Athabasca University stalls bargaining right out of the gate

Bargaining between the Athabasca University Faculty Association (AUFA) and Athabasca University (AU) kicked off June 28th with an exchange of proposals. You can read the details here but the short version is: 

1. AU refused to table its monetary proposal, and 
2. AU has refused to set further bargaining dates unless AUFA agrees to meet in person (instead of bargaining via video conference). 

Since I'm no longer president of the union, I don't have to be polite about this approach to bargaining, which is stupid for many reasons, including:

• Practical: A union can’t get an agreement (which is the goal of bargaining) when the employer refuses to say what it wants and refuses to meet. Being unreasonable serves no one’s interests, including the employer’s.
• Strategic: While AU might have gotten away with stalling on a full proposal for a while, refusing to bargain until AUFA agrees to bargain exactly how the employer wants to bargain is contrary to the Labour Relations Code. There are good reasons to bargain online (e.g., significant travel costs, child-care issues, health issues) and AU has provided no coherent or compelling reason to refuse to bargain by unless it is face-to-face. The employer will eventually have to abandon this demand and, when it does, it will look (even more) incompetent and unreasonable than it does now.
• Political: AU ran this same play last round and it resulted in a near strike. A repeat of this approach has dramatically raised tensions among the members for no real gain. Most AUFA members are now angry and frustrated and AU’s bargaining team just spent all of the new president’s political capital for no real gain (“meet the new boss, same as the old boss”). In less than 20 minutes, AU also drove AUFA’s bargaining team (who are mostly new) from “let’s bargain in good faith and try to get a deal” to “fuck these clowns.” For a union, there is simply no better organizing force in the world than a terrible employer.

It is hard to fathom why AU insists on meeting in person. My best guess is this is some kind of dick-measuring contest, where the employer wants to show the union that it sets the terms of bargaining.

Alternately, it could be that the employer is stalling because it is not prepared to bargain. The union hasn’t shared AU’s non-monetary proposal yet (I imagine that is coming in the next few weeks) but it is basically a rehash of stuff from the 2020-2022 round of bargaining, which provides some support for the “not ready” hypothesis.

If there is a strategy behind refusing to provide a monetary offer, I’m hard pressed to see it. The government has issued a mandate across the public sector for a four-year deal with a cost-of-living adjustment of 2%, 2%, 1.75%, and 1.75%. AU will either open with that or with something even worse (like the U of Lethbridge has). Either way, withholding the monetary just makes AU look like uncooperative dicks and AU gains nothing from the eventual reveal.

Maybe the strategy is to try and lure AUFA into settling the non-monetary stuff first (thereby giving up the opportunity to trade language for a monetary offer the employer could live with)? Since AUFA isn’t stupid, it is obviously not going to fall into that trap so delaying providing a monetary proposal is just wasting everyone’s time.

Overall, alienating the union and its members (to no real gain) is a bad way for Athabasca University to start to bargaining and raises real questions about the competence of whomever is directing AU's bargaining approach. At this point, the employer’s best pathway to a deal that doesn’t involve a work stoppage is to set dates and provide a full offer, maybe with a mea culpa to smooth things over.

Since AU is showing zero labour-relations game, I imagine we’re off to the Labour Board. In the meantime, the union will begin the process of dissecting the employer’s proposal and building resistance to it among the members as part of its strike preparations.

I’d hoped that AU changing its spokesperson signalled a desire for better labour relations. Apparently not. If I had to guess how this will play out, I'd say there will be no real progress at the table, AUFA will declare impasse in the fall, and we go to mediation where the employer will be forced to actually start bargaining. 

This is super disrespectful of the employer and heightens the risk of an  unnecessary "fuck you" strike. Glad I kept my picket sign from last time. If anyone wants in on the pool about which employer-side rep gets throw under the bus first by AU when this goes off the rails, shoot me an email.

-- Bob Barnetson

Update: AUFA members to vote on reversing exec decision

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Athabasca University Faculty Association (AUFA) executive deciding to make a cash donation to a member. Yesterday, the AUFA membership forced a special meeting on the issue and will soon be voting of a motion to reverse this decision.

A good outcome of the meeting was support for the development of a formal member emergency fund. There are lots of examples to choose from. Most have these features:

• a low- or no-interest loan for a fixed period of time,
• available to members on application,
• a requirement for some disclosure of the circumstances giving rise to the need, and
• decisions being made by a committee without a real or perceived conflict of interest.

