would be an honour to serve the TSSU membership as Organizer, a role that necessitates discipline, consistency, and open-mindedness, qualities that I believe I’ve displayed throughout my involvement in our Union over the years. 

Coordinator

Abhishek Nanjundappa.
I am running for the position of coordinator in the upcoming fall 2022 elections. I graduated in the Summer 2022 term from mechatronic systems engineering. During my graduate studies at SFU, I have represented graduate students in various roles: surrey graduate representative, TSSU steward, graduate program committee (GPC) representative, engineering caucus president, senate representative, human rights board member, director of university relations (DUR) at graduate student society (GSS), TSSU volunteer organizer and SFPIRG volunteer. Over the years, I have started or collaborated with various campaigns affecting graduate students' academic and professional development. The campaigns that I worked with include research assistant unionization (unionization drive in 2018 and 2019), graduate student housing, minimum funding, transparency in the selection of teaching assistants, reforms to graduate fellowships, increase in openness and reproducibility of scientific research, international student health insurance and operational and governance reforms to the office of Ombudsperson. I have over the years experienced and seen how the system is inherently unfair to racialized international students.
The coordinator position ensures the smooth operational and administrative functioning of the union. The upcoming year consists of the bargaining for the existing collective agreement and the first collective agreement for the research assistant. These two goals can be achieved as a collective (executive and union members as a team) with a united voice and keeping union founding principles in mind (feminist, non-hierarchical, and directly democratic). As a member of the membership mobilization committee (MMC) during the current term, I have taken part in the research work campaign and migrant student united SFU chapter campaigns. If I get elected as the Coordinator, I hope to contribute my best to achieve the goals set by the union.

Occupational Health & Safety Commissioner

Katie Gravestock

My name is Katie Gravestock (she/they), and I am re-running for the position of Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Commissioner. For the last year, I have worked as your OH&S Commissioner where I have been working with members of the TSSU Health and Safety Committee to address ongoing safety concerns on campus. 

As your OH&S Commissioner, I sit on several local joint health & safety committees at SFU, as well, I am currently serving as the worker co-chair of the Central University Health and Safety Committee. At these committees, and at Senior Administration meetings, I have been raising awareness of some of the workplace health and safety issues that TSSU members face such as bullying and harassment, physical accessibility, and access to legally required, paid job-specific training and orientation.   

Prior to taking on this position, I was one of your Chief Stewards for two years, where I worked with other TSSU members, Student Groups, Faculty Associations, and unions in B.C. to advocate for a safe return to campus in September. I helped draft an open letter to the provincial government calling for increased safety measures and participated in a number of media interviews. With this press coverage and the success of the open letter, we helped pressure the provincial government to implement a mask mandate and system for proof of vaccination.

I would love the opportunity to continue to work as your TSSU Occupational Health and Safety Commissioner where I will promote and protect the health and safety rights of TSSU members and the entire SFU community. 

TA/TM Day! Sept 9th

All members are invited to register for the TA/TM Day on September 9th, the first Friday of the term!

TA/TM Day is a traditional peer learning event for both new and veteran teaching assistants. Meet your colleagues and get information and advice from experienced TAs and other members of SFU’s academic community. You will find out about campus resources, your rights and benefits as a TA, gain knowledge, develop skills and build confidence for your teaching support roles.

This hybrid event will be held virtually via Zoom in the morning, and in-person on the Burnaby campus in the afternoon.

Sessions will run from 8:30am to 4:30pm. Please register here to attend one or more sessions: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/fall-2022-ta-day-tickets-401498000327 .

After the sessions, we will finish the day with a social at the BierCraft (Burnaby campus) from 5-7pm. TSSU will provide a free drink and burger for members and 12oz beers will be sold for $3.5! Do you want to save your spot and a cold beer? Let us know here!