The CAUT Journal is an online refereed publication of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The journal is a vehicle for the dissemination of occasional articles, papers and presentations on topics of vital interest to academic staff in the post-secondary sector, including academic freedom, the rise of precarity, government policy, academic activism, and the role of post-secondary education in the support of a healthy democracy. The journal welcomes submissions on these and other related topics from national and international perspectives. The journal does not charge any author processing fees. ISSN 2563-8882
Canadian Association of University Teachers / Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d’université
Organizing for power in Canada’s university sector
Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on organizing for power in Canada’s university sector, lessons for academic staff associations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Larry Savage, Susan Spronk http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In 2023 Memorial University Faculty Association (MUNFA) engaged in a two-week strike that resulted in substantial gains and no concessions for our union. This commentary situates the strike within broader national and provincial conditions and describes key mobilizing and organizing tactics used by MUNFA for success. In particular, I detail our use of ‘on-ramps’ and the ‘ladder of engagement’ as useful metaphors for structuring practical mobilizing and organizing activities for success.
Copyright (c) 2026 Josh Lepawsky http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article assesses the utility of Jane McAlevey’s organizing model for higher education workers amidst ongoing crises in the sector. While her vocabulary and methods are widely adopted, we argue that building workers' power requires embracing the theory underpinning her framework—one premised on the fundamentally antagonistic nature of class conflict and the collective strength generated through mass participation. This adversarial, mass-participation model offers a vital corrective to dominant union practice in higher education. This “whole worker” framework faces significant challenges, including resource intensity, bureaucratic inertia, and forging “wall-to-wall” solidarity across a divided workforce. Engaging critically with McAlevey’s model remains a necessary strategic intervention for building transformative collective power.
Copyright (c) 2026 Paul Gray, Jordan House http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Openness, organizing, and job action at the University of Manitoba Faculty Association
For over a decade the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has integrated organizing approaches into multiple rounds of collective bargaining negotiations to build power amongst its members and make significant gains during collective bargaining. We describe and analyze our practical and lived experiences of integrating organizing tools including charting, structure tests, union openness and transparency, and “big open bargaining.” In sharing these experiences, we encourage other academic faculty associations to similarly embrace organizing approaches and seek to demonstrate how organizing approaches can be integrated into existing union cultures and across multiple rounds of bargaining.
Copyright (c) 2026 Orvie Dingwall, Erik Thomson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
As Canada’s only fully online university, Athabasca University (AU) offers a unique case study in post-secondary bargaining and union organizing. In the past few years growing neoliberalization of the institution combined with a dramatic shift in the legal and political climate posed a significant existential threat for AU’s faculty association (AUFA). The association responded by turning to internal organizing strategies informed by solidarity unionism and Organizing for Power. The dispersed and online nature of the workplace necessitated adapting methods and tactics to fit AU’s specific dynamics. Organizing in an online environment offers opportunities for innovation but also presents unique challenges. Through its organizing efforts AUFA learned that while tactics and methods need to be tailored to AU’s environment, overall strategy reflected that of bricks-and-mortar universities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rhiannon Rutherford, Jason Foster, Eloy Rivas-Sánchez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Organizing requires measuring participation
In a workplace context, structure tests are strategic actions that measure the participation levels of rank-and-file members and test whether they are ready to take job action. This article reflects on the lessons the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO) learned in adapting the organizing model in the context of a large, research-intensive university in Canada, and in particular the importance of measuring participation in structure tests. It identifies several key challenges: how to marshal the requisite resources, which tools to use to measure member participation, and how to share information in a manner that keeps workplace leaders engaged and organizers accountable but respects privacy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Susan Spronk http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Collective bargaining and strike innovations in Canada’s university sector
While academic staff associations have historically operated within a service-model framework characterized by professionalism and relative insularity, many have begun experimenting with strategies and tactics associated with the organizing model of unionism. This article analyzes how workplace mapping, structure tests, transparent and member-driven bargaining, and supermajority strike mandates are reshaping collective bargaining practices in the sector. Drawing on recent cases from universities across the country, the article shows how these innovations, loosely inspired by the work and methods of Jane McAlevey, can strengthen member engagement, enhance strike readiness, and increase academic staff association leverage in negotiations. The article argues that embracing the organizing model is a strategic imperative for academic staff associations seeking not only to defend working conditions and collegial governance, but also to build durable collective power capable of achieving transformative gains for academic staff and the broader university community.
