Your Bargaining Committee met Wednesday, September 18, 2024 and made good headway discussing the upcoming negotiations session with NAIT on September 25, 2024 5 – 8:30 p.m. in person at the main campus.
The NASA committee is going into this session prepared to agree on some items, and make counter proposals on others.
NAIT has communicated to NASA that they do not intend to have any counter-proposals to table at this meeting and will only be asking questions. NASA had asked if at least some questions of clarification could be handled between meetings to allow for more progress in productive negotiations, but NAIT has declined to ask or answer those questions between sessions. This may have the potential to unnecessarily prolong bargaining, which the Bargaining Committee will be assessing.
NAIT is also refusing to allow a hybrid option for observers to attend virtually if we reach capacity in the rooms we are meeting in. They expressed a confusing rationale that it would amount to “live streaming” the negotiations despite it being on Teams on NAIT’s systems where the users logging in could be tracked. When asked how observing this session through Teams would differ from the observers who attended through Teams on July 10 and August 1 this year, NAIT refused to offer any further explanation.
School & department re-organization and representation
There has been ongoing discussion with the NASA Bargaining Committee and Executive about the re-organization and what it may mean with the make-up of the Bargaining Committee. With the moving of programs into different departments,, NASA was faced with some issues of duplicate representation. After exploring options that would require changes to NASA’s Policy Bylaws such as adding alternates or doubling up the representation per department, NASA’s Executive decided to remain with the current one representative per department structure.
At the same time where there has been duplicate representation there were representatives who chose to resign which has made this process smoother.The Bargaining Committee wants to acknowledge and thank all of the representatives who have served on the committee but have now moved on:
Angie Skuba, Roo Maynard, Steve Chattargoon, David McCoy, Kirk Lamble, and Mette Rasmussen all made significant contributions to the heavy lifting of developing your ingoing proposal package and other important work since the first bargaining committee meeting last fall. The path to an improved agreement at NAIT has been made easier through their work. We also welcome new representative AJ Armstrong representing Information and Communications Systems who jumped right into his first meeting on Wednesday.
Picket captain training
This is training that has been underway for months now in other unions like AUPE, and it’s good to see NASA members stepping up so that your bargaining committee can be in the strongest position possible at the table. The course will talk about how negotiations get to a picket line, what can happen there, what our rights are, and what your role would be.