Voting on Forced Offer begins Tuesday at 9:00 am
You may vote beginning Tuesday with the PIN sent to you from the OLRB to your Algonquin email address. Please vote as soon as possible.
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Council webinar
Here is a response produced by members of Humber’s Rat(ification) Vote Committee to the CEC’s webcast earlier today. It’s not a line-by-line breakdown, but addresses a few of the more egregious bits of misinformation.
Worthwhile article from Local 417 (St. Lawrence) on the effect of colleges’ overreliance on contract faculty
Misinformation No. 1
Just in case anyone is motivated to vote Yes by the lure of unlimited overtime, be aware overtime is not pensionable.
Misinformation No. 2
We reported that on the weekend, Cathy Frederick, the VP of Human Resources, had put out a document stating the post-strike reduced pay for full-time faculty will be at the rate of 1/261 of annual salary for each day of the strike as opposed to 1/216th as contained in the Council offer. Today, when she came to the Navaho TH line, rather than correcting Cathy, Cheryl reaffirmed Cathy’s memo. However, she could not explain how she could make a commitment in direct conflict with the Council’s offer.
Again, to be clear, all provisions in the offer apply to all 24 colleges. There is no such thing as individual bargaining by colleges. In the unlikely event we accepted the offer, the reduction will indeed be 1/216 for each day of the strike.
The loss for each full-time member based on the Council offer ranges from $1230 to $2130 for professors/counsellors/librarians depending on the member’s current salary step, and from $809 to $1373 for instructors.
Those losses can only be avoided by rejecting the Council offer.
Why is academic freedom an issue? One Algonquin faculty member’s experience:
I and another member were assigned to teach BUS2301 in academic year 2012/13. During that time, management determined that
· the delivery method was online, i.e. no in-class instruction, changed from an in-class format the previous year
· the course would be Pass/Fail with no tests or verification that students were actually doing their own work
· that the course would be offered to 1st semester students
· only 2 faculty would be responsible for the course
· we would be responsible for approximately 500 students each
· in-class orientations were not required
· no application using Adobe Flash were to be used as teaching software in the course
· there would be no scheduled classes (the optional drop-in classroom hours were not displayed in student timetables as it would have caused conflicts in the timetable schedules)
· there would be no pilot to determine if the online model was suitable
o for the material taughto for the students receiving ito for the chosen software
To the best of my knowledge
· no review of the literature was done prior to implementation to see if any other institutions had tried anything similar and what the results were
· no consideration was given to the fact that BUS2301 fed into streams that required invigilated work to ensure that students met competency requirements, e.g. accounting
Results
· software chosen to run the course was not suitable for the task mainly due to the restriction on not using Flash but also due to the inexperience of the developer contracted to do the work
· when management was informed that the guaranteed failure rate was 34%, and potentially up to at least 64% with 11 days left in the semester we were told make all work available again and allow all students to complete work not completed, even if they had previously attempted an item (or items) and failed
· Both faculty were working overtime in both fall and winter semesters, in my specific case I estimate 40 hours/week of overtime in the fall and 20 hours/week in the winter
· Both faculty ended up doing work that was outside their assigned position