Working Towards A Practicable, Transparent, and Fair Hiring Process
On Friday November 7, our bargaining committee met with McGill to discuss two big clauses: job postings (Article 12) and hiring/onboarding (Article 13). We are pleased to say that significant progress has been made on both of them!
For job postings (Article 12), your bargaining committee and McGill have reached an agreement in principle. Our goal was to give members enough time to apply for positions while ensuring that you can also be hired in a timely manner. Our tentative commitment to a timeline of 7 days, accepted by McGill, aims at doing just that! Furthermore, job postings will be required to provide some essential details to applicants, such as the number of hours, positions, a summary of duties, and the statement “McGill University is Committed to Equity in Employment.” Pending a thoroughly-reviewed French translation of Article 12, it is ready to sign.
Concerning hiring and onboarding (Article 13), however, our bargaining committee was met with a bit of a challenge. As a union, it is important that we receive information not only on who gets a job, but also who applied and was rejected.. This information allows us to keep track of hiring tendencies, so if one position is only ever employing Kyles despite a broad and diverse application pool, we can flag this as inequitable. Unfortunately, McGill was hesitant to provide us this list of rejected applicants.
Transparency in hiring remains a top priority for our members, so this is a challenge which we will not back down from. Although the atmosphere was tense during negotiations, near the end of the session we saw a slight change in tone: McGill expressed concerns about sharing certain details (like final enrolment numbers of courses), but acknowledged our rationale and agreed to review internally how to make this practical. This is great news, as this change is incredibly vital – if we can also observe the hiring process, we can call attention to systemic issues before they reach the grievance stage, saving our membership and the employer time.
While there are still some details to negotiate, we have made significant progress on this clause, including tentative agreement on about 4 clauses, one of which concerns orientations for new employees!
Finally, careful readers of our newsletter may note that we did not table a revised conflict of interest policy (Article 14.05). This is because we’d like to bring it back to you, our membership! You have flagged conflicts of interest as a serious concern, and we really want to get the language right according to the lived experience of our members: that means a policy that trusts our membership’s earnest desire to identify any conflicts of interest they face when grading, but doesn’t make this disclosure an undue burden . We have reached an amicable understanding with McGill on the importance of this issue, and they have provided a proposal that aims to not be burdensome, but we need your input! Do you have anything to say on this clause? Do you have any times that you had to grade a friend? We want to hear about it! Reach out to Jordan Cowie bargaining.casual1@agsem-aeedem.ca – she’d love to discuss how we can make this clause both workable and realistic for you.
On our side of the table were Jordan Cowie (2L, Grader & Course Tutor, Management/Law), Bronwyn Walsh (Recent Graduate, Grader & Course Assistant, Math & Stats), Donald Morard (PhD Candidate, Grader, History), Connor O’Keefe (U3 Grievance Officer), Guillaume Forest-Allard, our advisor from our affiliate union Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec (FNEEQ), and both AGSEM co-presidents, Dallas Jokic and emma mckay.
Do you want to see our next negotiation take place and have your input represented at the table? Sign up to be a member in the room! Our next bargaining dates will be:
- Wednesday November 19th 12:30-3:30PM
- Monday November 24th from 1-4pm
- Tuesday December 2nd (timing TBD)
Please fill out this form to sign up, and we’ll be in touch!
Love and solidarity,
Your Bargaining and Bargaining Support Committee