The following is a transcript of an episode of The Vilest Rag, The Ubyssey's podcast. You can also listen to the full audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
[THEME SONG]
Sophie Clark
This is The Vilest Rag. I'm your host Sophie Clark, and you're listening to a podcast brought to you by The Ubyssey, UBC's student newspaper.
[Archived Recording 1]
Here at the office of UBC's Employee Relations Department today to deliver legal notice for mediation. At bargaining yesterday, UBC presented a comprehensive offer that didn't come close to addressing the top issues for CUPE 2278 members. So we're filing for mediation at the Labour Relations Board in hopes that a third-party mediator can bring us closer to a contract that meets our needs.
Sophie Clark
If you've been following The Ubyssey's series of news reports on collective bargaining agreements, then you may know seven units representing faculty and students have been ratified, notably providing employees with wage increases and health benefits until 2029. Two still remain in negotiation, but CUPE 2278, representing teaching assistants and other academic support staff, are heading to a vote to strike from Sept. 21 to 25.
Today, I'm speaking to Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega, The Ubyssey's news editor, and Simon Jian, The Ubyssey's governance reporter, about recent updates on the agreements and what this means for students and staff.
[THEME SONG]
Sophie Clark
Hello and welcome back to The Vilest Rag. Well, welcome back to you, and welcome to you.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
Thank you.
Sophie Clark
Simon, since this is your first time on, I want you to explain a little bit about your role and your beat at The Ubyssey.
Simon Jian
Yeah, absolutely. My name is Simon. I've been here with The Ubyssey for a few years now. I'm currently a governance reporter with the news section, and part of my portfolio is reporting on university institutions — which is part of what we're going to be talking about today, the Board of Governors and labour relations.
Sophie Clark
Over the past year, UBC has been negotiating, and has now ratified seven collective agreements that will be in effect until 2029. They include added benefits and wage increases for employees, but the details differ between agreements. For listeners' benefit, can you explain a little bit about the process of collective bargaining? Also, what is a collective agreement, and how does it impact unions?
Simon Jian
A collective agreement is where a group of employees at the university work under essentially one large contract. Part of that is that every few years the government puts out a mandate for public-sector bargaining, and this year's is the 2025 Balanced Measures Mandate, which outlines what the government wants for its public institutions when negotiating with unions. This year it's a four-year term, so the universities' collective contracts go back to 2025 and will all end in 2029.
There's a general wage increase of 3 per cent each year, and there's also some additional funding of 2 per cent for service delivery and improving working conditions — those goals come from the province. As for the university, we now have seven ratified contracts, which is fresh off the press as of the time we're recording this. That includes CUPE 116, the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff, the Faculty Association, BCGEU, Vancouver and Okanagan, CUPE 2950, and IUOE 115.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
I think when it comes to the process of collective bargaining, what happens is the province sets out this mandate for public bodies like UBC to bargain with the unions that represent their employees, and then they negotiate — that's called the bargaining table. They try to reach an agreement on what employees want and what the university can, or is allowed to, or is willing to give them.
When they reach that agreement, it's called a tentative agreement, and that goes to the union's membership, who ratify it, and then the university also ratifies it, and the agreement becomes ratified. The seven agreements Simon just mentioned have all gone through that process.
Sometimes there's disagreement that can't be resolved at the bargaining table, and there are other mechanisms for that. One is mediation: the union can give notice of mediation, essentially telling the university, we're not reaching an agreement, so we're bringing in a third-party mediator to help find one. The province provides that through the Labour Relations Board, the quasi-judicial body that handles this, which appoints a third-party mediator to make sure the conversation runs smoothly.
If that works, the same thing happens — tentative agreement, ratified by both parties, and it takes effect. If it fails, then you're looking at job action, strikes, that whole other track. There are other ways unions can escalate too. But in the best-case scenario, both sides reach an agreement, both ratify it, and it becomes active.
Sophie Clark
There are now two agreements still to be ratified: CUPE 116 Aquatic and CUPE 2278. Can either of you explain who and what these bargaining units represent?
