University of Winnipeg Bargaining Update - July 3, 2012

Your bargaining team met with the employer to begin negotiations for your first collective agreement. We had prepared proposals on many issues to get negotiations started. We had intended to exchange proposals with the employer to start the process on June 29th.
Your team wanted to get things started on a good note. We wanted to start discussing some of the less contentious issues before getting into the issues that we knew would be tougher to resolve. And on the tougher issues like hours of work and appointments language, we planned to make our proposals a little further down the road.

Surprisingly, after we had set dates and sat down with the University, they refused to exchange proposals with us. The University stated that if they couldn’t see all of our non-monetary proposals, they would not discuss anything with us. Essentially, the University has told us that we must play by their rules, or they won’t talk to us.

We will be filing an Unfair Labour Practice against the University. They are obliged to bargain in good faith with us, but they are refusing to do so. We are very disappointed as this is certainly not how we saw things starting.

We will be updating you on the progress throughout negotiations. Please stay informed through the process. Your support will be needed to get you the best deal that we can. We will issue communications like this one after every set of negotiations. In addition, updates will be available on the PSAC Prairies website: http://prairies.psac.com/

Questions or comments are always welcome: psac.elp@gmail.com

Your bargaining team:
Sharon Muldrew
Campbell Martin
Eric Violago
Seth Sazant, PSAC Negotiator
Deanna Kimball, PSAC Rep