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UNBCFA Strike Diary March 17th, 2015

On Friday evening the UNBC Faculty Association held a banquet at Strike Headquarters to thank our “flying pickets,” who joined us on the picket line from as far away as Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island.  At the event, each of these guests gave an inspiring speech and donated a cheque in support for our cause–and representatives from the CAUT Defense Fund presented us with a cheque in the amount of $1,000,000!  Needless to say, we were blown away by these gestures of support.  Yesterday I was proud to be among the signatories to a letter addressed to UNBC’s president and the chair of our Board of Governors, in which seventeen senior researchers and research chairs explained our opposition to the Adminstration’s recently proposed merit-based pay scheme.  Although such a scheme would in all likelihood benefit productive researchers like ourselves, it would do so at the expense of many of our faculty colleagues, thereby fostering a divisive work environment that would risk destroying our university’s cooperative and collegial ethos.  Such a scheme is at odds with the way faculty compensation works at virtually every other university in Canada.  We urge the UNBC administration to bring a proposal to the negotiating table that respects sector norms.