What job forces you to pay $1500 to your employer every four months?
You’re right! Being a teaching assistant, tutor maker or sessional instructor at SFU, you have to pay SFU roughly $1500 every semester in tuition in order to keep your graduate student status, in spite of the fact that you can’t utilize the university services in a full-time fashion to study or to do your own research. Why do you have to pay full-time tuition fees when you are actually a part-time student? We don’t know. That is what we are asking the SFU administration.
We understand that funds to support graduate students consist of scholarships, fellowships or research assistantships. SFU administration considers teaching assistantships as a source of funding too. Do you need to pay Employment Insurance and Canadian Pension Plan out of your scholarships, fellowships or research assistantships? No, but you do for the teaching assistantships. Clearly, TAships are a form of employment and not simply ‘funding’.
We know there are many universities that are currently offering tuition waivers for their graduate teaching assistants while graduate TAs at SFU are suffering from years of tuition fee increases. Even the $70 tuition credit - a portion of which was drawn from TSSU Childcare Bursary - was quashed! We need to send a message to the SFU administration that this is simply unacceptable.
November 26, 2004
Sometimes it's the little things that aggravate you in the bargaining process...
Sometimes it's the little things that aggravate you in the bargaining process... like management arguing that departmental assistants know more about what's happening in math and physics labs than the TSSU members that work in them; or arguing that the CUPE members who have access to sensitive student information don't know the university's privacy policy and haven't been trained in the new privacy legislation; or implying that these CUPE members don't know that someone's home address is private although their workplace email or phone number is not. The latter two annoyances stem from management’s response to TSSU’s request for Human Resources to withdraw an offensive and heavy handed memo from last year.
Essentially, this memo bars any working group on campus from asking departmental assistants for information, even a steward simply asking for the email address of a new sessional instructor. It grew out of a request from a couple of departmental assistants to clarify whether or not they had to respond to TSSU requests for information. Bruce Anderson, the Director of Human Resources, sent out a letter stating that any information requests from union members would have to come through the Labour-Management Committee, as departmental staff did not have the authority to hand out such information. For the union, this creates a poisoned environment in those departments where TA's /TM's and Sessionals have, until now, enjoyed healthy, cordial relations with co-workers and departmental assistants in particular.
November 9, 2004