Goals and Priorities

Working collaboratively with UTFA Council and Executive, and with the support of UTFA’s broader membership, Terezia is committed to:

• Bargaining forcefully for across-the-board salary increases that keep pace with inflation. As is demonstrated by the recent round of negotiations in which the University Administration’s final offer was only 4.75% over three years, less than half of the 10% UTFA obtained via arbitration, it is essential to have a strong Negotiating Team when dealing with economic issues. The University of Toronto continues to be in a strong financial position and can afford to pay faculty and librarians fairly.

• Extending recent gains in mental health and other health benefits. These are of enormous value to our members; however, the Administration offered far less than UTFA ultimately achieved in the last round.

• Vigorously defending equal health benefits and other benefits for retirees. The Administration wanted to create a two-tier system with lower benefits for retirees. It also deprived retirees of automatic access to Microsoft Office without reasonable explanation or discussion, a move that UTFA is firmly contesting.

• Developing a joint UTFA-Administration comprehensive, multi-year, faculty and librarian housing strategy to address affordability requirements, access to family-sized units, and ensure that funds are transparently and equitably distributed. Recently, the Administration has invited UTFA to engage in some meaningful consultation on housing, which is an important start to what must be a more significant role for the Association in the context of a housing affordability crisis, especially for junior members.

• Protecting secure, full-time, and Tenure-Stream faculty positions as the norm. There is an increasing trend within many units to supplant Tenure Stream positions with more precarious sessional, part-time, and CLTA appointments. Part-time faculty lack the same degree of job security that comes with a full-time appointment, and this vulnerability has negative effects not only for them but also for full-time faculty. It is important to create a path to permanency for part-time members, as well as to improve workload protections for UTFA’s precarious members.

• Addressing the significant, growing, systemic, and persistent workload challenges members face. We must gain full disclosure of workload data from the Administration that demonstrates the substantial gap between principles that are supposed to guide workload assignments in the Workload Policy and Procedures (WLPP) and the realities of how workload is assigned at the local level. This will allow us to advocate more effectively for remedies and solutions via Association grievances and at the bargaining table.

• Working with the membership, with negotiators from other Associations, and with scholars and legal experts to explore solutions or alternatives to our dysfunctional Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), including certification. The limitations of the current MoA make it much more difficult to pursue the preceding goals effectively. (For example, Arbitrator Eli Gedalof noted in his recent arbitration award that the MoA and the WLPP, in their current form, are ill-equipped to meaningfully address overwork.) Too often the U of T Administration faces no timely, enforceable, legal obligation to provide UTFA with the information it needs, or to consult with UTFA on matters of fundamental importance to faculty, or even to bargain in good faith. We need the right to bargain all terms and conditions of employment for our members and to do so within a modern mediation/arbitration framework (as needed). This includes enforceable timelines, as well as an expedited arbitration process, to eliminate what are now routine lengthy delays in bargaining, grievances, and the resolution of other disputes. For more details on this issue, see UTFA’s 2022-23 AGM Newsletter.

•  Defending our core values of academic freedom, collegial governance, and non-discrimination. Sometimes defending these core values leads UTFA to work with the University Administration to protect the University against private actors or government officials seeking to control what scholars think and write and teach. On other occasions, it is the University Administration itself that takes courses of action in conflict with these core values. UTFA is committed to defending these core values when either is the source of the danger to them.

• Hearing our members’ expert advice on health & safety, pensions, housing, and more—and having it inform our Association’s positions. The University is full of scholarly experts with detailed knowledge about concrete problems and how best to address them. Too often the University Administration fails to take advantage of this local and available expertise—UTFA will not.

• Expanding membership engagement and participation. It is important to democratize UTFA further through membership outreach and participation via ongoing Town Halls, surveys, focus groups, expert panel events, and more. If it is the will of UTFA Council, Terezia would also support introducing membership-wide elections for UTFA’s senior Executive officers.

• Ensuring that our pension plan invests ethically and responsibly. UTFA has a very active and well-informed Pension Committee that has been pressing the University Pension Plan (UPP) to pay serious attention to climate change as well as other ethical issues and to adopt investment guidelines that are clear and transparent.

• Continuing to lead UTFA’s ongoing, complex, Association grievances on pay equity, salary discrimination, and student evaluations (SETs), especially when these are connected to gender, racialization, Indigeneity, LGBTQ2S, and/or disability. UTFA is committed to eradicating the root causes of significant, persistent, pervasive, and systemic pay gaps.

• Advocating for safe and healthy workplaces via central health and safety policy-making that is collegial, transparent, evidence-based, and aligned with science. UTFA needs to hold the central Administration to account where their policies and responses fall short and challenge the Administration to step back from uncoordinated or ill-considered efforts that merely waste time and money without positive effect. 

• Continuing to work with UTFA’s Barriers to Research Working Group to identify and address systemic obstacles preventing our members from being able to engage in the research, scholarship, and creative professional activities at the core of the academic mission.

  Note: these are not listed in rank order of priority.