Fair Employment Week 2025, October 20–24

Once again, it is Fair Employment Week, the national campaign by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) to recognize the valuable work of contract academic faculty and to call out the inequities they continue to face across Canada’s post-secondary sector. At Camosun, that means our Term faculty members—the educators who help keep our classrooms running, our students supported, and our programs viable year after year.

You know them. You rely on them. And yet, the events over the past year have made painfully clear that our Term members remain the most vulnerable and least supported employees at the College. Even though we’ve lost over 100 Term faculty members, representing the equivalent of nearly 40 full-time positions, the elimination of Term faculty isn’t counted in anyone’s “layoff” statistics – it’s as if they are invisible.

But it gets worse, Camosun’s Term faculty are having to do more with less than ever before. Those fortunate enough to be covering courses vacated by continuing faculty on unpaid leave receive their contracts late, delayed, and often full of errors. Some are teaching last-minute sections, confirmed only days before classes begin, without the same access to offices, professional development time, or collegial supports as their continuing counterparts. They do so while managing the uncertainty of whether they will even be re-employed next term.

It is hard to overstate the emotional and financial toll this takes. A Term instructor preparing multiple courses in a single semester—without equitable pay for preparation or guaranteed reappointment—still carries the full academic responsibility of teaching with none of the security, resources, or recognition. None of this is accidental. Contract after contract, our employer seeks to deepen and perpetuate the system that depends on increasing precarious work to balance its books. They’ve sought to make it harder to regularize, put up more barriers to earning the right of first refusal, and repeatedly violate the collective agreement by replacing continuing positions with term contracts.

Recent months have only deepened this injustice. Section cuts, program reshuffling, and budget decisions made without consultation have once again placed Term faculty on the front lines of uncertainty. The College’s messaging frames this as “efficiency” and “sustainability,” but the human cost is paid by the very people who make Camosun’s success possible – faculty, and our Term faculty are in more precarious positions than ever before.

We think that’s wrong. And at one time, we thought our employer did too. From the Camosun College Strategic Plan, ÍY,ĆȺNEUEL OL: Doing Good Work Together, must mean more than remaining civil, weathering crises, and exploiting our resilience. Good work requires fair work—and fairness demands action.

This Fair Employment Week, the CCFA calls on the College to:

• #MakeItFair by restoring stability and predictability for Term members through early contract offers and transparent communication.
• Address workload inequities by ensuring all faculty have equitable access to preparation time, office space, and student supports.
• Include the Union meaningfully in financial and academic planning that impacts faculty work.
• Comply with pathways to regularization & ROFR, reducing Camosun’s reliance on precarious labour to deliver core programs.
• Acknowledge publicly—in CamNews and at the Board—that Camosun’s Term faculty are essential to student success and deserve fairness, equity, and respect.

Term faculty are not disposable labour; they are the passionate and committed educators who help make “Your path to success” more than a slogan. It is time for the College to match its stated values with its actions.

Ways you can get involved to #makeitfair this year:

• Learn more about how precarity harms all faculty. As part of Fair Employment Week (FEW), Dr. Kendra Strauss from SFU Labour Studies will provide a virtual keynote address titled, “A Discussion on Academic Freedom and Precarity.” This event will take place on Wednesday, October 22, at 9:00 am PST.
  • Click this link to register for the event
• Get to know your Collective Agreement better – or at least the people you’ve elected to keep on top of important issues for all Faculty! Look for “purple people” wearing CCFA t-shirts at our Drop-In Table Talks to meet some of your Union Executives this week in the Helmet Huber & Lansdowne Cafeterias:
  • Wednesday from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM
  • Thursday from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM
• Be sure you’re getting the most out of your benefits! We know many New and Term members have questions about their benefits. Join our first Infosession of the year on Benefits & Leaves.
  • Check Outlook for your invite. If you didn’t get one, email our staff at ac.ytlucafnusomac@afcc and they’ll make sure you’ve got invites to all of our upcoming infosessions.
  • Join our Discord server, where members share tips and tricks for navigating claims with our insurance provider. You can only get our invites during a meeting or via a personal email.
• Show your New and Term team members that you care. The employer doesn’t routinely inform us when someone new is hired, term or continuing. This means your new term and continuing employees might not even know they are part of a union. Help us connect!
  • Send their names to our staff at ac.ytlucafnusomac@afcc to make sure we add them to our listserv and can send them a treat in honour of Fair Employment Week!
  • Fill out our Fair Employment Week 2025 Survey to share what’s great about our Term members and the ways we all support each other! (You could even win a prize!)

Over the past several years, we’ve come together over and over in response to crisis after crisis, and we have endured because we truly are stronger together. And together, we’ve all worked hard to build a community of solidarity, one where our strength is working together as one.

#FEW2025 #FairEmploymentWeek #MakeItFair #CamosunFaculty #FairnessInEducation #FPSE #BCUnions #fightforfairness #endprecariouswork