UPEI administration requests arbitration as striking faculty ponders next move

Mediation between the University of Prince Edward Island and the school's faculty association broke down as the strike that's put classes on hold enters its fourth week.

Mediated talks between the parties ended after just three days this weekend. Now, UPEI's administration says it's asked that the process move on to interest arbitration. 

That means talks would continue, but students would also be able to return to class.

UPEI said in a release Tuesday the process would be led by Michelle Flaherty, the same facilitator who led the mediation talks.

Margot Rejskind, the lead negotiator for the UPEI Faculty Association, said faculty is still considering its next steps, but that it has concerns about having Flaherty as the arbitrator.

"For her to have been the mediator and then become the arbitrator in our view would be a very serious conflict of interest because she has been a party to all of the discussions," she said. "And so we do question the fact that they're even suggesting that."

Rejskind said arbitration wouldn't deal with many of its members' concerns, such as "the fact that we don't have enough faculty, that we are so low on full-time faculty that we will be seeing programs collapse and close in the next few years."

She said about 40 per cent of its members are working on short-term sessional contracts maxing out at about $30,000 a year.

In a notice published on the UPEI website, the university said it remains committed to crediting students with net savings from not paying faculty salaries while they're on strike. 

UPEI said in an effort to get a deal on the weekend, it offered to pay both the university and faculty member pension contributions for the time that they were on strike.

That would have amounted to $355,000 for the first three weeks of the strike, which would otherwise have been net savings available to students, UPEI said.

The university said the faculty association countered with a back-to-work protocol that, in addition to paying both portions of pension and additional benefits, included 32 other items. 

"Among these items were additional cash pay outs of $2,000 per person plus 40 per cent of their lost wages for the strike they initiated," the notice said.

"This is in addition to their current non-taxable strike pay of $1,120/week for spending 10 hours on strike duty per week. This strike pay value is approximately equivalent to a gross annual salary of $96,000 if they had to pay taxes and standard regulatory and benefit deductions."