Copyright (c) 2026 Larry Savage http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on seeing equity as labour justice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Momin Rahman, Alison Hearn http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Bargaining for a Transformative Vision of Decolonial Indigenization
The diversification of the academic workforce is primarily the responsibility of management in most Canadian universities. However, the University of Victoria Faculty Association played a critical role in the last two bargaining rounds, successfully negotiating meaningful advancements concerning equity, indigenization and decolonization. In the 2019–2022 collective bargaining round, for example, an Indigenous hiring fund was negotiated. Empowered with a strong mandate from the membership, the faculty association sought in the next bargaining round to move beyond an “Indigenous inclusion” framework, which simply added more Indigenous people to the academy, towards bargaining for a more decolonized space in which, for example, Indigenous members faced fewer barriers in tenure and promotion processes, and were recognized for the additional decolonial work they do in and for the institution, and beyond. We discuss the challenges and successes for Indigenous members in this bargaining round and the crucial role of faculty association Indigenous members in shaping these bargaining successes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christine O'Bonsawin, Lynne Marks http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this paper, I explore a particular formation of institutional racism within academic organizations. First, I detail the recent positive recognition of systemic barriers to inclusion in Canada through the rhetoric and policies from national research funding agencies, university managements, and faculty unions. I go on to suggest, however, that there is a contradiction in the promotional framing of these commitments as ‘inclusive excellence’ because the discourse of excellence implies that the institution is already performing at peak function and hence needs no systemic organizational change. I argue that this contradiction undermines the development of genuine motivations to address exclusions and reduces equity policies to tokenistic promotional branding. The excellence discourse appeals to the vanity of the academics who are being encouraged to be more inclusive, a vanity of ‘excellence’ that is a manifestation of the broader epistemological understanding of our profession as both very intelligent and neutral or objective in our approach to generating and assessing knowledge. This professional epistemology anchors our understanding of why the profession looks the way it does: white ethnic dominance is taken as a reflection of objective merit, which then prevents any consideration of whiteness as a contributing privilege to entering and progressing through the academy. I term this equation of whiteness with our professional capacities as ‘professional snowblindness’ because it prevents recognition of the whiteness of the profession precisely through recourse to our professional skills and capacities. I argue that this ‘snowblindness’ is the particular formation of institutional racism in the academy and, crucially, that it needs to be named and discussed if we are to create genuine motivations for equity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Momin Rahman http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this paper, we reflect on our experiences in the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association and our efforts to prioritize decolonizing, indigenizing, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA) in the collective bargaining process. We examine the performative nature of EDIA efforts in negotiations by university administrators and the Board of Governors, outlining our employer’s active resistance to proposals pertaining to EDIA, their lack of explicit Indigenous and EDIA expertise on their bargaining team, their sidelining and exclusion of university Indigenous and EDIA experts, as well as the absence of transparency and accountability in decision-making. We suggest that three actions — strengthening internal and external solidarity, democratizing governance, and pursuing legislative reform — offer a pathway to rethinking equity-based bargaining, challenging the instrumentalization of EDIA, and achieving genuine structural change.
Copyright (c) 2025 Geneviève Boulet, Tammy Findlay, Michael Gillis, Diane Piccitto, Kelly Resmer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Introduction to the CAUT Journal special themed issue on post-secondary information workers in Canada.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jennifer Dekker http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In collective bargaining, General Wage Increases (GWI) are most normally framed and implemented as percentages, with each eligible member seeing a salary rise of X% on top of pre-existing salary. While this approach is not remarkable where salary grids are in place and union members start at the same rate, it can have significant effects where starting salaries vary, as is common in the university sector. Under these conditions, percentage increases over time contribute to the widening of intra-member salary inequity, exacerbating structurally gendered and racialized inequities of the academic labour market. This paper explores the impact of a flat rate increase approach to salary bargaining. Beginning with the context of collective bargaining in British Columbia, it examines how percentage-based and flat-rate increases would impact real salaries of faculty members at Simon Fraser University in order to better understand how faculty associations and unions could use flat rate approaches to begin to counteract the impact of differential starting salaries on the career earnings of faculty members. The paper finds that flat rate increases could be an effective tool against pay inequity even where that inequity is driven by forces outside the university.
