Click here for ten victories we're trying to win together - Sessionals, ELC/ITP, TAs, TMs, and General proposals we believe will help all of our members. 

Sessional Proposals

1. Guarantee Job Security for Experienced Teachers
Sessional professors, who teach one quarter of SFU’s classes year after year, often for decades, should be rehired based on their experience and skill at teaching those classes, so we’ve proposed a seniority system, just like at York University and Vancouver Community College.

English Language & Culture Interpretation/Translation Program (ELC/ITP) Proposals

2. Guarantee Equitable Benefits
ELC/ITP instructors deserve benefits equivalent to the support staff in their own programs.

3 .Close the Continuing-to-Temporary Loophole
ELC/ITP’s definitions of “continuing” and “temporary” instructors needs to be clarified so that the University can no longer deny long-term workers health and dental benefits by arbitrarily converting them back to temporary workers even though they’ve earned "continuing” status.

Teaching Assistant and Tutor-Marker Proposals

4. Guarantee Access to Work
Grad students should be automatically considered for all TA/TM jobs in their departments that they are qualified for, instead of having to apply individually for just a few at a time, which artificially bars them from getting work. The automatic application system we’re proposing is already in place at UBC.

5. Merge TA & TM Language in the Collective Agreement
Our pay should reflect our workload, which is determined by time in class and number of students, and SFU is making our classes bigger and bigger by merging online and in-person teaching (aka, “flex ed”), so the collective agreement ought to reflect that reality.

General Membership Proposals

6. Post All Positions on the Same Day
TA, TM, and Sessional jobs should be posted on a single day, every semester, so you can apply for all the positions you’re qualified for at the same time.

7. Obey the Laws of British Columbia
Worksafe BC requires that employees be allowed to use work hours if they sit on safety committees, which teachers can’t do, so instead, they ought to be paid for that time. SFU is also required by the Employment Standards Act to pay members what they’ve earned and on time. Right now, they don’t.

8. Make Surrey and Downtown Real Campuses, Not Satellites
TSSU members require real access to campus mail in order to do our jobs, and right now, we don’t have it.

9. Protect Us from Surveillance and Guarantee Our Intellectual Property
Given how many cameras and microphones are on campus and how much of our interaction with our students happens online, we need clear, fair rules about how those records can be used, and we need guarantees that we will own our lectures, slides, and other teaching materials.

10. Wages…?
Keep watching for further developments!