Faculty members at the University of Manitoba have voted in favour of authorizing a potential strike, citing a demand for salary increases, better hiring practices and access to child-care services.
The vote by University of Manitoba Faculty Association members ended Friday afternoon, the union said in a news release, with nearly 67 per cent voting in favour, according to the union’s president.
The bargaining team for the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, which represents more than 1,300 professors, instructors and librarians, will head back to the bargaining table on Monday, said UMFA president Erik Thomson.
Members have been negotiating for a new contract since their collective agreement expired on March 31, 2024.
“While in many ways the bargaining has been very productive on sort of money and resource issues, we hit, I think, a wall, and so … our members decided they weren’t satisfied with the offer given by administration,” Thomson said in an interview Saturday.
The vote doesn’t mean the union’s members will definitely go on strike, but does give the union power to call for the job action if it’s deemed necessary, he said.
The U of M Faculty Association’s members went on a five-week long strike in 2021, but Thomson hopes bargaining can avoid strike action this year.
“We don’t want to [strike],” he said. “We want first of all to show that we’re earnest, and our members weren’t satisfied with what the administration put on the table.”
After bargaining, “we’ll then consider if we have to take … job action further down the road,” but there’s no fixed timeline for that right now, he said.
Thomson said child care is one issue the union wants addressed in a new collective agreement, with promises from the university for high-quality child care for union members dating back to the 1990s. Those promises haven’t been fulfilled, he said.
“I talked to many members who have problems with child care while they’re managing their labs or they’re teaching, and so we’d like to see the university make a serious attempt to live up to the commitment they made in 1991 on child care,” he said.
The union also says the university needs to offer more competitive salaries, which Thomson said will help attract and retain employees.
“We often take years to hire for positions because, you know, we make our offer and people laugh and leave,” he said.
“The U of M is not financially strapped.”
CBC has reached out to the University of Manitoba for comment.
