Miskatonic University Press

CUPE 1281 and YUFA

york

I’ve had eighteen happy years in my union, the York University Faculty Association … over eighteen-and-a-half years of membership.

YUFA has staff who are in a union of their own. They are now in the fifth week of a strike. This terrible situation was directly caused by the current Executive. It is hurting the staff right now, and some YUFA members, and will do permanent damage to YUFA that will affect all members. I’m strongly opposed to what my union’s Executive is doing.

What’s happening boggles my mind. I’ll document some of it here for anyone who’s interested, and to make my opinions public.

About YUFA

As a librarian at York University, I’m a member of the York University Faculty Association (YUFA). All full-time faculty, librarians, and archivists are in YUFA (plus two small groups of others), but not faculty at the law school, who for historical reasons are in a different union. Right now there are about 1500 members, down from around 1700 just a few years ago. Of course, this excludes faculty and librarians in management and administration roles: the president and provost (academic vice-president) are professors, and were YUFA members, but are not currently in the union.

(Side note for Americans and others: in Canada our Charter of Rights and Freedoms says that “freedom of association” makes union membership a human right; separately, the Rand formula says that all union members pay union dues.)

I’ve been a member of YUFA since I started at York in 2007. In that time I’ve had several roles in the union: three full and two partial terms as a steward, over twelve years; I was a member of a side table bargaining team updating our tenure and promotion document; for one year I was on the union executive; and for two years I was a trustee.

The trustee role is defined in YUFA’s constitution; there are two, and they review “the Association’s activities and operations during their year in office and recommend improvements in the methods of operation.” I was a sole trustee for one year, then a colleague joined me for my second. The reports cover a lot of what members can know about YUFA operations, but nothing confidential: Trustee’s Report from 2023–24 and Trustees’ Report from 2024–25.

YUFA staff

YUFA has eight staff members. There are seven “executive associates” or “staff representatives” and one “co-ordinator of accounting and administration.” YUFA members see a lot of the staff reps and less of the admin person.

Member dealings with the union usually start with an email. The staff reps answer our questions and begin to help deal with problems. These range from minor to life-changing (such as the possibility of not earning tenure and therefore losing one’s job). If the problem needs special attention, the staff escalate it and YUFA members with special union roles (chief stewards, known elsewhere as grievance officers) get involved; this might lead into a complaints process that could result in a formal grievance, which could in turn lead to a mediation or formal arbitration between the parties. Big problems can take years to resolve. Staff are crucial to every stage. On top of this, staff advise and support the union executive in its work, and our bargaining team when we negotiate our collective agreement with York every three years.

The staff are in a union themselves: they are a sub-local of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1281 (CUPE 1281), which has units representing staff at various unions. It may seem surprising: YUFA’s staff are themselves in a union, which means YUFA is an Employer. It surprised me when I first learned it. The CUPE 1281 - York University Faculty Association (YUFA) collective agreement is online.

(You may wonder, are CUPE’s office staff in a union? They are, in the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union. As are the staff at the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the national association of academic unions and faculty associations. I don’t know what union COPE’s staff are in. That’s quite a chain of unions, but unions believe in the importance of unions and union membership, and it’s all various levels of people helping each other, making a better workplace, and, for social unions, trying to make changes in society.)

YUFA staff are on strike

The staff’s collective agreement with YUFA expired in May, and there was bargaining over the summer. The titles of this series of October posts from 1281 show things getting worse and the strike starting on 27 October. (See Ontario’s page on collective bargaining for details of the processes involved in conciliation and “no-board” reports.)

CUPE 1281 is not the only CUPE local on campus. The biggest and most well known is CUPE 3903: “proudly representing Teaching Assistants, Contract Faculty, Graduate & Research Assistants, Part-Time Librarians & Archivists, and Canadian Observatory on Homelessness workers at York University.” (The labour disruptions section of Wikipedia’s article on York describes its four strikes.)

Generally 3903 and YUFA maintain friendly relations, with mutual support at a respectful distance. But on 27 October, it posted CUPE 3903 Exec: Solidarity with CUPE 1281 YUFA Staff. It’s no surprise: they’re both CUPE locals. Good unions stand up for each other. I take this, and other events, as a marker that cross-campus solidarity is badly damaged, and YUFA won’t be able to depend on its fellow unions in our 2027 bargaining.

Inside YUFA there have been some emails from the Executive, and these posts on the web site:

There have been two poorly-attended meetings on the strike. It seems most members don’t care. That’s hard to understand, but at the fall general membership meeting last week only 5% of the members attended.