The meeting itself flushed out some additional information about the executive’s donation. While I am hopeful that a recording of the meeting will be available to all AUFA members prior to the vote, I worry that the disclosure of the member’s identity by a member of the incoming executive during the meeting may preclude the union from sharing the recording. So, for those who could not attend, here is a recap (I have flagged the new info below):

1. In early June, the executive held an emergency meeting three days before a regularly scheduled executive meeting.
2. The purpose of the emergency meeting was to vote on a donation to a member whose salary had been cut off for refusing to comply with an employer direction (i.e., the member choose this outcome).
3. NEW The member did not ask for this money. Rather, this motion was an initiative of a member of the executive.
4. The executive was not told before voting on the donation that the member could have their salary restored simply by complying with the employer’s demand.
5. NEW The donation was to another member of the executive.
6. The recipient was not named in the notion meaning the payment could not be implemented.
7. Multiple members of the executive resigned over the decision.
8. The executive did not communicate this unprecedented move to the membership until nearly a week later and under pressure that I would tell the members if they did not. 
9. The eventual disclosure (which occurred after voting for the next union executive had concluded) left out important information about the donation, including the resignations that had resulted from it.

So, is this decision by the executive one that should be reversed by the members?

One way to answer that is to look at how far the executive’s process deviated from the typical approach to emergency funds that I set out above.

• There was a donation in lieu of a no-interest loan. There is no explanation for this.
• The member never asked for the money; this was an initiative of an executive member. This raises the question of whether the member is even in need of the money? 
• Key facts were not disclosed to the decision makers. Specifically, (1) evidence of hardship, and (2) that the member was refusing to take action that would restore the member’s salary (which is a bit like drowning in a bathtub because you refuse to sit up).
• The recipient was a member of the same committee that made the decision. This may not create a conflict of interest (that is very hard to tell given the information the executive has provided) but it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Overall, this was a bad process that led to what looks like a bad decision that was then communicated in way that was untimely and incomplete. Consequently, I think this decision, at the very least, warrants a do-over using a better process. The way to achieve that is for the members to pass a motion reversing the decision. The executive could, of course, rescind their decision and do a proper job of it once they have a fund set up.

It is notable that the executive has not followed through on the other motion it passed during the emergency meeting: strike a committee to establish a member emergency fund. Had they done that, members could be voting on that right now (there are lots of examples to cut and paste from, including AUFA’s emergency fund from its strike prep). This inaction is notable because the executive are, on the one hand, aggressively defending their decision but, on the other hand, taking no actual steps that would get their decision implemented (and get the member the money).

Several other motions planned for the meeting (including a non-confidence vote in the lame-duck executive) did not get discussed. An important issue going forward is that AUFA members (who almost all work from home) have no effective mechanism to discuss matters of concern as a group. Hopefully next year’s executive will do something about that.

-- Bob Barnetson

AUFA executive resignations follow unusual payment to member

Last Friday, the executive of the Athabasca University Faculty Association (AUFA) held an emergency meeting. After an apparently acrimonious discussion, the executive voted 5-4 to “donate” $2500 to another member. Subsequently, five members of the executive resigned and the treasurer is unable to make the payment because of the wording of the motion. 

The remaining members of the AUFA executive finally released some information about this payment a week later, after I threatened to go directly to the members. But the executive have left out important context and the subsequent resignations. These omissions are very troubling. This information also comes only after the union’s elections have concluded.

This post compiles the information I have been able to verify about these very concerning events. I believe this decision shows very poor judgment and that the remaining members of the executive who voted in favour of this motion should resign. I understand that one of them has done so this morning.

Background

I’ve redacted some of the details but the gist is that a member declined to comply with an employer direction (i.e., was insubordinate). After several unsuccessful attempts to gain compliance, the employer placed the member on an unpaid leave.

As much as I don’t generally like how AU behaves, placing a member on unpaid leave is permissible in these very specific circumstances (that I am carefully not discussing). This has happened periodically over the past 15 years that I’ve been active with the association and is not an unprecedented situation (what is unprecedented is the payment).

The member decided to continue not complying (and thus not be paid). While being placed on an unpaid leave can certainly create a financial emergency for a member, this is not a labour-relations emergency for the union.

Subsequently, a member of the executive sought an emergency executive meeting to authorize payment of $2500 in financial aid. AUFA does not presently have a system for providing financial aid to members. The union did create an emergency-loan system in anticipation of a strike last year. Absent a work stoppage, that system does not operate because the members have not approved expanding its parameters.

