EDMONTON – In the hopes of cutting expenses, the University of Alberta asked staff to consider cuts to compensation. However, on Monday, non-academic staff voted against opening contract negotiations.
In a blog post on July 31, the U of A’s Acting Provost Martin Ferguson-Pell explained the school’s leadership team had spent the summer trying to figure out ways to balance the budget, but was told by the Ministry of Advanced Education that it would have to speed up its proposed budget timelines.
“The majority of the university’s operating expenditures are devoted to salaries and benefits,” wrote Ferguson-Pell. “We had hoped to address our budget challenges while honouring existing agreements with AASUA and NASA. However, given changes in our situation, we are now convinced that reductions in faculty and staff compensation are necessary to avoid large-scale job losses. As a result, we decided to formally seek the support of our staff associations and approached both AASUA and NASA with requests to consider re-opening current agreements.”
The Association of Academic Staff at the University of Alberta (AASUA) denied the request.
Then, on Monday, the Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA) voted to deny the request as well.
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“It was a very emphatic ‘no’ that the membership of the Non-Academic Staff Association gave us as the executive committee to report to Martin Ferguson-Pell,” said Rod Loyola, Vice President of NASA.
There were 639 votes against reopening the collective agreement, one abstention, and two were OK with reopening the collective agreement.
“As in every previous negotiation, people say ‘well, if we don’t negotiate a lower salary or reduced compensation, there’s going to be layoffs,’ so then we give. And that’s what’s happened in the past: we’ve given, and we’ve given… and layoffs have come anyway,” explained Loyola.
“We have been cooperating for a very long time… trying to help the university meet its budget year after year, but we finally said, enough is enough, we’ve helped enough, we’ve bent over backwards. And now, we’re going to be building strategy to figure out where we go from here.”
On Friday, U of A President Indira Samarasekera announced that in order to balance the school’s operating budget for the 2014-2015 year – which the Ministry of Advanced Education asked for – the U of A will have to cut seven per cent in core academic expenses and eight per cent in support services expenses. Then, in both 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, the U of A will cut two per cent each year.
“I want to be clear,” said Samarasekera in a blog post, “these are major cuts and every member of our community will feel the impact.”
Loyola said NASA is a group that feels those cuts first-hand.
“When the president states these numbers or these percentages, in terms of a budget, what we’re doing is we’re putting a human face on the budget.”
“We can talk numbers all day, but the public and our membership – the workers here at the university – what we’re doing is we’re showing that there are human lives behind this. These numbers affect people’s salaries, their benefits, their time off, their vacation entitlement, etcetera, and those things affect people day-to-day.”
However, Loyola says NASA doesn’t necessarily blame the university for the current budget situation.
“In our opinion, this has been sort of self-imposed by the government. At the end of the day, the university administration’s hands are bound by the budget that the provincial budget passes down to the University of Alberta.”
NASA is now in talks with other stakeholders at the university, including the AASUA, Students’ Union, and Post-Graduate Students’ Union, to organize against the budget cuts.
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