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
Before we get into who those two are — and Simon touched on this — by the time Simon's article was published, onlysix agreements had been ratified. Now IUOE 115 has also ratified theirs, and that happened four days ago. It's a similar story: ratified by both parties, with a wage bump for maintenance employees and a bit of an increase to their personal spending accounts — an account the university gives them — plus the 3 per cent wage increase Simon mentioned, also active until 2029.
IUOE is maybe one of the smallest unions on campus, if not the smallest. It represents the people who work in heating, maintenance and ventilation systems at the UBC Vancouver campus. So they've reached an agreement, which brings us to seven. The two still pending are CUPE 116 Aquatic, which represents workers at the aquatic centre, and CUPE 2278, which represents TAs, exam invigilators, GAAs, English language instructors, and some people at the Centre for Accessibility, the CfA.
Sophie Clark
I want to talk a little bit about CUPE 2278 specifically. Like you said, they represent TAs, graduate academic assistants, English language instructors, and CfA exam invigilators on our campus. Can you tell me a little bit about what each of these roles entails? I think we all know generally what a TA is, but I'm curious about their importance to this university.
Simon Jian
TAs, as we all know — particularly for lower-level undergraduate classes with lots of students — are often the ones running discussions, running labs, grading exams, and invigilating. It's very essential work; they're essentially helping run courses where there's only one professor. I was a TA once, so I was leading discussion sessions, grading exams, occasionally making lesson plans.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
I think it's also important to note that CUPE doesn't only represent TAs. As you were saying, there are also graduate academic assistants, or GAAs — similar roles to TAs, but for graduate-level courses — and exam invigilators at the CfA, who are important for students registered with accommodations at the Centre for Accessibility. Sometimes people have special accommodations for how or when they take an exam, and the CfA essentially runs a space where those students can do that. That's what exam invigilators do there. And then there are English language instructors as well.
Sophie Clark
I understand there are certain aspects of those two agreements that haven't been agreed to yet. What are the key issues in this new agreement, and why has the process been delayed compared to the others?
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
With CUPE 116 Aquatic — one of the smaller unions — UBC's collective bargaining page lists it as pending, which I understand to mean they haven't started negotiations yet, since once negotiations start the status changes to "underway." So that's one we haven't looked at in much detail.
CUPE 2278 is a different story — this is the TA union. They started negotiations, I believe, either very early this year or late last year, and were among the first to negotiate with the university. From my interviews with CUPE members, my understanding is that they dealt with monetary issues first — wage increases, essentially — though that wasn't explained to me in great detail, so it might be the other way around.
The point is, they've been negotiating for a while, and haven't been reaching common ground with the university. CUPE says the university isn't listening to or engaging with their proposals. The university says they've had multiple meetings, which they consider evidence of engagement.
During the summer, CUPE 2278 decided the best way forward was to file for mediation with the Labour Relations Board — what we were talking about earlier — so a third-party mediator, appointed by the province, was brought in to help move things along. Shortly after, maybe a month later, CUPE 2278 said publicly that mediation wasn't getting them anywhere and that the university still wasn't engaging with their proposals.
UBC maintains that they've attended these meetings with open ears and want to engage. To put more pressure on the university, CUPE 2278 has called a strike vote. Earlier, they'd told their membership to prepare for a strike; now they've put the actual question to their membership — do you want to strike or not. If the "yes" side wins, that puts more pressure on the university, because it means CUPE 2278's executive board can then call a strike at any time, with 72 hours' notice. But a "yes" vote doesn't mean they're going to strike right away.
Simon Jian
I wanted to talk about what CUPE 2278 is specifically asking for. They started with non-financial demands and have been moving on to financial ones. I think some of what they're asking for is employer-paid health benefits, workload improvements, and some protections around academic freedom.
Juan Pablo mentioned the strike vote taking place between Sept. 21 and 25 — in the next few days — and I wanted to highlight that on Sept. 23, which is a Wednesday, the Board of Governors, which oversees employee relations, is set to dissolve the Employee Relations Committee, effective Jan. 1, 2027. That's something being recommended out of the governance framework review, so it remains to be seen how the university will handle negotiating with CUPE 2278 amid these upcoming changes.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
So at the same time TAs are voting on whether to strike, the university is changing the way it handles labour relations — which is an interesting coincidence of timing.