Consequently, this request was brought to the union executive as an ad hoc motion. Article 12.8 of the AUFA bylaws permits the executive to authorize unbudgeted payments of up to $5000 without seeking membership approval.

Nine (of then 13) voting members of the executive were able to attend the emergency meeting:

• Davina Bhandar 
• Pamela Holway
• Jonathan Leggo,
• Gail Leicht
• Katie MacDonald
• Darka Pavlovic
• Kristin Rodier
• Rhiannon Rutherford
• Ching Tan

After an in camera discussion, MacDonald and Bhandar moved:

“AUFA make a one-time donation of $2500 to the member in question in support of undue hardship.”

This motion passed 5-4 with Leggo, Leicht, Pavlovic, and Rutherford opposed. A subsequent motion established an ad hoc committee to look into establishing a formal member emergency fund (which is a good idea).

While no one has been prepared to discuss all of the details of the in camera discussion, some attendees have characterized the information provided to them an incomplete. For example, they were not told that the member could have their pay restored by simply complying with the employer’s direction.

Over the next several days, Leggo and Pavlovic along with Florene Ypma and Dave Powell resigned from the executive over the motion. Leicht (who is also the treasurer) has also indicated she will be resigning as soon as the executive can put someone in place to perform financial oversight functions. In the meantime, she has declined to issue the cheque because she does not have a name and mailing address to permit the issuance of a cheque.

Questions

A number of questions jump to mind:

1. Why it was necessary to call an emergency meeting last Friday when there was regularly scheduled meeting three working days later? An emergency meeting likely reduced the number of executive members able to attend.
2. Why the secrecy within the executive about who the member is? How can the executive make an informed and accountable decision without recording to whom the payment was made (even if this information is shared only on a need-to-know basis)?
3. Why was the executive not informed during the discussion that the member who received the payment could have their pay restored by ceasing their insubordination?
4. Why was the funding provided as a donation, rather than as an interest-free loan?
5. Has this decision established a precedent whereby other members who refuse to comply with legitimate employer directions (i.e., are insubordinate) can now seek financial support from the union?
6. Why did the remaining executive not inform the AUFA membership of this significant departure from past practice and the subsequent resignation of five executive members in a timely manner? This question is especially salient since (1) there was an immediate member request for disclosure (within minutes of the meeting ending) and (2) the payment decision was made in the middle of union elections wherein some of the executive members who voted in favour off the payment were running for office.
7. Does this expenditure fall within the definition of non-core expenditures under the Labour Relations Code (as amended by Bill 32 several years ago) and, therefore, does it require the executive to get the permission of members to collect and expend these dues notwithstanding the bylaws? If so, will payment open AUFA up to a complaint to the Labour Relations Board?

Analysis

While the union executive can spend up to $5000 on its own initiative, this sort of expenditure (which was not an emergency) should likely have been subjected to meaningful consultation with the membership. Indeed, many of the executive members who voted for this motion ran last year on a slate that promised greater transparency.

Savvy union leaders go out of their way ensuring that union decisions, particularly about spending, are transparent and above reproach. Last Friday’s decision does not demonstrate this sort of political acumen. Instead, we see executive members:

1. Calling an unnecessary emergency meeting that only a portion of the union executive could attend.
2. Authorizing an unprecedented payment to another member (with the support of only 5 of 13 executive members).
3. Failing to disclose to the executive members in attendance that the member could resolve their problem on their own by complying with the employer’s direction.
4. Not naming the member who is to receive the funding in the motion, which has resulted in the treasurer being unable process the payment.
5. Disclosing information about the decision only after members threatened to release the information directly to the members and only after the end of the union election, in which some of the remaining executive members were candidates.
6. Possibly created a precedent where the union is on the hook to financially support other members who are insubordinate (or, at least, having to fight off claims for such support).

This behaviour demonstrates why it is important for members to pay attention to union operations and be very choosey about who they elect to manage the affairs of their union.

Now What?

The good news is that a new executive will take control of AUFA as of September 1. Many of the key players in this decision will not be a part of that executive.

AUFA members could also call a special meeting (under Article 5.4 of the bylaws). At this meeting, they could demand an explanation from the remaining executive and/or they could advance motions. These motions could include overruling the payment, voting nonconfidence in some or all of the remaining executive members, or setting up a committee to develop an emergency loan system with meaningful oversight and sensible parameters.

