As my term as president of the UWSA comes to a close, I want to express my sincere gratitude for the opportunity to serve as the voice of staff at the University of Waterloo. It has been an honour to represent such a passionate, resilient, and committed community.
From the very beginning of my term, staff have faced significant challenges brought on by the University’s financial climate. Throughout it all, you have embodied our slogan—Your Voice Starts Here—with courage and conviction. We’ve heard the good, the bad, and the difficult from across campus, and have worked hard to bring those concerns forward in meaningful ways.
While the year has flown by, there is still much work to be done. I remain committed to advocating for staff in my role as past president and will continue to support the UWSA and its mission. I am continually inspired by the strength and dedication of our staff community, and especially grateful to our Area Representatives Council. These representatives are vocal, engaged, and deeply care about staff wellbeing, and their insight and advocacy have been invaluable in helping us stay connected to what’s happening across campus.
I also want to thank everyone who reached out during my term. Your messages of support, feedback, and encouragement meant more than you know. This role has been one of the most challenging, chaotic, and fulfilling experiences of my time at Waterloo, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together. And to Yessenia Guerrero, our outgoing Past-President – THANK YOU! Your guidance and onboarding during my President-Elect year was crucial to my success, and I am grateful for all your support.
I recognize that we’re still facing a lot of uncertainty, particularly for those navigating changes to their work arrangements and the continued financial budget restraints. Please remember that the UWSA is here to support you. I’m confident that you are in excellent hands with Alyssa as she steps into the role of president.
Thank you for trusting me to serve you.
Here’s some of what we’ve accomplished together this year.
Lisa Habel
UWSA President, 2024–2025
Advocacy and action
Budget cuts and job security
The financial pressures facing the university have deeply impacted staff morale and our collective sense of job security. In response, we worked closely with administration to uphold and enhance Policy 18 – Staff Employment, securing an additional six months of internal status (for applying for open positions) for those staff affected by budget-related terminations. We held an information session about navigating job loss, raised awareness about burnout and workload, and successfully advocated for an extra day off on December 23, 2024—a small but meaningful win for staff wellbeing.
Flexible and hybrid work guidelines
We heard your concerns about changes to flexible and hybrid work arrangements. In June, we launched a staff survey to ensure your voices and experiences were represented in discussions with administration. The updated short-term flexibility guidelines introduced this fall were a welcome step, but we know that many members are—to put it mildly—not satisfied with the changes to hybrid work. We remain committed to advocating for fair implementation, effective manager training and meaningful staff consultation going forward.
New staff affected by the elimination of merit
In the transition away from the old merit system, newer staff have not been moved up toward job value, as promised on hiring. A Provost's Advisory Committee on Staff Compensation subcommittee was formed to investigate the impact on staff, and we recently escalated this issue as it has been taking longer than expected. We remain hopeful that a resolution will be forthcoming and will continue to address the issue in all future meetings with the administration.
Heat and workplace conditions
This summer, we pushed for greater flexibility in response to extreme heat and cooling issues on campus. We also advocated for updates to the Weather Closing Guidelines to better support staff well-being during adverse conditions. Plans have been made to prevent the same problems from arising next summer.
Individual support
As noted in Gail Spencer’s report about our Member Advisory Committee, we provided individual support to more than 125 individual members over the last year, a 25% increase over the 100 members we supported in 2023–2024, which was in turn a 40% increase over the previous year. While this seems alarming, the increase is in large part driven by our growing membership and increased awareness of our services, and we’re glad that more staff are getting help as they navigate workplace processes and struggles. Expanding our own staff complement from two to three has allowed us to meet this increasing demand and we continue to monitor our capacity on this front.
Strengthening relationships
Our Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with UW continues to be a vital tool in building collaborative relationships with university leadership. This fall, we initiated a joint working group with administration to update this agreement, with a draft expected for consultation in winter 2026.
Through the Provost's Advisory Committee on Staff Compensation, we secured a 3.6% raise for permanent staff in 2025. A focus of our MoA review will be updating how we discuss compensation with the University, moving to a more structured approach that will give us an even stronger voice in the process.