Sophie Clark
Obviously, the TA agreement impacts students very closely. This might be speculation, but one of my classes dropped tutorials entirely and replaced them with occasional drop-in sessions — it might be a stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's preparation for a strike. TAs are crucial members of the UBC community, so what can students expect if the strike vote passes?
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
It's interesting what you're saying about your class dropping tutorials — are the two things connected? Maybe, not for sure. But I'll say something I'll probably say every time we come on this podcast as the news section: we're in a post-secondary sector crisis. The sector in B.C., and across the country, is struggling financially, largely because of the diminishing influx of international students who were supporting the system for a while, and now, with immigration restrictions, there are fewer of them.
That plays a role too, when universities are struggling to keep faculty on payroll — the first people affected tend to be the TAs, the GAAs, the people further down the hierarchy.
If a "yes" vote wins — which I think is what CUPE 2278's executives want and what their bargaining committee is recommending — that doesn't mean there's going to be a strike right away. They have up to three months, maybe three or four, to call a strike with 72 hours' notice. So it could happen at any point, essentially, in the first term. The thing about job action is that it's as much about the threat of it as the action itself — the intent is to push the university toward an agreement, so a "yes" vote doesn't mean a strike happens immediately.
This has happened before — this isn't the first time TAs have done this. CUPE 2278 went on strike in 2012; that job action continued through mediation. They were asking for wage increases, priority hiring for fifth-year PhD students, and tuition waivers. They reached an agreement a couple of weeks after starting job action, but they didn't get wage increases, and didn't get priority hiring for master's students — they got it for PhD students, but no tuition waivers.
A few years before that, in 2003, they also went on strike — that one lasted about three weeks, largely over wage increases to keep pace with rising tuition. This is a bit of a debated issue, but the university president at the time, Martha Piper, sent a letter to the province's minister of advanced education, Shirley Bond, expressing concern about the repercussions of a TA strike.
A week later, they were legislated back to work — the province passed a bill forcing CUPE 2278, and also CUPE 2950, the clerical, library and theatre workers who were on strike at the same time, back to their jobs. It was controversial at the time — what role did Piper's letter play in that decision? Maybe she applied pressure; it's not fully known. They eventually reached an agreement with wage increases, but no concessions on rising tuition.
So it's happened a couple of times this century. The common thread is that these weren't terribly long strikes — a couple of weeks — and they eventually ran through mediation or arbitration, different instances of the collective bargaining process. So, again: a "yes" vote doesn't mean TAs are striking right away, and it doesn't mean the strike, if it happens, would be long-lasting — at least, not based on the previous strikes.
Sophie Clark
What exactly has CUPE 2278 asked for?
Simon Jian
I touched on this a bit earlier, but I think one of the main things they're pushing for is an employer-paid extended health plan. CUPE 2278 originally asked for 100 per cent employer-paid health care; UBC said that would be too expensive, so the union came back with a proposal for 75 per cent — matching what TAs at Simon Fraser University already get. UBC hasn't budged on that either — I think that's part of what pushed them toward a strike vote. Other things they've mentioned are workload and academic freedom protections.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
Simon's piece talks about the different health spending accounts each union got, since they all received a different increase. As it stands, CUPE 2278 has the lowest health spending account — I think it's $100, from what I heard from CUPE. They're saying they need the employer to pay for health care; they want to be on UBC's staff insurance plan.
From my conversations with CUPE 2278 executives — and I should clarify these are conversations with CUPE executives, since we've had trouble getting a university perspective or interviews with the people running these negotiations on UBC's side — what I understand is that the university has said the fully employer-paid plan CUPE's asking for would be too expensive, and has pointed members toward the existing AMS/GSS Health & Dental Plan instead.
CUPE's response is that the AMS/GSS plan doesn't cut it for student workers — a lot of their members are either international students or over 25, meaning they don't have a parents' plan to fall back on if the AMS/GSS plan comes up short.
So that's one of the biggest points of contention: health spending amounts. Then, as Simon said, there's workload — they want to balance the TA-to-student ratio, to keep what they'd call a manageable number of students per TA. And then there's academic freedom, and clawbacks — that last one matters to them because the university recently raised the minimum research funding for graduate students, many of whom are TAs.