Really, though, the simplest way for the remaining executive to restore membership confidence in the executive would be for the members of the existing executive who voted in favour of this motion to tender their resignations. I understand one of them has done so already (that is six resignations now, if you're keeping track). This would still leave enough executive members to get through the traditionally slower summer months and hand the organization over to the incoming executive in September.

-- Bob Barnetson

Resisting company doctors through moral suasion

Unionized workers can make gains and stave off concessions by attaching costs to employer behaviour in the hope that the employer will decide to behave differently.

Most often, we think about strikes. Strikes attach primarily financial costs to employer intransigence at the bargaining table by disrupting production. If the strike causes the employer enough pain, the employer tends to compromise.

Moral suasion is a different way to attach costs to employer behaviour. Athabasca University’s (AU’s) unsuccessful efforts to impose company doctors on its academic staff provides a useful example of this tactic and its limitations.

AthabascaU’s demand for company docs

In 2018, AU pushed its workers to agree to new contract language around company doctors. Essentially, the employer wanted to be able to send a worker for a so-called independent medical examination (IME) if:

• the worker used sick leave frequently or for a prolonged period,
• the employer believed the worker was unable to do their duties due to illness or disability, or
• the employer believed a worker was mis-using their sick leave.

This proposal would give the employer a largely unfettered ability to impose and IME upon pain of discipline and/or loss of sick leave. Such a power would:

• interfere with workers being able to choose their own health-care providers,
• open the door to illegitimate employer demands for non-therapeutic medical examinations, and
• would end-run the requirement for the employer to get an arbitrator’s order to require an IME. 

Seventy-seven percent of union members were opposed to this proposal. Of particular concern to the union’s members were the possibilities of:

• worker fear of being sent to an IME might cause them to not use their sick leave when its use was medically required,
• when workplace harassment had caused a worker’s performance to deteriorate or the worker to go off sick, the employer might weaponize the IME process to further harass the sick member, and
• the medical opinion of a company-paid doctor may result in a refusal of sick leave or the alteration of work restrictions set out by the worker’s treating physician.

The employer’s rationale for this proposal was cost-savings (i.e., no arbitration hearing required). In fact, the proposal shifted costs from the university (lower financial costs) to the worker and their families (less privacy and greater stress).

There was, of course, no evidence of any meaningful level of sick leave abuse. A review of 15 years of union files (with a membership of more than 400 workers) identified one case where the university officially raised concerns about the accuracy of medical information provided to the employer. This was conern was resolved.

Pushing back on company docs

Resisting company doctors could certainly form part of the basis for a strike mandate. But there is always the risk that members might be willing to accept company-doctor language as part of a package deal (i.e., if the employer offered something good in exchange) or to avoid a strike (if company doctors was the only major issue). Given this risk, the union opted to explore a different approach first.

The company-doctor proposal was obviously repugnant. The union also suspected it was being driven by the desires of the HR shop, rather than being a core mandate from the university’s Board of Governors (which was the ultimate decision maker). These factors opened the door to applying moral pressure on Board members to abandon the proposal.

Activists identified 15 members who (1) were secure in their jobs, (2) had experience with ill-health that required medical leave, and (3) had a reasonable degree of political acumen. The union then used its membership map to divide them into five three-person groups based on pre-existing relationships.

Each team was tasked to write a five-paragraph letter to individual Board members (the union provided contact details). The first and last paragraphs were boilerplate, respectively introducing the issue and asking the Board to drop its proposal.

Each team member wrote one of the middle three paragraphs, disclosing their personal experience with medical leave and explaining how the company-doctor proposal would have affected and harmed them. The letters were heart wrenching and drove home the odious nature of the Board’s proposal.

The union coordinated the members sending their letters such that Board members received a new letter every week. The Board members eventually concluded that their negotiating team’s proposal truly was not worth pursuing because, shortly thereafter, the employer’s chief negotiator said “company doctors (suddenly!) wasn’t a hill to die on” and the proposal fell away.

Analysis

This example illustrates one (of myriad) ways that workers can attach costs to employer behaviour and, thereby, possibly change it. The costs attached by the letters were mostly emotional. Few people (even employers!) enjoy being shown how their behaviour will profoundly and personally harm others.

The Board members may also have been concerned about being publicly and personally associated with such a disgusting and harmful proposal. That threat was not contained in the letters, but was an obvious next step and was part of the union’s overall escalation strategy.

Having workers write about their very personal experiences of ill-health appeared more effective at driving home to the employer how awful the proposal was than were the union’s broader communications about the proposal. The pressure exerted by the letters was applied discretely enough that there was no real loss of face for the employer in doing so.

