Frank Cosco on The Vancouver Model

Frank Cosco of the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association (Vice President, Bargainer, Past President) spoke on "One Tier & How It Spread in BC" at the CFT's Community College Council on March 15, 2024.

“VCCFA: One Tier & How It Spread in BC”
CFT Community College Council, 3/15/24

Follow-up Questions & Answers (audio)

• Presentation Slides (PDF)
• Handout: Features of One Tier Employment System Under VCC-VCCFA Collective Agreement (March 2024) (PDF)

---

Transcript of Frank’s Talk (With Slides)

Thank you for the hospitality and invitation to come down. I've been enjoying the conference, sat in on some workshops and I am very impressed with this high quality and level of intensity and preparedness of this crew. And so, power on. You guys are very impressive. And I salute you.

I've been working in community college system in BC for a long time, and have been involved in union work for, since about … well, I started in Japan, actually, in one of the first unions for foreign ESL teachers started by some guys from Vancouver. And, it's still there. It's still a union in Tokyo. And when I got back to Vancouver, I, I enjoyed that so much, I joined, got active in my local in Vancouver. So I have this little presentation. I'll send this along to somebody, so it can go out to anybody who wants it, if you want to get a copy of the PowerPoint.

You like the color scheme? I worked long and hard to get this. I've got to keep it as simple as possible. I just run into trouble all the time. Anyway, there's sort of two parts to this. One is a brief description of the, hopefully brief, description of what we have.

And it's basically all the stuff you want. Almost all, we have it and a few other things. And, and then the second part is people have been asking me, well, how did you get that? Right? And the VCCFA story is so weird and unique. I don't know if it's helpful. So I took three aspects of this, first part of the presentation, which is summarized in this sheet that you have.

I took three aspects of this, and I was thinking in history how the unions, the other college sector unions in BC, tried to spread it throughout the system, tried, not completely successfully, but there are small units in BC, less than 200 people. And they they've got aspects of this, but they would not have gotten had they not done some of the things that I'm trying to touch on a little bit later in the talk. So that's the way it was, attempts at spreading it through BC. I'm going to sound very boastful, and I apologize. Canadians aren't supposed to do that. Don't tell anybody I'm bragging because my colleagues in BC will kick me in the ass if word gets out.

But we we've always had the best conditions in BC, and we still do. And we didn't use the processes exactly that I'm going to describe here. It's been very difficult and a struggle, but you might find parts of this useful, I hope.

Okay, so the first slide Thank you to my loyal assistant. There we are.

I like this little poem because it's the only poem I've ever seen that mentions community colleges. Kay Ryan, I understand is, was, a community college teacher somewhere in California and was poet laureate in the States. And I really like this one word here: egalitarian machine. And I think that's a key point about community colleges.

We're not a stratified, elitist institution. We're egalitarian, right? Equals. And I love the comparison to the bicycle. And I try to keep that in mind. "With little financial encouragement, saving lives and minds. I can't think of a more efficient, hopeful, or egalitarian machine, except maybe the bicycle." I think that's a great point.

Okay, moving along…

So we're not that special in Vancouver. We're about 600-700 members in total. It's a normal community college with normal community college programs. We've got a little bit of music. We've got a little bit of university transfer. We've got automotive, English as a second language, adult basic ed. We really have programs at all 50 different departments.

So it's a normal thing. We try to create a single career path so a person gets hired once, maybe as a sub. If you go into subbing that's it for your career, you don't have to get interviewed again, except the interview for retirement purposes. No, not really, but it's a single career path, and we try to minimize workplace distinctions.

And, you see, I clearly, crossed out, "part time" and "full time." Forget about that distinction as much as possible. There are as few distinctions as possible. You have to serve some time as a probationary person, but then once you become regularized, that's it.

We can go to the next slide, please.