Copyright (c) 2025 Brian Green http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The post-secondary education sector is increasingly incorporating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) frameworks into its institutions. This transition from traditional concepts of affirmative action and employment equity to a decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEDI) model was very much in development both at administrative and faculty levels during my stint as Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Administration of the Agreement (JCoAA), representing a large faculty association. In regular meetings with Labour Relations, representing university administration, conceptual perspectives differed, objectives needed to be agreed upon, and goals compromised. This paper explores the broader model of justice, equity, diversity, decolonization, and inclusion (JEDDI) and the absolute importance of such a perspective for the higher education sector and labour market in general. Implementing and actualizing JEDDI is important as universities continue to diversify. Utilizing such frameworks can assist in assuaging tensions regarding academic freedom, governance, and labour practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nick Mulé http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From Post-Hoc Accommodation to Inclusive Design
Efforts to improve inclusion of workers with disabilities have often focused on providing accommodations. While this is useful and necessary, the need for an accommodation signals that a barrier exists. What if fewer barriers existed in the first place? The inclusive design movement seeks to create tools, policies, and practices that are inherently barrier-free. This paper reviews how to apply inclusive design principles to HR policies and procedures, enabling the creation of more inherently equitable practices. Bargaining teams have an important role to play in ensuring that collective agreement clauses related to HR comply with inclusive design principles. Specific recommendations are made, with particular attention to recruitment, selection, tenure and promotion, attendance management, scheduling, and enforcement of respectful communication policies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katherine Breward http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Across most jurisdictions in Canada, academic librarians are members of academic staff associations. Librarians participate in union activities including committee work and participation on union executives. Librarians also frequently contribute to collective bargaining through mobilizing colleagues, identifying bargaining priorities, and crafting collective agreement language. Their direct participation in bargaining as members of collective bargaining teams, however, is relatively rare. For those librarians who have participated in bargaining, how do their motivations and experiences differ from those of the faculty members that typically make up the bulk of these teams? This paper draws on interviews with ten academic librarians who have served on negotiating teams. It explores their experiences at the negotiating table, including identifying barriers and opportunities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tim Ribaric, Carla Graebner http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Individual and Collective Action: Advocating for Academic Librarians’ Rights from Within and Outside of the Bargaining Unit
Most academic librarians working in the postsecondary sector in Canada and the United States today hold faculty status appointments and are represented by their campus faculty association (i.e., they are unionized). In some settings, librarians and archivists are included in the same collective bargaining unit as teaching and research faculty, while in others, information workers have their own bargaining unit. Still yet, there are campuses where librarians are not recognized as academic staff, and as such, they must actively advocate to win the rights and recognition that most of their peers who are employed at other college and university campuses in North America enjoy. This advocacy work takes place at both the individual and collective levels. The following case study explores the experiences of one Canadian and one American academic librarian who each offer their own, distinct perspectives of having held faculty status librarian appointments with permanence (i.e., tenure or continuing appointment) as well as appointments as academic library administrators, roles where librarians typically relinquish, formally and informally, their active membership in and representation by the faculty association and/or collective bargaining unit. Reflections shared will include: perspectives gained on collective action, having directly participated in labour action (e.g., a librarian and archivist strike) and collective labour advocacy work in the North American context; considerations for leaving, be it temporarily or permanently, a tenured librarian appointment for a library administrative post outside of the union (e.g., improved individual compensation, striving to improve individual and collective working conditions for librarians from within the leadership ranks) and the costs of doing so (e.g., relinquishing faculty status and its associated rights and responsibilities, including academic freedom and a workload that formally recognizes research and service work); and finally, the knowledge gained and insight gleaned after having returned to the privileged position of a faculty status librarian appointment with permanence. Arising out of this case study, strategies will be offered to help academic librarians resist corporate practices that erode their individual and collective autonomy and employment stability, and which are misaligned with academic librarians’ core professional values. The experiences of these two librarians, who have each engaged in advocacy work from both within and outside of the collective bargaining unit, will be explored in relation to the wider context of collective action, unionisation, and the overall employment conditions of information workers in Canada and the United States.
Copyright (c) 2024 Melanie Mills http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
After failing to resolve an association grievance by means of mediation and collective bargaining, the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa signed a Letter of Understanding transferring grievance settlement to library council. This decision was both novel and carried risks, but ultimately led to unionized librarians using both the forum and worker voice effectively. This article explains the grievance, explores the concept of worker voice - including the cost of using voice - and questions whether library councils are conducive to voice. I also describe the member engagement that was necessary for librarians to participate in grievance resolution and offer advice on conditions that supported effective grievance resolution.
ChatGPT and the Commodification of Knowledge Work
This article explores the effects of generative AI software like ChatGPT on academic labour. Beginning with an account of the commodification of knowledge work and higher education under neoliberalism, it argues that the class position of both academics and students has become muddied. In order to properly understand how ChatGPT can and will affect the academy, including academic libraries, we need to get clearer on the class position of knowledge workers (including students) and the role technology plays in the capitalist mode of production. Only then can we engage in labour activism and forge links of solidarity in full awareness of the class composition and technological structures of knowledge work.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sam Popowich http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Exploring Edmonton’s Library and Archival Labour Movements and Visions of a National Library Workers’ Organization
This article examines the history and relationship between organizing library workers and creating spaces for critical conversations among those in the field that have occurred in Edmonton since 2010. The reflective piece begins with a short history of the rise of the Edmonton Chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG). Despite PLG’s early successes, PLG Edmonton disaffiliated from the broader PLG organization in 2016, and its successor organization, the Information Workers Collective (IWC), ultimately and rapidly failed as an organization. However, an ongoing space for critical conversation was facilitated the emergence of the local Politics of Libraries (PoL) conference largely organized by student volunteers. The article concludes by reflecting on the limits of organizing beyond Edmonton.
