• The Crowe Case: A Student’s Perspective
• Control Matters: Intellectual Property and Electronic Files
• Community Learning? The UWFA Executive Responds
• UWFA Bargaining Updates
• Raising Course Caps… And Concerns
• 331 Days and Counting…
• Closing the Gap: In Search of Librarian/Faculty Parity
• Thanks from the UWFA Executive
• UWFA Women and Equity Committee

For a PDF copy of the print version of The UWFA News, click here.

For the online copy of The UWFA News, click here.

The UWFA News accepts submissions from UW Faculty Association members on issues of interest. Unless otherwise stated, the opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of the Association or its Executive Committee.

• Academic Freedom on Campus and Beyond
• Where Acronyms Meet: UWFA Goes to the MFL Convention
• Transforming the Academy: CAUT Aboriginal Academics Conference
• Saddle Up Partner! The 2010 Olympics and Postsecondary Classes
• Pop Goes the Union 2

Enjoy and have a happy holiday!

“On December 6th it will be 20 years since 14 young women were murdered in Montreal simply because they were women,” says Barbara Byers, Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress. “Ironically, as this anniversary approaches, our government is trying to eradicate the firearms registry, the one concrete measure taken to reduce gun violence against women.”

Byers says the CLC and its affiliate unions have distributed thousands of postcards and have asked people to return them to Prime Minister Stephen Harper between November 16th and December 6th. The cards urge him to keep the gun registry, and also contain messages asking that Canada improve the lives of women by: improving the funding of shelters for women and children; investing in new social housing; setting a national standard for welfare rates; providing equal pay for work of equal value; and improving services, including a nationally-funded child care program, better public pensions and access to Employment Insurance.

Byers says, “Rather than promoting women’s equality, the federal government is severely limiting women’s capacity to organize, advocate and lobby. They won’t support women’s equality in the workplace and have limited women’s rights to challenge discrimination before the courts. We will not accept an erosion of our hard-won equality rights and we will not be silenced by a socially conservative government agenda.”

The 20 Days 20 Ways postcards are available on the CLC website. The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.2 million Canadian workers.

For more information, please contact the UWFA Office at 786-9430.

OTTAWA – The Executive Council of the Canadian Labour Congress is asking workers who belong to its affiliated unions not to visit the Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa-Gatineau until striking workers have secured a fair collective agreement.

The CLC’s Executive Council, meeting in Ottawa, passed a resolution saying in part that the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation (CMCC) “has blatantly abandoned that responsibility by failing to negotiate a fair collective agreement with its workforce.”

For the past five weeks, 420 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada have been on strike at the museums to secure a collective agreement that would change the museum’s employment practices: 38% of the workforce is employed on a temporary basis, and museum workers are being paid 30% less on average than other federal government museum workers doing the same or similar jobs.

The CLC is also calling upon the government of Canada to force the museum “to negotiate a collective agreement that ends the precarious work practices used by the Corporation.”

Although it is still a work in progress, we hope that this new website will be easier to navigate and easier for us to keep updated.

If you have any comments, questions or concerns, please direct them to uwfa@uwinnipeg.ca.

• A Message from the UWFA President;
• Updates on the Pension Plan, Collective Bargaining and the Scholarship and Bursary Fund;
• A Cautionary Tale from Thompson Rivers University;
• Pop Goes the Union (Unions in Pop Culture); and,
• Community May Not Extend Past Words at UW.

About The UWFA News

The UWFA News is published by the UWFA Communications Committee four times a year (September, November/December, February and May). If you would like to submit something to the next issue of The UWFA News, please email it to t.whalen@uwinnipeg.ca or uwfa@uwinnipeg.ca. We are always looking for submissions from our members.

If you have any questions, please direct them to uwfa@uwinnipeg.ca.

Each year, the Canadian Labour Congress and the Manitoba Organization of Faculty Associations make submissions to the federal government as it prepares for the upcoming year’s budget. Below are links to both submissions.

MOFA Federal Budget Submission

CLC Federal Budget Submission

Peer Review: What is Fair?

English Version