A Call-Out for Hardship Committee members!

by

A new policy, the Hardship Fund policy, has been adopted at our Special General Members Meeting on June 16th. It is a temporary policy ending September 30th, 2020, and was added to our Policy Book . Normally, creating a hardship fund would be treated as a bylaw amendment but under the special pandemic-related circumstances CUPE National guidelines allowed us to create a policy and vote on it at a general meeting, instead of engaging in the longer process associated with bylaw amendments. After its expiry, this temporary policy can still become a bylaw  (not necessarily in the current version but subject to CUPE National approval), should the membership wish so.

According to this policy, hardship requests would be administered and vetted by three Hardship Committee members, who are to be appointed by the Executive Committee.

If you wish to serve on the Hardship Committee, simply email the local at info@cupe4207.org by July 3, 2020.  A short statement expressing your interest is welcome but not required.

The three members will be appointed at the  Executive Committee meeting on July 6th.

Special General Members Meeting

by

TUESDAY JUNE 16 at 4 pm

Register on Zoom

AGENDA:
This is our first general meeting since the lock down on March 13th. It is a special general members meeting with the following agenda:
  • Bargaining Update for Unit 1 and Unit 3.
  • Voting on three items:
  • Hardship Policy Proposal Since we have never had a policy on members’ requesting help in times of hardship, we have a proposal authored by the Policy, Bylaws and Finance Committee, that is to be discussed and voted on.
  • 2020-2021 Budget. We need to discuss and pass our annual budget.
  • Code of Conduct Proposal   At the last GMM, a notice to add a Code of Conduct to our bylaws was given. We will be discussing it and voting on it at this SGMM.

Workshops for Teaching Assistants in the Spring and Summer 2020

by

The Centre for Pedagogical Information has developed TA workshops and discussion sessions.

  1. Workshops for Teaching Assistants. The workshops are listed in pdf here and will take place on Tuesdays. Participants need to register for them.
  2. Drop-in discussions will be taking place weekly every Tuesday from 1pm to 2pm and Friday from 11:30am to 12:30pm and will use Microsoft Teams. Email eddev@brocku.ca for the meeting link.

Make Brock a $15 Fairness Campus endorsement

by

Our local has been approached by Fight for $15 & Fairness Niagara to endorse a proposal of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights, Equity, and Decolonization [PACHRED] for improvement of work standards at Brock. The proposal, Make Brock a $15 & Fairness Campus, requests that the university reinstates some of the labour protections that have been revoked by Bill 47 in 2018. … Read more…

Access to payslips and ROE

by

According to the Ontario Employment Standards Act the employer must provide a wage statement – payslip – on or before an employee’s pay day. We lose access to Workday when our contract expires, yet there are still two more pay periods after April 30th. The employer provides a solution to payslip access on the Human Resources website: https://brocku.ca/human-resources/payslips-t4s-roes/

The page also informs about the automatic release of ROE to Service Canada. This is important to members who apply for Employment Insurance benefits.

On or about May 3 the employers sent this:
Your appointment with the University has ended. If your regular access to Workday is no longer active, you can obtain limited Workday access for 7 days after your final pay deposit to view/print your final payslip. Follow the instructions in the job aid found at the following link to access your payslip: https://brocku.ca/human-resources/wp-content/uploads/sites/81/HR_PostTerminationAccess.pdf

Open letter to waive graduate fees

by

On April 21, the Canadian Federation of Students [CFS] has released an open letter addressed to the federal and provincial governments, Canada research funding councils, and university administrations. The letter demands the suspension of graduate tuition fees for the Spring/Summer term for all graduate students. Our local has endorsed the letter. The pandemic has accentuated the already precarious conditions of graduate students having to pay exorbitant fees for their stays in graduate programs over the summer when TA jobs are very scarce.

Open Letter: Grad Students and COVID-19

Workday glitch alert!

by

It would seem that Workday’s bugs continue plaguing the human resources and financial management system at Brock.

Members applying for jobs should be aware of their attachments’ format they upload to the application. Workload seems to only accept .docx and .pdf.

Here is the gist of the glitch – a member applies, includes all the required information, sends it off and receives confirmation from Talent Acquisition. If the attached documents are not in docx or pdf, the hiring staff in the department where the application is directed will not receive it. To the staff responsible for hiring, you have not applied…

Making sure that submitted documents are in particular format should not be our problem, and certainly our livelihood should not hinge on such a chosen, human made technicality.