(Sudbury – Oct. 5, 2018)

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the Memorandum of Settlement of the Collective Agreement has been ratified by the University of Sudbury membership. Of the members who cast ballots, 92 percent were in favour; the three-year deal was ratified earlier by the University of Sudbury’s Board of Regents.

The membership’s mandate for the bargaining team was to ensure that the importance of collegial governance be more clearly recognized. This was achieved in key places: a renewed Article on Academic Freedom that explicitly identifies the principle and practice of collegial governance, and in the preamble to the Appointments, Promotions, Tenure article.  It will help ensure that appropriate collegial processes are respected.

The mandate also included addressing the inequity in pay for both full-time and part-time members.  By the end of the agreement, sessional rates of pay will approach parity with other sessional rates on campus. For tenured and tenure-track faculty, the team fought hard to get the University to agree to catch-up funding, which is now explicitly identified in the agreement.

The team also faced incredible resistance to its efforts to obtain more security for non-tenured faculty, but managed to get agreement on a University roster as well as better language to compensate for course cancellations.

Please join us in congratulating the bargaining team, led by Chief Negotiator Réal Fillion, and the University of Sudbury members for their strong support throughout the process that resulted in significant improvements to their terms and conditions of work.

In solidarity,
The LUFA Executive