President's Welcome Back Message
Welcome to another Academic Year, which is also a very pivotal year for all of us.
Our current Collective Agreement expires September 30th and the Bargaining Team is doing their best to have a new C.A. in place for October 1st. In addition to the standard items like salary and benefits, we now have the Joint Workload Taskforce Report, which supports and clearly justifies the need to revise and update the formulas and methods for workload assignments (like the SWF), plus adding more Librarians and Counsellors to our Colleges.
For our Partial Load colleagues, there are several important changes required to eliminate precarious elements within the C.A. and to enable full participation in our Local.
Our first bargaining campaign activity, in support of our Bargaining Team (BT) during negotiations this Monday/Tuesday Sept. 9th & 10th. We encourage everyone to support the following initities. it is important to show the college we are supporting our bargaining team.
Actions
We encourage everyone to wear purple or yellow.
Doon Union Office Drop In: Our office will be open all day on Monday, September 9th in Room 1E01, so drop on by.
Town Hall meeting via Zoom on Thursday, September 12th @ 17:30 to 19:00 hrs with our BT, to discuss the WTF (Workload Task Force) Report and how it directly links to our Demands. Make sure to register for the town hall.
To ensure that everyone has all of the information available and can fully participate in upcoming events, our Local will be enhancing our presence on social media, plus our website; more details to come.
You may already have received a text message, with fast responses to your replies, which has been added for another quick communication option.
If you haven’t officially signed up to be a full member in good standing, through our website on-line application, please do so. If you haven’t been receiving any communications to your private email or mobile phone, please send us a note through Letterbox237@gmail.com .
We have been working on assisting several colleagues at the end of August, due to last minute changes in Partial Load contracts and SWF’s. If you haven’t contacted us yet for assistance, please do so as soon as you can and we will provide you with direction and options.
Some of you may have heard that the ballots will finally be counted as per the OLRB (Ontario Labour Relations Board), and this could lead to Union Certification for our Part-Time and Sessional colleagues. We don’t have a date for this yet, but even after it is done, we will not begin negotiations for their first contract till our new CA is finalized.
We wish all of you a good semester and look forward to working together in achieving critical improvements in our working conditions going forward.
In solidarity,
Leopold
President-Local 237
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Ontario Blue Ribbon Panel Report
The Ontario Governement created the blue-ribbon panel in March 2023 to provide advice and reccomendations to keep the postsecondary edudation sector financially viable while providing " the best student experience possible" (ontario.ca)
Read the report here: https://files.ontario.ca/mcu-ensuring-financial-sustainability-for-ontarios-postsecondary-sector-en-2023-11-14.pdf