So I used the word "one tier." I see you've got a different term? What's the new one, John? Unified faculty? I use the one tier here because that's what I heard is your slogan. But anyway, it's the same thing. From day one you have one job classification, one pay scale, 11 steps. Top, next month, is going to be 113,000 Canadian. I did the weighted average, you know, you take the whole faculty, and you do all the fancy math. And it came out over 100,000 for the weighted average because you get a good step placement once you get a contract. You're not kept down below.

Absolute pay equality. We give the term people, the new people, a little bit of all the statutory holidays, little bit of all the normal holidays that anybodye would get. So I always tell people that if you're working in July, there's a little bit of Christmas in your paycheck, because it's completely pro rata for the whole year. So if you work 30% contract, you get 30% of an annual full-time salary.

One hiring per career. Academic freedom is important. We have one provision in our collective agreement about academic freedom, applies to everybody from their first day as a sub, maybe only working three hours. They're protected by the academic freedom clause. All union rights and membership rights. You accrue the right of first refusal after 120 cumulative days. That's very important. And you get your starting seniority with your first contract. Pension vesting, pro rata workload, Scheduling by seniority.

I see you've got a busy agenda, so I'm going to go through a little bit faster pace and then hopefully there's more time for questions. Can we go to the next one?

So if you maintain half-time or more for a couple of years, you'll get extended health. Everybody in Canada has Canadian medical, which is good. [applause] Thank you. Tommy Douglas, Saskatchewan, 1944, I think or something. So that's hospital care, doctor care, basic, basic health, but you have extended health on top of that, which includes the pharmaceuticals and all your tests that you need, etc.

Dental benefits. Just last month, Trudeau and the NDP, brought in a new idea for dental benefits, but it's going to apply to lower income people first, but at workplace dental benefits. Paid sick leave. The government of B.C. has a minimum of five paid days for everybody. And that just came in, this year, or late last year. And we have paid sick leave on top of that, short- and long-term disability, PD time as well with monetary support. PD is 1 or 2 months of paid time if you maintain your, the crucial point is the half-time or more status, you accrue.

And then the bottom one, this is the big, the big one, is automatic regularization of the person, not the position. You see, I crossed off position. I was explaining to John that actually, when you fulfill your requirement for regularization, you don't have to do anything. You get a memo from the college saying, okay, you're you're now a regular on May 1st, if you qualify in April, the first of the month following, and the college tells you you're regular and that's it. It's automatic. It's a person, not the position. Any time status between half and full time. So you might be, if you've maintained 60% for that time, maybe sometimes you were 70, maybe you were full time, but you maintained at least 60, then you become regular at 60.

Okay. Next one.

Okay. If you're regular, this is your sort of tenure like status, and we call it regularization. You maintain your status. You can stay as a part time regular. You can be a half time regular, and you can be more. I can be more senior than this gentleman who is a full time regular if I started before you and I mean, if I want to be a half time regular for the rest of my career, that's it.

But I maintain my status vis-a-vis you because I have more seniority than you. And my seniority accrues at the same rate. So that ranking goes on for the rest of your career, so you don't have to worry about not being full time. There's no further evaluations, no further summative evaluations. We have a formative eval system, but not summative.

And you have layoff protections with all the suite of rights, you know, notice, and we even have bumping rights If you're qualified as a musician, you and you're good enough, you can bump into music and, take the poor fellow's job over there. So you have bumping rights like in a traditional union situation. If you do get laid off, you have recall rights by seniority. You come back in and you get your job back. And we laid out that scenario many times.

And at the end of your career, we're trying to bring in some transition to retirement provisions like, retirement incentives. For example, 45,000 bucks to retire early. So we usually get 20 or 30 people applying for that every year.

Okay. Thanks.

So all of these things work together. There's no cost differential between a new person and a senior person. Some department heads even complain that a new person is making more than they are because they're they have higher credentials or something, or more experienced. So that that's technically possible. So that takes away the incentive of the college to keep people as non-regular, because there's no cost differential.

