A timeline of recent FAUW achievements

Here are some of the highlights of our work over the last few years—as far back as we have news stories on our website!

  1. 2022
    1. Oct
      1. Senate adopted our Path Forward for Policy 76/77, committing the University to a process involving mediation and arbitration.
    2. Jun
      1. We settled a grievance regarding the application of the policy to members who were already on pregnancy leave when the policy came into effect, but whose parental leave began after the implementation date.
    3. May
      1. FAUW signed onto a letter to the Provost supporting Equitable access to In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) benefits.

        IVF benefits are not available to surrogates who are not named in the plan, making them unavailable to gay men, trans women, and any other employees who would want or need to use surrogacy. The Pension & Benefits Committee is currently exploring this.

    4. Feb
      1. We secured a Memorandum of Understanding with the University regarding compassionate accommodations for winter 2022 re: teaching in person during COVID.
      2. We announced scholarship funds for students from Six Nations of the Grand River
  2. 2021
    1. Aug
      1. After receiving significant pressure, including through our open letter, the administration announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The letter was signed by many student and employee organizations on campus and 1,521 individual members of the UW community.
    2. Jun
      1. We negotiated a change to Policy 76 (Faculty Appointments) to eliminate two-years-less-a-day contracts that had been leaving some lecturers with fewer benefits than their colleagues with contracts just one day longer.
    3. Apr
      1. The revised Policy 14 – Pregnancy and Parental Leaves (including Adoption), and the Return to Work – was passed by the Board of Governors.
    4. Feb
      1. Our compensation negotiation settlement secured significant improvements to compassionate care and bereavement leaves and benefits and ensured that salary anomaly reviews will now look for anomalies by race and Indigeneity.
      2. The Renison Association of Academic Staff signed its first collective agreement.
  3. 2020
    1. Nov
      1. We reached an agreement with the Provost on how to re-allocate unspent FPER funds, as negotiated in our 2018 salary settlement.
    2. Aug
      1. We negotiated modifications to performance reviews in light of the pandemic.
    3. Mar
      1. Renison Association of Academic Staff, with support from FAUW, received certification as a trade union.
  4. 2019
    1. Dec
      1. Members voted to move forward with the process of seeking to represent research professors.
    2. Oct
      1. We collected information on teaching workload across departments through the Council of Reps and shared it publicly.
    3. Jul
      1. We negotiated a change to the Memorandum of Agreement so that faculty teaching in all three terms can carry forward two weeks of vacation (vs one week).

        We also worked out some changes to the FPER program to provide sufficient processing time and to allow members to carry forward unspent FPER balances for up to three years, as negotiated in 2015.
    4. May
      1. We submitted a response for the Treasury Board Secretariat consultations on collective bargaining in the public sector (a precursor to Bill 124).
    5. Apr
      1. We submitted feedback to the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities on proposed legislation to force post-secondary institutions to reduce the pay of employees who are also receiving a college or university pension.

        We also met with the deputy minister and staff on June 24.
  5. 2018
    1. Dec
      1. The Working Group on Salary Structure recommended increasing the lecturer thresholds to promote equitable career salary progression.
    2. Oct
      1. Members voted yes on a proposal to make our dues more equitable, calculating dues based on each members’ salary rather than the average salary for each rank.

    3. Apr
      1. We raised over $13,000 for the Collective Movement Award, a student scholarship in need of funds, on behalf of UW-BASE (Black Association for Student Expression), and Shatitsirótha’, the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre (WISC).
    4. Feb
      1. Salary settlement achieved an increase to benefits spending and a working group to investigate a salary inequity for lecturers.
  6. 2017
    1. Oct
      1. We held our 60th anniversary celebration.
      2. Senate passed a motion by FAUW VP Shannon Dea to strike a working group to develop methods of assessing teaching and learning complementary to Student Course Perception surveys.
    2. Sep
      1. Stood against the use of flawed student surveys to evaluate teaching by voting against the CEPT report at Senate.

    3. Aug
      1. Faculty association representatives from more than ten Ontario universities recently presented at hearings on Bill 148, Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, including FAUW's president, Sally Gunz.

    4. Jan
      1. We raised concerns about employment accommodations practices, later resulting in the (still ongoing) creation of a new policy.
  7. 2016
    1. Dec
      1. One of the outcomes of the first salary anomaly review was a commitment from the University to conduct regular salary anomaly reviews every five years.
    2. Oct
      1. We negotiated changes to the Memorandum of Agreement to reduce workload by switching to biennial performance evaluations for tenured and continuing faculty, and to increase transparency and collegiality in the performance review process.

    3. Aug
      1. The Salary Anomaly Working Group found 71 individual anomalies and a systemic gendered anomaly of $2905 in favour of male faculty members.
    4. Jan
      1. Worked with admin at FRC to establish new guidelines for handling conflicts of interest on hiring committees.
      2. We shared member concerns in our response to the Course Evaluation Project Team's draft report.
  8. 2015
    1. Dec
      1. We updated the FAUW Constitution to ensure that each faculty has at least one representative on the Board, and that there’s at least one lecturer on the Board.

        This was to address an issue of discussions often being slowed by the need to go outside the Board to gather more information.
    2. Nov
      1. We created the Lecturers Committee and launched the first Lecturers Survey to inform FAUW’s contributions to the review of Policy 76 – Faculty Appointments.
    3. Sep
      1. We worked to make sure that faculty members could be eligible for solo PhD supervision (ADDS status) within the first year of being hired into tenure-track positions.
    4. Feb
      1. We secured a gender-based salary anomaly review in our compensation settlement, along with the ability to carry unspent FPER for up to three years.

This list doesn’t account for a whole lot of advocacy work being done by dozens of FAUW-appointed representatives on committees across campus, including excellent work being done to ensure that FAUW is kept up-to-date and faculty perspectives are heard on the Accessibility Committee (Zara Rafferty), Copyright Committee (Joan Coutu), and Joint Health and Safety Committees (Laura Deakin, among others), just to name a few. Nor does it include much of the work done by our committees, like the Equity Committee's development and delivery of equitable recruitment training for hiring committees. FAUW members are working on a wide range of issues at any given time, and we strive to keep you updated on our website, by email, and on our blog.