Ontario’s college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians have negotiated a pending deal for three consecutive years of pay hikes and job stability in exchange for teaching more of the same courses and halting grievances about hiring practices.

Highlights of the three-year tentative agreement, released by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, show the deal contains salary increases for all faculty in each year of the contract: 1.2 per cent in year 1, 1.5 per cent in year 2 and 1.8 per cent in year 3.

No layoffs of full-time faculty due to contracting out is part of the contract, OPSEU says. The union represents more than 12,000 full-time and partial-load professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians at Ontario’s 24 colleges.

In return for improvements to the collective agreement, OPSEU said, the faculty members would have to consent to remove a cap on the number of times they can teach the same course, albeit in the same number of teaching hours, and put a moratorium in place on grievances intended to boost full-time hires.

If approved, the agreement would last until Sept. 30, 2017.

OPSEU president Smokey Thomas told Queen’s Park Briefing on Thursday his members would have a ratification vote Sept. 23. OPSEU's bargaining team is recommending ratification.

Thomas was glad to see the “small” wage increase in the deal, he said, as his members had their wages frozen in the past. He also praised the fact a tentative agreement was reached without a strike, calling it, “maybe one giant step on the road to improving labour relations.”

“I think the benefit of recognizing even with a modest wage increase is that you actually value the workers, and happy workers in the college system will make for happy students,” Thomas added.

OPSEU negotiator Mark Kotanen said the employer, the College Employer Council, had come to the bargaining table with a “net-zero” posture on the contract, a similar position to that of Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has said there is no new money for wage increases lest they come from other savings. The Liberals have been trying to slay a $12.5-billion deficit and have said raises have to come from efficiencies elsewhere.

“The work done between the parties found the monies” for the salary increases, Kotanen said.

OPSEU’s release on the tentative deal said the salary increase and other improvements in the tentative contract were exchanged for the “removal of the cap on the number of repeated sections … and a moratorium on new grievances on Articles 2.02 and 2.03 A for the length of the contract.”

David Fasciano, bargaining team chair for the academics, told QP Briefing that removing the cap on repeated sections, the term for teaching the same class to different groups of students, allows the employer to have members give more than six repeated sections within the agreed-upon amount of class time.

Repeated sections used to be an average of three hours or more, said Fasciano, but many are now one or two.

“It just allows the college to give us more sections still within the same number of teaching hours,” Fasciano said. “It does result in an increase of workload in many cases.”

The tentative deal would also force the faculty to cease grievances made to increase the hiring of full-time faculty over the life of the contract. Fasciano said they don’t object to part-time jobs, but the reliance on it by the employer was “too much.”

“There was a lot of pressure from management for us to basically accept the use of part-time instead of full-time in many cases,” he explained. “In order to counter that, we proposed this moratorium. In exchange, we got the job security language to protect against … layoffs as a result of contracting out.”

Prior to the faculty’s pending agreement being announced, OPSEU said earlier this summer it had reached a separate tentative deal for 8,000 college support staff.

The Liberals have also struck deals with the AMAPCEO union of senior public-service managers, a deal that froze the workers’ pay for two years before increasing salaries over the contracts’ last two years.

The College Employer Council said it would not comment on the terms of the tentative agreement until the ratification vote. The government said it would not comment on the details either, but spokesperson Linda MacKay said it, "fully expects employers and bargaining agents to reach responsible settlements that are respectful of fiscal realities and also maintain vital public services."

All college faculty would get wage increases in tentative three-year deal

Read this for free.