“I just want to say, simply, that a second appointment was missed,” Laval University rector Sophie d’Amours said Friday morning of negotiations with the university professors’ union. Laval University (SPUL).
During a press conference held in Quebec, the rector deplored that the SPUL had rejected the conciliator’s settlement hypothesis only four hours after it was filed. After more than three weeks of strike, the two parties remain at an impasse, which risks prolonging the current winter session.
“I remind you that we manage public funds and that we have to make compromises. The SPUL president cannot say that the SPUL wants to negotiate while posting messages on social media where he repeats, ‘this is not negotiable’,” she said.
Ms. d’Amours underlined the “significant” and “real” impacts of the strike on the entire academic community and recalled the “shared responsibility” of both parties towards the approximately 23,000 students affected by the events, “including 6,700 are at risk of having their graduation delayed.”
“Three issues remain to be resolved: salaries, minimum employment and a specific aspect of academic freedom, that of determining the teaching modality used in a course,” said the rector, adding that a settlement was “achievable” if everyone was willing to cooperate.
In a video broadcast Thursday evening on the union’s YouTube channel, SPUL President Louis-Philippe Lampron indicated that certain proposals of the settlement hypothesis were “not acceptable”, especially since it is not there was “nothing to fix the problem of academic freedom”.
“Elements were deemed interesting and sufficient to build a basis for discussion to relaunch negotiations, acknowledged the tenured professor at the Faculty of Law. […] We made a counter-proposal to the employer; Unfortunately, we didn’t hear back, and that’s where we left off. »
Note that the SPUL demands the hiring of 100 new professors to lighten the growing workload of the teaching staff, a request “completely reasonable and realistic”, according to Mr. Lampron.
The protection of academic freedom by leaving the choice of teaching methods to professors and a “salary catch-up” compared to comparable universities are also at the heart of union demands.
“The SPUL suggests that we have the ability to pay, because according to them, we have accumulated sums of nearly 260 million in recent years. This is a misinterpretation of the university’s financial statements,” said André Darveau, executive vice-president and vice-president of human resources and finance, during the press conference.
“This amount, we don’t have it in our woolen sock”, he specified, adding that these sums were generally used to support teaching and research activities as well as to ensure the development of the university.
After 36 meetings, including 28 with the conciliator, management and the union have still not found common ground.
“We want to end the session, not cancel it. We will no doubt have to exceed the normal deadlines, so beyond April 30, but we will do our best to offer terms that will be flexible and that will allow students to reconcile their commitments and the continuity of their studies “, assured Cathia Bergeron, vice-rector for studies and student affairs.
Last Saturday, the impasse between the negotiating committees had prompted the conciliator appointed by the Ministry of Labor to suspend the talks until Friday.