That funding is the amount the university grants to fund a student's research, but TA wages are discounted from that amount. It's been raised to $40,000 a year, but if you're a TA earning a wage from that work, that wage gets discounted from the $40,000. If you get a wage increase through bargaining, that just reduces how much minimum research funding you receive — you effectively lose the increase.
The same happens if you get a grant from a federal research funder, or if you take on a second TA-ship — the research funding amount decreases even further. That's something they're really concerned about, and from what I've heard from the executive, it's not something the university is entertaining in negotiations.
[INTERLUDE]
Sophie Clark
You mentioned having trouble speaking to the university or getting information from them on this. Have they expressed any kind of plan in response to a possible strike, or have you received anything at all?
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
I can speak to the plans, and Simon can speak to the lack of responsiveness from media relations. On the plans: we asked the university directly what their plans are in case of a strike, and that question wasn't addressed in the statement we got back. That was for the piece we wrote about the union heading to a strike vote. There have been other instances of questions going unanswered too.
Simon Jian
I think part of it is that, as journalists, we always want to get people on the record talking to us, and getting interviews with the university is hard. I don't know exactly how many interviews Juan Pablo's gotten as news editor, but it's not too often — we mostly end up with statements, and it's hard to follow up or get clarification from a statement alone.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
And sometimes those statements, like the one we got about strike contingency plans, don't really answer the questions. Sometimes they just include information that's already public. It's hard to understand where the university is coming from when the message is always essentially the same: that they're willing to negotiate because they've been attending these meetings, and because they've signed seven out of nine agreements — it was six out of nine when we first asked, now it's seven out of nine.
That's what they point to as evidence they're willing to negotiate, and it's what they put in their press releases and on their collective bargaining page. But when we're trying to understand where they actually stand — especially on the TA negotiation, which doesn't seem to be going as smoothly as the others — it's been hard to get a clear picture.
Sophie Clark
So, this coming week for listeners, but over Sept. 21 to 25, CUPE 2278 will vote to strike. Where should students look for updates, and why should they stay informed on this?
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
If you want information about the strike, ubyssey.ca — we're going to keep covering this and keeping an eye on it.
Simon Jian
Yeah, ubyssey.ca, and also UBC HR's website and CUPE 2278's website — hr.ubc.ca and cupe2278.ca. I'm sure both parties will be posting updates as things unfold.
Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega
On what students should care about: TAs are essential. If they go on strike, there's going to be a disruption to students' academic progress — that's undeniable. But it also has to do with the fact that what TAs are asking for — and this comes up in conversations I've had with the union — they believe will benefit students too. The workload conversation is something they're really hammering on, because I think they believe it'll make people sympathetic to their cause, and I don't think it's a flawed argument: when workload is too much for TAs to manage, the quality of education students get suffers.
They've said many times that this matters a lot to them, and that it should matter to undergraduate and graduate students too — because if TAs and GAAs can't manage their workload, education quality gets worse, and that affects students directly, strike or no strike.
Sophie Clark
Before we go, let's take a look at this week's stories. In news, post-secondary policy reporter Oliver Matisz writes about UBC's Learning Exchange in the Downtown Eastside, and its plans for program expansion and construction of non-market housing. In opinion, technology columnist Leah Grossman tests GenioNotes, the university's replacement for student note-takers, in Move Fast, Break Things. In arts and culture, editor Jack Paransky reviews Coyote vs. Acme, a film following Looney Tunes characters in a live-action comedic legal battle. In sports, football reporter Caleb Peterson analyzes the Thunderbirds' thrilling performance at Homecoming. You can read all of these pieces and more at ubyssey.ca, which publishes daily.
In today's episode of The Vilest Rag, you heard from Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega, The Ubyssey's news editor, and Simon Jian, The Ubyssey's governance reporter.
Audio clips were sourced from CUPE 2278's Instagram, and myself, Sophie Clark, The Ubyssey's audio producer. This episode was edited by Sophie Clark, and the music is by Dylan Fitzhenry.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
