ULFA files unfair labour practice complaint

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on March 2, 2022.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association has filed an unfair labour practice complaint against the U of L’s Board of Governors.
ULFA president Dan O’Donnell said Tuesday the complaint with the Alberta Labour Relations Board comes after two years of unsuccessful negotiations.
O’Donnell said the complaint is an effort to get supervision over the U of L’s negotiating team.
The ULFA has compiled 30 pages of complaints about the university which it says in a press release has “engaged in a concerted and ongoing effort to avoid genuine and productive bargaining with the association.”
O’Donnell said the university has gone through five chief negotiators and the union has only met three at the bargaining table.
“It’s actually quite a comprehensive complaint. We’ve avoided doing this over two years because as a rule, it’s not very helpful. I think in the last two years, we’ve filed one Labour Board complaint…We ended up taking them to a hearing and about a half hour or so before the hearing, they just gave in and gave us what we’d originally asked for,” said O’Donnell.
“As a rule, we tend not to do it except when the situation is egregious which is what’s happened here,” he added.
“Despite what they’ve been saying on their blogs, in private they’ve actually been writing to us saying they don’t want to meet and so we’ll be quoting from their letters later today,” he said.
“Basically, it’s a culmination of two years of problems. They’re on their fifth chief bargainer. That’s never been heard of before. And we’ve only met three of them at the table,” he added.
One of those bargainers never led a session and the most recent one the ULFA hasn’t met, he said.
“It’s really a truly strange, strange, strange situation.”
O’Donnell said “the nature of the complaint is what’s known as surface bargaining and now failure to bargain. Surface bargaining is when you show up and you’re not really serious about trying to reach an agreement. So it’s quite a lengthy application but we detail many, many examples where they would show up at the table and then they weren’t ready to present something.”
During mediation, the U of L “basically presented nothing to us until the end,” he said.
He said every other university in Alberta has settled at least 50 articles of contention as part of negotiations but the ULFA and U of L have only settled two in two years.
“I won’t say that they’re misrepresenting what was happening in terms of us trying to meet with them was the final straw, but it’s become clear that they’re simply going to refuse to meet. So our request to the Labour Board is really an attempt to see if we can’t get some supervision really over a negotiating team on the other side that really does not seem interested in reaching an agreement,” said O’Donnell.
The union says the U of L has refused in writing to meet with the ULFA on three separate occasions since the labour action began.
The U of L said Monday on its website in a post by Provost and Vice-President Academic Erasmus Okine, “the labour disruption at the University of Lethbridge is a challenging time for our entire campus community.” The post said there may be some apprehension when university employees comes across students picketing and “as these activities unfold, our community has a shared responsibility to respect these rights of students in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
The U of L said picketers and people crossing the picket line have conducted themselves appropriately, adding “we anticipate that all strike-related activities will continue to be lawful and undertaken with due consideration of safety and regard for others.”
The university is asking people to not disrupt picket lines. Campus Safety, it said, is prepared to support students and employees during what it calls “these challenging times.”

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