Dalhousie faculty seeks conciliator in negotiations
The Dalhousie Faculty Association is asking the province to appoint a conciliator to help it negotiate a new collective agreement with the university and avoid the possibility of a strike in the new year.
Both sides remain far apart on key issues such as pay, workload and pension plans.
“I do think there will have to be some significant movement on some of our proposals,” said Darren Abramson, president of the association, which represents roughly 1,000 university professors, librarians and counsellors.
Attempts at a last- minute agreement between the negotiating teams representing the faculty association and the Dalhousie board of governors on Wednesday proved fruitless.
Abramson, who’s an associate professor of philosophy at Dalhousie, said the association would file for conciliation on Thursday.
It is expected the minister of Labour and Advanced Education will appoint a conciliator in midJanuary to try to break the current stalemate.
If the conciliator isn’t able to spark an agreement, a non-binding report would be submitted to the province. The association would have to provide 14 days’ notice of a strike.
Meanwhile the association is preparing for the worst, having already struck a strike co-ordination committee. A strike headquarters is also being considered.
But Abramson stopped short of saying a strike is inevitable.
“I would absolutely not agree with that categorization, that it’s inevitable. It’s the association’s position that we hope for the best and plan for the worst.
“Conciliation, we hope, will be a meaningful process by which real progress can be made, but we felt there are significant issues that we still need productive movement on.”
At this point, Abramson said he couldn’t elaborate on the associa- tion’s key areas of concern.
Both sides of have been attempting to negotiate a new agreement since June.
At the heart of the matter is determining the kind of standard the university wants to set now and into the future, said Abramson.