Guess who is turning 50?

Well, one of the fun things about doing Data Archiving and Scanning all of our old files is we’ve found a lot of things that we didn’t really know we had. They weren’t lost, just sort of forgotten. That’s the challenge when a small group of insanely capable and dedicated members serve in the Union for a very long time. We have our own indispensable knowledge keepers, and believe me, I’m doing my best to learn as much from them as I can while they continue to serve! However, I’m hoping everyone is beginning to see and appreciate the value of organizing our information, information is power after all.

Back to the question! Would you believe it ALL the unions at Camosun are turning 5o at about the same time next year?

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, initially – even before bargaining for the first Collective Agreements began, there were jurisdictional disputes between CCFA and CUPE, some that went on for decades (according to our newly scanned records). Thankfully, in recent years we’ve enjoyed the kind of solidarity between our three unions that comes from a relentlessly abhorrent labour relations climate, oh, and working together to protect employee’s rights during that pandemic thing.

When I look back on the College’s 50th Anniversary Celebrations, they spent a lot of time “honouring the past, inspiring the future“. A Union’s past, present, and future is it’s members. Every Right we have worth celebrating was hard won through negotiations and sometimes sacrifice, like when our past members agreed to forego raises in order to establish the right to two months of uninterrupted SD. There was also that ONE TIME, when we used the binding arbitration clause to obtain market raises. Over the next year, we hope to share these stories with you to help us all remember how much our efforts today will reach into the future, making members’ working conditions better than ours were.

it’s hard work that we all do together, and other than our Collective Agreements (plus several terabytes of scanned data) we have little to physically show who and what the CCFA is. It is us, all of us, and I think it is time that we celebrated that!

So at the Winter GM, we put out a call to please join our join an Ad Hoc 50^th Anniversary Party Planning Committee!

We invite you to join all together and:

• Send in your “5oth Anniversary” logos proposal for the CCFA to be use for promotions and will be printed on swag; this is a PAID honorarium!
• Help us decide what kind of party you think we should have, a banquet, a dance, outstanding service awards? How do should we celebrate?
• Bring us your Union history! Do you have old seniority lists, minutes from meetings, photos (Oh, please oh please tell me there’s photos out there) of Union events? We wants them all!
• Submit your #ThankUnion stories to the Blog (these can be posted anonymously) to share how the Union has made your work life better
• Once we have a logo, we will use it to create a media kit to update your Teams backgrounds & show your Union pride!
• Post pictures of solidarity spirt among faculty from your own department and social events to social media and tag @camosunfaculty #CCFA_50 #CCFA_turns50 #CCFA50yearsstrong #CCFA_StrongerTogetherfor50years #CCFA_50isFabulous #CCFACelebrates50 (just some fun hashtags I came up with!)
• Once we start distributing swag, make sure it is VISIBLE, we’ll have some fun “treasure hunt” type games for finding our 5oth Anniversary Swag “in the wild” and posting it to our social media

Its our time to congratulate ourselves for all the Union has achieved, because no one else will. Its time to honour the colleagues who came before us. Its time to make a show of our strength and Solidarity. And, its long past time to have an epic party.

Generations of members have worked hard for this and now it’s time for the CCFA TO CELEBRATE 50 YEARS!