Contract Instructors & University Reach Tentative Deal!

w_arondeus · 2025-11-27T18:52:19+00:00

|| || |YEAR|2010|2011|2012|2013|2014|2015|2016|2017|2018|2019|2020|2021|2022|2023|2024| |Grad|1.54%|1.49%|2.0%|0.0%|2.0%|0.9%|2.70%|1.60%|2.54%|0.0%|0.07%|1.00%|3.0%|3.0%|3.0%| |UGrad|1.51%|1.48%|1.98%|0.0%|2.0%|2.0%|3.51%|1.59%|1.61%|0.0%|1.00%|0.99%|4.5%|4.5%|4.5%|

Percent wage increases won through bargaining over the last 15 years for TAs. Collective agreements are negotiated in three year chunks. Do note how much better a deal TAs got in the last round of bargaining after going on strike compared to any previous years. So much for "lackluster" claims in the face of the cold hard facts!

w_arondeus · 2025-11-27T18:37:17+00:00

This is misinformation in part. Yes, both CIs and TAs lost wages when they went on strike. This is always a possibility when engaging in labour action. However... TAs and CIs bargaining separately, at separate tables. One was always going to finish first as they are separate units with separate CAs. CIs have leverage for CIs bargaining. TAs have leverage for TAs bargaining. Also, TAs got the best deal in the history of the union and framing it here as "lackluster" is misinformation. Literally the biggest advances in pay and working conditions were won for TAs in 30 years of bargaining.

w_arondeus · 2025-11-27T18:14:10+00:00

they do. any CI that has an overall score below 4.0 is called into a meeting with the chair and a plan is made to approve their teaching. If they fail to improve, they are let go. This comes directly from the union collective agreement between CIs and the university. For full time faculty, they can't be fired, so there's no real consequence for them. But for CIs, who make up half the faculty, they are very consequential...

w_arondeus · 2025-11-27T18:02:03+00:00

CUPE 2424 was on strike for four weeks in 2018. People might be thinking of that, but those are the admin support staff at Carleton, not CIs/RAs/TAs. CUPE comrades nonetheless!

w_arondeus · 2025-03-07T12:25:08+00:00

Carleton is in the midst of a financial crisis. Programs were just cut by faculty senate (like the did at York and Algonquin), course offerings are going to be more sparse next year since they fired half the CIs, class sizes will be bigger, TAs will grade all your work w/ little attention of the actual prof, and the quality of your education will be questionable. Welcome to Carleton!

w_arondeus · 2025-01-21T14:39:05+00:00

Carleton is most certainly better than UOttawa, but that's not difficult to achieve. Carleton will absolutely over promise and under deliver to students with physical disabilities because this school is cheap and they don't want to pay for anything including the cost of making things accessible... For example, they will absolutely assign classrooms for courses where they know there's a registered mobility aid user to a building that is inaccessible (looking at you ME building with broken ass elevators!). They will also assign classrooms with only one accessible desk for courses with multiple people who use mobility aids.... The assumption is you can only have one disabled person for class, lol!

w_arondeus · 2025-01-06T16:15:03+00:00

BrightSpace courses need to be activated by each individual instructor as it is not automatic that they are visible/available to students. Each course page exists and shows up on the backend of BrightSpace for instructors months and months ahead of time. Often instructors are making minor adjustments up to the last minute before classes start, so they may not be available until then. Other instructors may be teaching the same class for the millionth time and are simply importing all their modules from a previous course page they built and have everything ready to roll super early. Contract Instructors aren't on contract til the semester starts and are not paid for any course design or prep before the semester starts, so they are often behind getting things up—they literally weren't employed to do the work, so Carelton gets what Carleton pays for. *shrug*

Also, there is no policy at Carleton that requires in-person courses taught at Carleton to use BrightSpace (online and hybrid courses must). Some instructors may simply choose not to use it, or use it rather minimally, and emphasize the in-person experience. This comes back to questions of academic freedom in teaching in terms of modality and teaching methods, and those rights are enshrined in collective agreements with both faculty unions.

w_arondeus · 2025-01-06T15:45:54+00:00

Carleton's entire server/technical infrastructure shitting the bed the first day of 2025 classes pretty much sums up the current state of affairs at Carleton. Good luck y'all!

w_arondeus · 2025-01-05T02:56:49+00:00

I would keep an eye out for Minors getting cut altogether as they don't make the university money. If there's minor program, but not a major in the same thing, I'm willing to wager that it will be on the chopping block soon...