We’ve expanded our regular meetings with senior leaders—including the president, VP finance, chief human resources officer, and AVP communications and institutional relations—to ensure staff voices are heard on a wide range of topics.
Avoiding job losses
Our current collaborative relationship with university administration enables proactive and flexible responses to workforce challenges. For example:
- 12 employees were successfully appointed to new roles through the Staff Relations Committee, effectively avoiding job loss.
- 11 employees were seconded to other departments without backfilling their original positions. This approach provided one-time budget savings while preserving employment stability, thanks to strategic workforce planning by home units.
- 30+ stipends have been approved for staff who assumed additional responsibilities during the workforce review. These realigned duties, developed in partnership with Workforce Planning, will undergo full job evaluation to ensure fair and appropriate future compensation.
Coalition of Waterloo Workers
Adjacent to our relationship with the University, we came together with other employee groups to form the Coalition of Waterloo Workers. This is a forum to discuss issues affecting all employees at UW so that we can be as well-informed as possible, work together where our interests align, and support each other when needed. Recently, discussion has focused on struggles CUPE 5524 has faced in negotiating their first Collective Agreements for sessional faculty and graduate teaching and research assistants, and on the UWSA and FAUW Memorandum of Agreement reviews.
Membership trends
We’re starting to see the effects of the hiring freeze on our membership numbers, though it hasn’t been as severe as we’d feared. We have just 25 fewer members than this time last year, with 2,000 members out of 3,136 eligible staff. The portion of eligible staff who are members has gone up 2 percentage points this year.
We rely on member dues to fund all of our advocacy work, member support, grants, and more. Since October 2022, under the Memorandum of Agreement with UW, all new staff are automatically members, and our membership rate has increased since then, though the rate of increase has slowed this year. The number of pre-2022 staff opting in has also slowed since mid-2024, though this will naturally fall as the number of staff who aren’t already members shrinks.
With fewer staff being hired, it’s increasingly important for us to reach those staff who haven’t opted in. You can help by becoming an Area Rep or inviting us to a department meeting to talk about our services.
Celebrating community
Despite the challenges of this year, we did manage to find joy and connection through community events:
- We held 18 events over the last year, including social events, open meetings, and workshops, with more than 500 members attending.
- Last year’s Winterfest market, skating day, and workshops were huge successes thanks to our amazing volunteers! Make sure you’re registered for this year’s Winterfest Celebration on December 7 and don’t miss the artisan market November 27 and 28!
- Our Flavours of Fall soup lunch and Brunch at Lunch events were warm, well-attended gatherings—watch for more of these to come in the next year.
- We celebrated the contributions of many of our 128 volunteers with food, fun, and UWSA Bingo at our annual Volunteer Appreciation Lunch.
- We received more than 300 “10/10” submissions celebrating staff this month—a powerful testament to the excellence and care within our community. You can see just a few examples of these on our LinkedIn page.
Member input and engagement
We continue to explore more ways to hear from staff, like our “What You Want Your Colleagues to Know” series. In addition to the strong response to our flexible work survey, we also surveyed members about changes to the MoA, workload, and more. We also received 180 comments through our online suggestion box, 30 of which were not anonymous and received individual responses.
Many of the suggestions we received from members about the MoA either don’t fall under the scope of that agreement or won’t be tackled in this round of changes, but there were some great suggestions that we will be taking up or passing on to the appropriate committee.
Thank you to everyone who participated in a survey or poll this year, or submitted feedback directly or through your Area Representative. We’ll have more surveys about hybrid work and other topics coming soon. Everything we do is shaped by what we’re hearing from members, so please continue to participate and share your input.
Looking ahead
As I wrap up my term, I’m filled with gratitude. Thank you for walking this journey with me. Your resilience, collaboration, and commitment have made all the difference. I’m thrilled to welcome Alyssa Kuron as your next UWSA president. Her thoughtful leadership and deep commitment to our shared values will guide us into the next year.