Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER MARCH 2019 12 NEWS academic-support side full-tim- ers, they helped out a lot to help track people down," said omas. "It really is what we would call kitchen-table organizing: You've got to find one person, one per- son, one person, one person, be- cause they're all scattered all over the place — different work, differ- ent times, and then the students who work." is is "a positive step forward" for the part-time workers, said CEC in a statement. "This agreement is the first of its kind — which provides fair terms and conditions for part-time workers who play an important role in developing career-ready Ontarians. Over half our part-time workers are current students and this deal ensures they can access part-time opportunities during their time at college. ese job opportuni- ties provide income and valuable experience to students, helping jump-start their careers." Hopefully, the new contract eliminates the glut of precarious work in the college system, said omas. "A lot of this workforce comes and goes because they're part- time. ere's people in the college system who have been part-time or precarious, contract after con- tract for 15, 20 years, and they stuck with it," he said. "So now they don't have to re- apply every semester like a lot of them did. It changes people's lives really (in) just that they might be getting 24 hours a week, but have to re-apply every four months." It's particularly meaningful for the people who have been sticking it out for a long time, said Tracy MacMaster, reference technician at Seneca College in Toronto, who was one of the organizers who helped part-time support work- ers sign union cards. "I don't know how they feel about the contract in front of them, but their rights were so limited," she said. "I have people that I work with in my depart- ment right next to me every day who do essentially the same job that I do for half as much money and they haven't had a raise in 10 years. e hope is that they can continue to do the work with bet- ter conditions." New benefits e staff — defined as any college employee who is not involved in a teaching or administrative capac- ity and who works fewer than 24 hours per week — voted to ratify the agreement on Feb. 21. "Anyone who is not a teacher and administrator is support staff, and that's everything from the student ambassadors that greet people during orientation, helping people around the build- ing, to the IT services that keep the colleges running; the aircraft mechanics that keep the airplanes running in that program; the sec- retaries — pretty much any job you can imagine that isn't teach- ing in the colleges is a support staff (member)," said MacMaster. The colleges' funding model saw most of the support staff as part-time employees, she said. "When you look at the percent- ages, 75 per cent of the teachers in the system are part-time with no access to benefits or decent wag- es or any kind of job security. It's not me exaggerating (but), quite clearly, the colleges are reliant on this model. e fact that the part- time support stuff has managed to organize and get a contract in front of them, it's astonishing and something to celebrate," said MacMaster. With the new collective agree- ment, the employees will "get a grievance procedure; they don't have to keep re-applying for their jobs; there's language in there that they can bid on full-time jobs when they come out whereas be- fore they didn't really have that right; they'll form health and safe- ty committees — it's a whole host of things there... wage increases, but mostly it will be just that right to work toward secure, stable em- ployment," said omas. Unique organizing effort e 14-year long battle was "quite exceptional" and not often rep- licated in labour relations, ac- cording to Craig Stehr, partner at Gowling in Ottawa. "e complexity of the case is quite extraordinary and I would suggest this explains why the mat- ter did take so long to be resolved, but it is most certainly an unusual case," he said. "e situation was unusually complex, dealing with a large number of workers and the proposed bargaining unit and multiple locations and so on." Typically, a union certification case could "be resolved... within a matter of months, six months, but the point to emphasize is that the length of time that it takes in terms of the scope of the bar- gaining unit, in the context of a certification application... really depends on the complexity of the circumstances surrounding the application," said Stehr. "The more complex the cir- cumstances or the composition of the bargaining unit, the longer it's going to take for the board to adjudicate." In the fall of 2009, OPSEU signed thousands of employees with union cards but "even after we got the right to unionize them, they used every trick in the book to keep from counting the cards, so we withdrew, and came back in a year and signed them all up again," said omas. e next effort began in Sep- tember 2015, he said, as OPSEU submitted the cards to the OLRB and demanded a vote in June 2016. The CEC appealed in court but on Jan. 10, 2018, 84 per cent of support staff voted to unionize and become OPSEU members, said omas. "I've been working on this proj- ect since 2005; it's sort of become my life's work," said MacMaster. "e actual technical aspects of hunting people down to sign cards was the difficulty because they're mostly hidden. And if they're support staff, their hours are so erratic, that it's a lot of people to track down." Complicating the efforts to or- ganize was the fact that a lot of the support staff were students, who were employed only as long as their courses were running, said MacMaster. "ere's a huge turnover in that a lot of the students are employ- ees, so there's a very high percent- age of student employees and they fundamentally just want things to be fair. And, of course, they would love access to apply as an internal candidate for jobs when they've already worked there for a couple of years." When the colleges opened, part-time work was a small per- centage of the workforce, she said. "It was a different time, so there was a certain amount of sexism in- herent in the idea that it would be all women and there was a great many of them and it was just pin money, honestly," said MacMas- ter. "It was a very long road." Law changed In this case, OPSEU took the fight to the Ontario legislature, and the union continued to battle the employer in the courts and on campuses. "It was a hell of a fight be- cause first we had to get the law changed and then they changed the law, but they didn't make it easy and then we had to fight them every step of the way," said omas. "We had to spend millions and I wager they spent millions to fight us: ey use all lawyers, we use staff." The Colleges Collective Bar- gaining Act was amended in 2008 by the then-Liberal provin- cial government and it allowed part-time college employees to unionize. "The proposed amendments that I'm aware of go back to 2008, which would have been part- way through this the saga," said Stehr. "(From) what I understand, the changes were... that the act maintained the existing full- time bargaining units, and then they created two new province- wide bargaining units each for academic part-time and ses- sional employees, and then an- other one for part-time support employees employed on what would be called non-recurring and projects." As well, 2018 legislation amend- ing the Employment Standards Act (ESA) in Ontario provided a welcome boon to the workers, said MacMaster. "e changes under the ESA that changed the exclusions have had a huge impact: ey're now entitled to vacation pay and statu- tory holidays which they weren't entitled to before and this was ap- plied very unevenly," she said. "Some colleges paid them and some colleges didn't, and now they must pay them so that's a good thing." ESA changes served as boon to embattled workers UNION < pg. 1 "e actual technical aspects of hunting people down to sign cards was the difficulty because they're mostly hidden... It was a very long road." About 24,000 part-time support staff at Canadian colleges such as George Brown College in Toronto (pictured) have signed their first collective agreement with the Canadian Employer Council. Credit: Google Street View

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