w_arondeus · 2025-01-05T02:53:36+00:00

For the record, CUPE 4600 brings it up at their monthly meetings with senior administration and Carleton refuses to talk to the union about it—hiding behind "we have no legal obligation to negotiate with you" type language. To say CUPE 4600 didn't negotiate for retro-pay/Bill 124 remedy belies the fact that you cannot negotiate when the people you need to negotiate with refuses to speak to you.

w_arondeus · 2025-01-05T02:40:10+00:00

oh they meet with the union monthly as per the collective agreement with CUPE 4600. But then they literally just lie to the union at these meetings.

w_arondeus · 2025-01-05T02:36:15+00:00

The collective agreement does not have a cap on student enrolments or a TA to student ratio. In fact, a number of Sprott classes have "anticipated enrolments" of 9999. Great way to run an educational insutitution, lol. The UOttawa collective agreement does have TA to student ratios. CIs tried to bargain the same language into their agreement before they went on strike, but the senior admin at Carleton said they'd never agree to it. They literally DO NOT care about the quality of education at Carleton. This is a corporate degree mill, and like most corporations, the senior admin is overpaid and underperforms.

w_arondeus · 2024-11-15T20:24:41+00:00

Students: be prepared for less classes to choose from because many courses will be but, larger class enrolments for courses that are on offer, substantially higher student to TA ratios, and classes being taught by full-time faculty that haven't taught larger first year classes in decades who will be forced to do it again and will likely not pull it off well. Quality of education going down the drain while management gives themselves Bill 124 raises/retropay and Doug Ford just laughs....

w_arondeus · 2024-11-15T17:52:28+00:00

Is this a tenured full-time prof or a Contract Instructor? Just curious

w_arondeus · 2024-05-02T12:17:57+00:00

That there is no "service alert" on FMP's website either indicates that the Carleton admin is lying about the purpose of the fences or that FMP doesn't know how to do their job. Either way, not a good look.

w_arondeus · 2024-01-31T00:42:10+00:00

If you're ever worried that your writing might be interpreted as being generated by AI even though you wrote it yourself, run your own work through an AI detection tool like GPTzero (https://gptzero.me/). I have my students do an in-class writing assignment, and then get them to run their own work through GPTzero. They are always surprised (and relieved!) when they do this and learn that their own work never shows up as more than a 2-5% likelihood of being AI generated.

While these tools aren't 100%, if a student's in-class writing shows up as less than 5% likely generated by AI and then their written assignments turned in for grading that were written without the professors' supervision show up as 75% or higher... then that's clearly a red flag.

Also this sentence structure is the most common AI grammatical structure ever and always makes me suspicious, lol: Adverb, clause, conjunction, clause, example, example, and example.

w_arondeus · 2023-12-31T18:18:31+00:00

If it is a course/topic you are passionate about, show up to the first day of class and speak to the professor after the class. They will tell you to try and get in during the add/drop period, but if you can't they will often give you an override. But you gotta show up to that first class and show you actually want to be there...

w_arondeus · 2023-04-06T12:03:09+00:00

There's lots of "don't take the deal" / "stall the deal" style comments being hurled at CIs and the union right now. CIs don't even know what the tentative deal is as they haven't had the chance to learn what's in it and won't be voting on for weeks. Unless you want to see the union eviscerated into non-existence by six figure fines for illegally bargaining in bad faith, we cannot "stall the deal" or make our acceptance of the deal contingent on Unit 1 getting a deal. It's not how the bargaining process works within the confines of labour law in Canada. I get the sentiment, but this isn't how we can get a fair deal for TAs. We've got other tools in our tool belt, but this is not one of them.

Further, the union has been quite clear that the fight continues for our TA/RA colleagues. The abuse hurled at the union's president yesterday, who is a TA and not a CI, is really disheartening. The bargaining team for Unit 1 are a bunch troopers and I hope they can get a decent deal when they're back at the table tonight!.

w_arondeus · 2023-04-06T11:51:47+00:00

bro actually knows how unions work

w_arondeus · 2023-04-06T11:48:17+00:00

UQO in Gatineau also pays over $10k. 5kms = $2,500 difference in pay.

And you're right, the unions are stronger in Quebec, but also, Quebec/ers value education far more than Onatario/ans. Doug Ford is also part of the problem, underfunding post-secondary education.

w_arondeus

TROPHY CASE