Earlier this week, the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association posted an update on their website regarding negotiations on a new collective agreement.
Their previous contract expired last June.
ULFA’s bargaining team met with the bargaining team for the U of L’s board of governors on the 19th and 21st of March for their 20th and 21st sessions of bargaining.
A year ago yesterday, ULFA issued notice to the board that they wanted to commence bargaining, and the first session occurred on 22 April.
You’d think that after more than 20 sessions, they’d have a tentative agreement by now, but keep in mind that the U of L dragged their feet for nearly two years on the last contract, and it took a strike after just 9 sessions to even get them to make concessions.
This week’s bargaining update mentioned that one of the topics discussed in the sessions was the discrepancy between salary floors for ULFA members and the average salary floors of faculty at 4 other universities.
Let me show you.
As we can see, in every faculty classification, ULFA members fall significantly behind their peers at the comparator universities, at least as far as the salary floors.
Salary floors are the least someone could get paid in those positions. Obviously, not everyone hired in those positions would get paid that much, but how low (or high) the floor is can affect how low (or high) the salaries are at other levels.
The comparator universities for the above graph are University of Calgary, University of Edmonton, University of Regina and University of Saskatchewan.
Remember, the red bars are the average of those 4 universities, so some of them would be paid more or less than those averages.
The difference varies widely, ranging from over $7,500 for assistant professors to over $23,000 for level 3 instructors. On a percentage basis, the comparator positions range from 8.56% to 37.60% higher!
| Difference | % difference | |
|---|---|---|
| Instructor 1 | $9,848.67 | 19.12% |
| Instructor 2 | $14,016.75 | 24.81% |
| Instructor 3 | $23,126.00 | 37.60% |
| Assistant | $7,533.25 | 9.66% |
| Associate | $8,103.75 | 8.56% |
| Full | $12,166.50 | 10.92% |
Then again, that’s what happens when you give your faculty 3 years of wage freezes (4 years for some of them), followed by 2.75% over the final year of the contract.
These are 2023 salaries, so that’s even after the 10% increase to the salary floors that assistant and associate professors were supposed to receive in July 2022.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of negotiations this time around.