Executive director and in-house counsel

The most important issue is that the YUFA Executive wants to hire a manager to oversee the staff. This manager would have a role in hiring and firing and would not be in 1281. This has a been a red line for the staff. They said they wouldn’t accept it, and they haven’t.

YUFA has “managerial rights” and could just go ahead and hire for this role—employers have that power—but the Executive didn’t start with that. Instead, YUFA tabled changes to the collective agreement that set out how a manager would fit in, but it did this by surprise, without introducing the idea earlier in, for example, the labour-management committee. This infuriated 1281. YUFA says the idea has been discussed for years, so really it’s not a surprise.

Everyone agrees that YUFA could use another employee. There is too much work. But why a manager? YUFA offers a few reasons: institutional memory, assisting Executive members in their duties, helping better manage the organization and distribution of work … and stopping the staff from “running the union,” which a lot of people seem to think the staff does. I don’t. I do know of management-staff problems going back years and years, but the ones I know about were all caused by Executive members I wouldn’t want to have as my boss. Later Executive members need to work to fix those problems. That’s part of their roles.

To help in its negotiations, YUFA hired two lawyers from the Toronto office of Ogletree Deakins. One of them spoke at this labour and employment law briefing in 2024, which featured such sessions as:

Union Capture of Millennials and Gen Z

Unions are increasingly gaining favour with younger workers with the result that waves of union campaigns are hitting workplaces, both blue-collar and white-collar alike. In this session, the speakers will discuss how employers might consider addressing the new union movement—whether as an already unionized employer dealing with demands that are less about economics and more about social investment, or as a non-union employer seeking to maintain a direct relationship with its employees in an environment where unions are showing an ever-improving ability to connect and engage.

“A non-union employer seeking to maintain a direct relationship with its employees.” You know what that means: stopping people from starting a union! See 1281’s Who is Ogletree Deakins, YUFA’s Union-Busting Lawyers? post from 06 July for more about the firm.

YUFA Executive members seems to really dislike when we call Ogletree union-busters, but that’s the correct word. As this document from the Traditional Labor Relations Practice Group puts it:

Ogletree Deakins’ clients measure results in two important ways. Most firm clients go year-after-year without experiencing a union election. That is the ultimate result of a well-executed positive employee relations program. Other clients that are targeted by unions for campaigns measure results differently. With unions winning elections at historically high rates in the 60% range, a very high percentage of Ogletree Deakins clients’ employees reject unionization. Moreover, these results are achieved lawfully and, in most cases, without further organizing attempts by the same union later.

YUFA spent around $75,000 on Ogletree, drove the staff to a strike, and then dropped the firm.

The other position YUFA wants to hire is an in-house lawyer. YUFA spends hundreds of thousands a year on lawyers (for consultations, briefs, representation at arbitrations, etc.), and the potential benefits of having counsel on staff are clear to everyone. CUPE 1281 staff have concerns about work being taken away from them—though not lawyers, they do legal work—but that could be worked out.

YUFA wants the in-house lawyer to be a management position. They want the lawyer to work on relations and bargaining with 1281. I don’t know how often before this round of bargaining YUFA hired outside lawyers to help it bargain with staff, but it wasn’t much, and it could be done again if needed. The lawyer doesn’t need to be management. CUPE 1281 is again entirely opposed to a new out-of-scope (non-union) position being introduced.

YUFA’s main argument is to says it’s impossible for a lawyer to be in a union. It points to §3 of Ontario’s Labour Relations Act (1995) and quotes from §3 (a):

No person shall be deemed to be an employee,

(a) who is a member of the architectural, dental, land surveying, legal or medical profession entitled to practise in Ontario and employed in a professional capacity; or

(b) who, in the opinion of the Board, exercises managerial functions or is employed in a confidential capacity in matters relating to labour relations.

Here’s what David Doorey, York professor, author of the excellent textbook The Law of Work, and expert on employment law, said about that: “It’s a Charter violation.”

Many people point to his 2022 paper “The Stubborn Persistence of the Lawyer Exemption in Canadian Collective Bargaining Legislation” in the Dalhousie Law Journal, but not everyone seems to have read it all. The abstract says:

However, some employees were excluded entirely from this legislation, including employees in five professions, law among them. By the 1970s, the federal government and most provinces had repealed the professional exclusion from the primary collective bargaining legislation. However, four jurisdictions—Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island (Exclusionary Provinces)—have stubbornly preserved the exclusion.