Copyright (c) 2024 Michael McNally, Michelle De Agositini http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Stories of Office Space from a Precarious Academic in Higher Education
In the fall of 2021, faculty were preparing for a return to campus after 18 long months of teaching their courses from home. In a post-pandemic world, as we get back to normal in society, many precarious faculty are wondering what “normal” they’re returning to. This paper draws on the author’s personal experience with office space on campus as a precarious faculty member. First, this paper will review the literature on office space for precarious faculty, noting specifically the importance of office space for newcomers to the organization. Secondly, this paper will offer a series of personal reflections of being given office space as a precarious faculty member at four institutions between the years of 2016 and 2018. Finally, this paper will compare the personal reflections with that of the literature and offer a discussion of the inconsistencies of resources that precarious faculty are allocated and the consequences that arise.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lisa Allen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The unionization of management at Collège de Saint-Boniface, followed by the great massacre of 1981
Around the world, people form unions and bargain collectively when they feel they are not being treated fairly. Usually, they have experienced many situations that give rise to this certainty. Of course, it is the employees who unionize because the bosses abuse them. It is unheard of for bosses to unionize. At the Collège de Saint-Boniface in Manitoba, a management union existed for a few months in 1980. Here is what happened, from start to finish.
Copyright (c) 2023 Rolland Gaudet http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This study examines whether third-party intervention during collective bargaining has an impact on the quality of collective agreements in the post-secondary sector in Canada. Interviews were conducted with 15 faculty union negotiators in five different provinces. These identified both benefits and drawbacks to working with third parties during difficult rounds of collective bargaining. Improvements included better communication between the disputants, expeditious conflict resolution, and achieving sectoral norms when unions had fallen behind in extended health benefits or salary. Nonetheless, the interviews highlighted many risks and costs that unions experience with third-party intervention, especially when it is mandated by legislation and involves working with provincially appointed mediators, conciliators, and arbitrators.
Copyright (c) 2021 Jennifer Dekker, Cecile Farnum http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Limits to Freedom of Expression in a University Setting
This text expounds the extent to which freedom of expression on our campuses is subject to limits. We will discuss the obligations imposed by law on academic institutions and explain the requirements incumbent on universities to respect or limit freedom of expression. The text explains the manner in which laws governing hate speech and human rights impose restrictions on freedom of expression. From what point is an offensive remark considered by law an incitement to hatred or an act of harassment? Where these issues lie is a function of the intrinsic nature of an academic institution, as a space for expression. Finally, we note that while limits on the expressive freedom of those who work in universities stem from external sources, these may just as well result from processes in place within the university itself. Unlike the prevailing situation in the United States, Canadian law already states limits to expressive freedom, in general legislation. These limits have been deemed reasonable by the courts. Consequently, it is not so much a university’s prerogative to mull the question of whether certain types of statements may be prohibited on campus. There are already laws prohibiting hate speech, calls for genocide, and the like. The issue is rather to ascertain the extent to which it is possible for universities to impose limits on expressive activities that go beyond those arising from the general laws. But there are also issues arising from the often very broad scope of the laws that limit freedom of expression.
Copyright (c) 2021 Pierre Trudel http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper is anchored in a concern that too great a focus on the limits to academic freedom risks overlooking its origins and dependence upon freedom of expression writ large. We ignore at our peril the crucial importance of the broader right of freedom of expression as fundamental to academic freedom. It is not only in protecting the intramural and extramural rights of academic speech that a robust defense of freedom of expression is necessary. Even in the realm of strictly disciplinary work this is critical. For to mitigate the risk of creating our own "prescribed doctrines" in the form of disciplinary norms requires the broadest respect for dissent on the part of individual academics. Moreover, preserving the free exercise of the core functions of teaching and research demands the vigorous defense of freedom of expression in the external world governed by the public authorities. Finally, any restrictions on free expression in the extramural or intramural realms, will lead inevitably to professorial self-censorship in the work of teaching and research.
Copyright (c) 2021 Mark Gabbert http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Properties of Universities and Universities' Property
The issue as to whether protests or other political demonstrations may be held on university campuses draws together interconnected issues related to freedom of expression and academic freedom. This paper offers analysis of the legal rights and obligations for post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United Kingdom. Are publicly funded universities obligated to open campus facilities to a wide range of interest groups? Must universities guard against “hate speech”? The key point is that the exercise of free expression is nuanced and that decisions should be – and often are – reached after serious consideration of the likely impacts on free expression and the impacts that allowing such free expression might have on others, including vulnerable individuals.
Copyright (c) 2021 Sarah Hamill http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0