They don't understand that sometimes because they go to they go to HR school, where they all walk like this [mimics a robotic walk]. They learn that regularization is bad. So they're just programed like that. It's like an automatic reflex reaction that, and they have to fight it all the time.

And then it changes every 4 or 5 years. Completely. Right. HR departments change. Everybody forgets everything. They have no history. They have no knowledge. So we have to try to teach them again and again. So I remember once at an American meeting, somebody asked me, what about your administration? What do they think about this? They don't think about it. They don't like anything we do. And that's that's their programing, right? And, they are just are programed to fight it. And we fight back and maintain these rights, which we've done over 30 years. At least six, six generations of HR, those 30 years. It's incredible how much HR changes and forgets everything. They have no history.

So all of these things work together to help the system. The wheels of the machine work because you've got, you've got people taking leaves, you've got retirement incentives, you've got a max on auxiliary work, pro-rata workload. Your pro-rata workload is very important. We have workload profiles in each of the 50 departments, which are slightly different. So you might have, in an academic program, 16 hours of contact per week and then maybe nine hours of non-contact duty. So the college has a right to know where you are and what you're doing for those nine hours.

Other than that, your time is your time. And you if you've got a ton of marketing to do, well, fine. You can do it at home. You have to do your professional responsibility, but your 25 hours of assigned duty is the time that college gets to know what you're doing. Are you at a meeting or you're in the class, etc.

But for a part timer, all we do with a part timer is prorate that. So if you're 16 and nine, if you're a half timer, you're, what is the math, eight and four and a half, right? And that's it. You get four and a half hours of pay for the non-contact duties, right?

Some departments, like automotive, are 25 and zero, you know, because they're 25 hours vocational model in the classroom, working with the students all the time. If they need a meeting, they just tell the students to go home and they have a meeting. It's very simple. But they don't need to schedule everything the way the academics do, rght? But every department runs their ship a little bit different.

No overtime is probably controversial. We've always had that. We've never even thought about it. We just don't have overtime. And we've insisted on that. So you can't schedule yourself in for more than 25 hours a week. Now, even in Vancouver, even nice Canadians try to get around that. We have to fight that and watch that and police it, which we do. But it's a basic rule, and it helps the whole system work.

Department leaders having to rotate is very important because you're electing department heads from your department. The union runs the election, by the way, and you get elected for three years. You can only get elected twice. Then you're out and somebody else goes in. So you have a changeover in power. And departmental dictatorships, at least they're they're over at some time.

There's departmental and union democracy. All the people, new or not, are expected at department meetings. We tell department hands, look if the new guy doesn't show up and hasn't got an excuse for not being at the meeting, they don't get paid. And you have to warn them the next time you're not going to get paid for that day. You can't just stay away AWOL. So the meeting is part of your not-assigned, not-contact duty, right?

The union democracy is clear. Everybody gets a vote. Everybody. We don't have this, thankfully touch wood, we don't have the system in the States with, what's that decision called? Janus or something? We have a rank formula, in which everybody pays the dues. You don't have to be a member, but you pay your dues. It goes the other way, and almost nobody opts out. Once in a while, we get a religious objection, but it it's, very, very rare.

But everybody pays the dues, and it's all pro rata, 2.15% of salary is our duties across the board for everybody. It brings in about a million bucks a year for us. And so you get a vote right from your first meeting. The first month you're working, you get a vote. And then we have the Canadian suite, the provincial and federal laws, which help support everything, right?

Shared governance in the workplace. I think you have some of them. The medical is good. The pension rights are good. After $30,000, you're in the pension plan, whether you want to be or not. And you're in for life and takes 10% of your salary, and the college puts in another 10%, and you get a good pension at the end of it.

Unemployment rights. I've been working the union for a couple of, three decades, never had a question about unemployment. It just is run by the Labor Department of the federal government. And there's no squawking about college faculty not being qualified. And union membership. I have already talked about that.