The union members, both those directly involved and those who simply heard about the tactic, got to see how they could take effective action to protect their own interests. This built confidence among the members in their ability to resist employer demands and advocate for themselves.

A weakness of this tactic is that it creates the possibility of a rapid reversal by the employer. For example, if the employer catches even one worker malingering or faking sick in the future, it is likely to bring this proposal back to the table. And, because the employer will feel like it got emotionally manipulated into withdrawing the earlier proposal, the employer will likely pursue the renewed proposal vigorously. In this way, both the employer and the union now have a shared interest in ensuring no workers malinger.

-- Bob Barnetson

Complaint over “Mafia-esque” union Xmas cards resolved

An unfair labour practice complaint, alleging Christmas cards sent by a union to the employer’s bargaining team amounted to “Mafia-esque” intimidation, provides insight into the unexpected impact that Alberta’s restrictive picketing laws may have on union pressure tactics during bargaining.

Alberta’s picketing laws

In 2019, the United Conservative Party (UCP) formed government in Alberta. In the summer of 2020, the UCP passed Bill 32: Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act (2020). This act substantially restricted picketing activities by:

• rendering it illegal to obstruct or impede someone from crossing a picket line,
• requiring a union to seek Labour Board permission to engage in secondary picketing, and
• allowing the Labour Board to determine the conditions of any secondary picketing.

These changes effectively rendered legal picketing ineffective and effective picketing illegal. This, in turn, reduced the ability of workers and unions to exert pressure on the employer to move at the bargaining table (which was the intent of the legislation).

Christmas card “intimidation”

Athabasca University Faculty Association (AUFA) served notice to bargain in the spring 2020. By the late autumn of 2021, the employer had not yet provided its monetary proposal and bargaining was stalled. The union began applying pressure in order to generate movement. For example, it filed a bargaining in bad faith complaint with the Labour Board. This proved predictably ineffective due to delay in getting the matter to hearing in a timely way.

The union also began experimenting with the alternative strike tactics that it had developed, in part, because of Alberta’s restrictions on effective picketing. These tactics included choking-off revenue by applying reputational pressure. The first effort was a 12 Days of Christmas meme campaign based on the song “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” Members tweeted these memes at the employer and its bargaining team.

At the end of the online campaign, the most popular meme was then made into a Christmas card. Copies of the card were mailed to homes of the university president and bargaining team co-chairs. In January of 2022, the employer filed an unfair labour practices complaint, alleging the cards were intended to be intimidating, an implicit threat to the safety of the employer’s representatives and their families, and were a “Mafia-esque” tactic.

In April of 2023, the union and the employer settled the unfair. In this settlement, the union agreed, in future, to collect personal information in accordance with Alberta’s privacy legislation (which it is legally bound to do in any case). The union also “acknowledged that those who received the Christmas Cards and members of their families felt that they had been intimidated and harassed.” This settlement is, I think, best read as saving the union the financial cost of the hearing and saving the employer the political cost of losing.

Analysis

The UCP’s changes to Alberta’s labour laws were intended make it more difficult for unions to exert meaningful pressure on employers via picketing that disrupts operations. The desired effect was to attenuate unions’ abilities to make meaningful contract gains.

These changes do not, however, eliminate the need for workers and unions to exert pressure on employers during bargaining. That doesn’t mean these picketing restrictions have no effect on union power. Rather, they just push unions to (1) develop alternative tactics and/or (2) ignore the law and take whatever punishment that entails.

On the surface, mailing Christmas cards to the boss was a very mild alternative pressure tactic. Yet, it triggered a very strong response from the employer. This reaction may have been an effort by the employer to generate some pearl-clutching and internal dissent within the union membership by equating the union with the mob. Or it may have been designed to generate litigation to trade away against the union’s bad faith bargaining complaint.

The tenor of the employer’s complaint, though, suggests real outrage. (I recognize these explanations are not mutually exclusive.) The memes and cards may have driven home for the recipients that collective bargaining can have real world consequences for bosses (just like it always does for workers). It may also have highlighted that the government restricting traditional picketing activities increases the likelihood that unions will expand their tactics to include applying pressure directly on bosses.

While the overall effectiveness of this sort of pressure tactic remains unclear, the employer’s over-reaction to the Christmas card complaint certainly suggests that bosses intensely dislike even the mildest personal pressure and are surprisingly easy, according to their own complaint, to intimidate. This, in turn, tells unions that they should continue to explore this space.