Clear enough. But that’s the beginning, not the end. In the conclusion:

Several observations can be made about the situation facing lawyers interested in collective bargaining in the four Exclusionary Provinces. One is that without access to statutory collective bargaining machinery,employed lawyers in the private sector have no access to meaningful collective bargaining unless their employer agrees to an extra-statutory, voluntary recognition. In practice, this has only occurred when the employer is itself a union or what might be described as “a progressive employer” interested in workers’ rights and access to justice issues (e.g. legal clinics)….

A second observation is that unions have occasionally been successful at pressuring public sector or publicly funded organizations to voluntarily recognize bargaining agents representing lawyers by launching Charter challenges against the lawyer exemption or threatening to do so….

A third observation is that where lawyers have managed to obtain collective bargaining rights, the bargaining process has worked well. Experience has demonstrated that there is nothing special about employed lawyers that justifies treating them differently than other employees.

Doorey said there are many unionized lawyers in Ontario, and it’s just a matter of time before that clause in the Labour Relations Act is removed.

YUFA’s interpretation of the law is embarrassing. It should be hiring a lawyer to be in the union—a lawyer who’s the kind who wants to be in a union, and to stand up for that right—and if there’s trouble about it, YUFA should be ready for a Charter challenge. That’s how I want my union to behave.

Finally, about both the positions, there has never been any clear answer about how they will be paid for if no staff lose their jobs. YUFA has said they won’t, but 1281 is suspicious. These two new positions might cost, say, $350,000 total per year, with salaries and benefits and pensions and such. Can all of that be carved out from what YUFA is paying lawyers now? The numbers have never been clearly presented. There’s an idea that one person could combine both jobs in one. I doubt it.

The other big issue is the nature of the workplace, with staff wanting a better environment and protections from abusive YUFA members, and YUFA painting this as uppity staff refusing to help people they don’t like. I won’t get into it here.

(For more about the whole situation, see this interview with an anonymous 1281 member.)

York is winning

In the fifth week of the strike, on 24 November, YUFA posted a job ad for Executive Director and In-House Counsel.

The York University Faculty Association (YUFA) invites applications for the position of Executive Director / In-House Counsel.

Should a candidate that can occupy both roles not be found, YUFA is open to hiring one individual for each role. However, candidates who meet the requirements of both aspects of the position are especially invited to apply.

This is outrageous. This will make YUFA worse—not because of this person or these people personally, but because of how it was done, that it will drive away our excellent staff, that a new structure will be managerial and haunted by the union-busting tactics of YUFA as an employer, and that, inevitably, YUFA Executive will complain that the executive director and the in-house counsel “run the union.”

(A new Q&A for members on YUFA’s bargaining this year with our staff went up the next day.)

YUFA Executive members get annoyed when I say that they are doing to their employees exactly what York wants to do to us. But it’s true! YUFA used an anti-union law firm to help introduce non-union management while having run a deficit for years and with inadequate reserve funds … all the while complaining about how York’s administration is hiring more administration in a budget crisis. When we go into bargaining in 2027, the York bargaining team can quote YUFA’s words back at it. “You’re complaining about hiring management positions, and calling it administrative bloat? But actually, these new associate vice presidents will help York to ‘more nimbly serve our [faculty] in a climate that is increasingly hostile to the work we do as researchers and educators’! So there!”

Bargaining in 2021 was difficult. Bargaining in 2024 was worse and we were very close to walking out. I always predicted bargaining in 2027 would probably take us into a strike. With all these problems, I started to think that we’d get walked all over by the Employer and it would be a huge fight to keep what we have. Now I’m starting to think the whole situation could be so bad there is no strike but we end up making concessions. A lot will depend on the next Executive and on member organization.

The root cause of all of this is YUFA’s Employer: York University. York is winning a years-long campaign to damage every union on campus. York forces us to turn complaints into grievances and grievances into arbitrations. A staffer likes to say: “They all sing from the same songbook. Every song has one word: No.” York has essentially infinite resources, but the unions do not. Bit by bit, faculty by faculty, program by program, year by year, complaint by complaint, York made YUFA spend millions of dollars and it put incredible pressure on YUFA members. Some lost their jobs.

York has pushed things to the breaking point, and now YUFA is fracturing. To my fellow YUFA members, I say: You may be an academic with tenure, but you’re in a union. You need a strong one. What is happening to higher education in Ontario is a policy decision made by the provincial and federal governments, and it won’t suddenly improve. We need protection and we get that through YUFA. To the YUFA Executive: Once again, I ask you to back down.

(Send comments to my off-York email address for YUFA matters, yufa@williamdenton.org.)