Okay, that's the sort of first part, it's sort of what's on the sheet in very quick order, right? The second part here is about how this was spread in B.C.

So, we pretty much had free collective bargaining since the 80s. By that, I mean, the government doesn't — before that, I believe, we didn't have unions in the post-secondary, like our neighboring province, Alberta. The the post-secondary people are still unable to have an actual union in the way we do in B.C. So we have a different system in each province. It's a provincially oriented system. And B.C., along with Quebec, probably has one of the best labor regimes in North America. We have anti-scab legislation, for example. You're not allowed to have scabs in B.C. or Quebec.

And we have good labor law rights and a good labor, what do you call that, the labor Code is one of the best in North America, with basic rights. And the government stays out of it. The government sets basic rules. Here's the labor law rules for going on strike or organizing or doing that stuff. Here's some rules for basic employment. For example, if you call in a sub they get three hours pay. Doesn't matter if they're calling for one hour of class, you get three hours of pay. That's a provincial statute. So the provincial government takes care of some, a lot of good things.

The first thing that we started to try to organize out of this was the same pay for regulars. Before the, before the mid-90s, we had, each unit, each college had a different pay scale so that even for folks, for full time regulars, and there would sometimes be a $10,000 difference in salary. So we organized what was called a common table. And this was the interesting device. We came up with a common table in '95-'98.

We had two-day coordinated strikes. I think it was two days. Yeah, two days per union. It lasted a week. So we went on Monday, another place went on Tuesday, etc. And by the end of the week we had the common tabl. And we bargained there a common salary scale for regulars across the province. So that was our first big attempt.

And it, the common table, is an interesting device. So that was the first provincial common scale, at least for regular faculty. There's still not a common scale for non-regulars, so that's a failure of our system. We haven't done that yet, but we did get it for regulars in '95.

Sorry. next slide, please.

So in '98-'01, the next round, there was a second system-wide push for two tier common table bargaining. And in this one we tried to get the regularization language spread. We increased the CFA. We already had orders. We didn't need this. But what we tried to do in BC was spread this to the other 20 unions in the province. And we used the common table device to do this.

So getting regularization language became a major goal, and we had a Status of Non-Regular committee. It looked like Snurfs, so we had a little take off on the Smurfs. And I remember at some union meeting, some of these people would come out in blue and do little skits, and then, but the important, important thing about that was it became an organizational wide, cultural feature. You had to talk about non-regulars and their rights.

I think that's part of what you guys are doing, and you guys are really good at it. Some of the workshops I've been at is lifting that culture up. So it became completely verboten, unacceptable, to speak about non-regulars should be non-regular. You have to flip the script on that. And everybody in the whole organization was talking about non-regulars. Couldn't go to a meeting without hearing about non-regulars. And we had the skits, the plays, everything.

And they had the non regulars represented, very well represented, and it became it became clear to government that at this moment in the bargaining, we're going to have to have a major move on this regularization issue. And that's actually what happened. So we used this mobilization of power here to push this over the final thing, a final barrier of strike votes all through the system.

Almost every one of the 20 colleges had a strike vote, we had a strike deadline. And it was the last issue at bargaining. And, we had some walkouts scheduled for six a.m., and about four in the morning, I remember, we reached a deal. But remember, it didn't help us at VCCFA, but we were there and support this common effort. And it really did help many people who set up a framework for regularization and clear goals and outlines. And we had, we set up a sort of binding arbitration. It's the work on the regularization at each college that they had a traveling show, road show, of mediators going around the province trying to mediate this at each of the different places.

And it took most of a couple of years, but most of them, were successful. And there was an arbitration which was binding if it wasn't. And many locals made significant progress, but it couldn't reach our level, there I go bragging again, I'm sorry. Most of them thought this deal was you could get regular if you did the two years, but only if there was some certainty about the work being available.

