Negotiations
Compensation Negotiations Payouts: Your retro GWI pay have been paid out on December 29. Please contact your department's HR Business Partner if you have any questions.
Basic Agreement Bargaining: APSA and SFU will begin renegotiating the Basic Agreement on January 15-19.
APSA has filed two grievances based on article 9.2 of our Basic Agreement. These grievances are for the professional development fund reimbursement payout for temporary members from our last round of bargaining and the University's aggregation of sick leave for concurrent illnesses. We are working to resolve these disputes with SFU.
Joint Compensation Review Committee: APSA received an arbitrated award from Colin Taylor in the 2015 round of negotiations. The committee works together on items such as market comparisons, salary, and other total compensation pieces as mandated by the award. We will have further substantive updates on this ongoing issue soon.
APSA advocates have several ongoing grievances and investigations on accommodations, return to work and hours of work. We can't give any details due to confidentiality issues. Please see this infographic on the Life of a Grievance to learn more about how the grievance process works.
Several members have raised concerns about the changes in massage benefits, noting that they're having difficulties with Pacific Blue Cross honouring the 12-month doctor's note instead of the six-month note. If you are having similar issues, please contact hradmin@sfu.ca.
Hiring Freeze
On December 4, all SFU employees received an email from Dilson Rassier outlining further budget cuts. SFU expects units to cut 5-8% in their budgets over the current and next fiscal year—negotiated increases to member's wages and benefits are not affected. We're working vigorously to prevent member job loss and learn more about the alleged state of SFU's financial health. We will update you as soon as we know more!
Pension
The University has given APSA, CUPE and PolyParty new administrative plan text to review, which appears to include only minor text edits and incorporates no substantive changes. The Pension Advisory Committee will make recommendations to the board, and the final changes will be presented to the Employees' Joint Pension Committee (EJPC). We hope to resolve these changes by February 29, 2024.
APSA and SFU LR are close to resolving an issue regarding the pension plan with members. The affected members will be updated on the next steps.
The recent Provost email about the budget issues includes a section: "...and an unanticipated increase in pension expenses". After
If you've recently checked your pension projector, please note that it is currently inaccurate for APSA members due to the recent retropay on December 29. A limitation of the pension projector tool is that it can not identify retro pay from regular salary. So, whenever a retro payment is made, the calculator assumes it is an employee's new regular rate and provides inaccurate, overstated data. Please wait until your next pay before checking the pension projector.