So it was a little catch that some managements were able to use, but it was pretty damn good when you compare it to what they had, which was nothing. And it regularized a lot of people throughout the province through this common table device. So locals could opt out, as we did, but this is still the current framework in BC right now.

It came from those days, and there's still a little bit of unevenness about what the regularization is at these different places. But it comes out of this and the common table, in effect, worked again. It worked for the salary for the regulars, and it worked for lifting up this regularization. But it came with strike votes both times, okay. And this cultural support issue, which is very important as well.

Okay. Thank you. Next one, please.

Common table. So all of us are independently certified as bargaining agents and unions. We have some big ones with, for us, big is over a thousand members. We have some small ones, like I said, under 200 members. Each one, though, is an independent union.

So to make a common table, I don't know if you have this device, but under our labor code in BC, you can actually, in effect, set up a temporary, special bargaining unit the unions agree on these 4 or 5 issues. We, 5 or 6 unions, are going to bargain as one. And we'll try to make a settlement for those 4 or 5 issues in this device. It's voluntary, right? Other issues are left to local bargaining. And, usually, to give it some weight, it usually includes the monetary issues, wages and benefits.

And your management has to agree too, because it's voluntary. They get to opt in or out. So when you have a government you can work with, there's some arm twisting going on to get the management to agree to be there. But usually that was effective. And in the unions, we had our own signed agreement, we call it an agreement of association about how we would do things. And it's been used nine times since '95 now. And this round we just completed, the '22-'25 round, was the first time since then that it's not been used.

And again, I have to say the VCCFA, we're so special, sorry. We, we've opted out the last 4 or 5 times because there was not, there wasn't anything crucial there, at that voluntary table. for us. And so we didn't think it was necessary. That's another long story. But it has been used nine times since '95.

Okay. Thank you. Next one.

Now this approach, the last time it was used, they tried to really do something important, which was — remember I said in '95, we got regular salaries across the board, one salary scale across the board. We did not get secondary scales. And the secondary scales still exist for some part-timers or new people in BC. But mot in VCCFA, I have I told you that?

But, in some other places, they had these terrible secondary scales where people were paid significantly lower if they were not regular. So we made the third big attempt to have a one-tier workplace, which was ending the secondary scales. Again, a long buildup of issue with union culture behind it. I still, to this day, I don't understand it. I thought we were going ahead of bargaining on this. It would be great for these other locals, but for some reason, with the new NDP government, our leadership was enamored of, oh, let's just talk to the government. They like us. They're our friends because we have had almost 20 years of right-wing Liberal, what we call Liberal, right-wing Liberal government, in BC. They're really super conservatives, but they call themselves the Liberals. Anyway, first time in 20 years we had an NDP friendly, leftist kind of government. So our leaders thought we could discuss the secondary scale issue and not push on the bargaining.

And this is my personal point of view. We lacked a clear focus on the bargaining. The political lobby intervened and they weakened the whole thing. And when it was stymied, the the government listened very politely and just said "next," we're not interested in in giving up anything. Why would they? And we were, they could see, their left wing, most of them are labor people themselves. They know if you really want something, you gotta have a strike vote in the wings. So they knew we didn't have a strike vote on this. They knew we were begging, essentially. So they didn't go for it, they didn't bite.

But when we were standing at the table, there was no clear strategy for mobilizing power around the common table locals, drawn out effort, less and less power. And in the end, it was it was referred back to local tables from the common table, which was just a recipe for defeat. A little union of 200 people is not going to be able to push this. but some did make some progress. So the result today is we have forms of secondary scales still, but the oomph, the cultural push, has gone out of it. It wasn't even raised as an issue this current round that we just finished. This is two rounds ago. So it wasn't even raised, the issue at all. So unfortunately we still have too many people in secondary scales. But some people did get an improvement.

Okay. Thank you. Next one. Oh I'm done.

---

(transcript of Q&A coming soon)