There is significant room to escalate these forms of personally targeted pressure while still staying within the bounds of legal leafletting activity. And the nothing-burger settlement of the employer’s unfair suggests the cost to the union of using these tactics is low.

-- Bob Barnetson

AU’s ergo program symptomatic of organizational dysfunction

Almost 100% of staff at Athabasca University (AU) work from home, at least part of the time. This is up from about 50% prior to COVID. The shift to permanent home offices was partially motivated by the cost savings associated with shifting operating costs (e.g., office space and equipment, utilities) onto workers.

The sudden move to working at home in March of 2020 due to COVID resulted in significant concerns among workers about both the financial and ergonomic implications of home work. Three years later, AU has launched new, online ergonomic training for staff.

Essentially, staff have been told to take online training and figure out how to adjust their home workplaces to be ergonomically adequate by April 30th. A key question is whether AU will fund any necessary purchases to make a home office ergonomically adequate? The answer is, of course, no.

Will there be additional funding to support any needs identified as a result of this assessment?
No. All home-office-based team members have been provided with Home Office Support Funding. This included $1,000 in 2020 and another $1,000 in 2022. Team members will be provided with an additional $800 Evergreening Fund every 6 years.

It was certainly appropriate for AU to respond to shifting operating costs onto workers in 2020 with a small, taxable payment (which might have bought a desk and chair and lamp). The taxable 2022 payment of $1000 (or $800) was negotiated in lieu of a wage increase so was essentially self-funding by workers.

In both cases, that money has already been spent by most workers. For this reason, it is not available to resolve any current ergonomic issues. (This reflects that AU rolled out the training and payment in the wrong order.)

Overall, this initiative is pretty typical of AU:

• A long-standing problem is addressed belatedly and inadequately.
• The workers are made responsible for solving the employer’s problem (i.e., unsafe workplaces).
• The employer gaslights the workers about it, in this case by referencing financial assistance that is only available if you have a time machine.

So what are AU workers likely going to do? Some staff will take the training, either because they are rule followers or because they are being explicitly paid to do so (e.g., tutors). I expect the rest of staff won’t bother to take it or will take it but not implement many of the recommended changes because it will require them to spend their own money to solve an institutional problem.

This program (which is, at least superficially, a good idea) is a microcosm of how AU operates. Essentially, the administration “talks away” problems instead of addressing them and staff learn to tune out or superficially comply. The result is widespread distrust of leaders and staff disengagement.

The aftermath of the 2022 staff engagement survey results (released two weeks ago) pretty much mirrors this. Staff disengagement has been identified as such an issue it was added to the institutional threat register at last week's Board of Governor's meeting. That doesn't mean anything is being done to fix it, though.

Senior executives are heavily messaging that the results are “sobering” but not actually doing anything about it. This is the performative “talking away” of problems that fixes nothing. Staff are, of course, onto this strategy, with only 30% believing senior leaders will do anything, because successive executives have talked away problems for years and years:



Middle managers seem to be taking two approaches to the results. Some are earnestly (I think) asking for staff feedback. This ask is basically flopping because of the long-standing “big bosses who cried wolf” dynamic to problems. For example, in my meeting of people who are basically lead hands, there was just dead silence in response to the ask for feedback. Others middle managers are framing the results as a consequence of inadequate communications.

It is true that gaslighting and victim blaming are communications strategies that are inadequate. But, since this approach has gone on for most of a decade and intensified over time, it is likely this is an intentional strategy, not some sort of oopsie. Last week’s framing of engagement by the HR director as “good” because it encourages staff to work harder is essentially an admission that the employer doesn’t care about staff except as the means to an end.

For staff, disengagement (whether active or passive) is a very sensible response to a traumatizing workplace. The other response I’m seeing is people over-engaging, which is leading to burn out. This is pretty hard to watch, but perhaps some people need to hit rock bottom before they’ll change their behaviour. I know that I did.

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca U staff engagement results are predictably terrible

This morning, Athabasca University released some of the results from its Autumn 2022 staff survey. The survey was about staff engagement, engagement means how willing staff are to put in discretionary effort to benefit the organization. AU framing its interest in workers as entirely instrumental was unexpected honest and went over poorly.

The basic talking points of the presenters were

• The data is four months old (i.e., things may not be as bad as the results suggest!).
• There is high trust among co-workers.
• All staff need to work hard and take responsibility for reversing these poor results.

This framing elides that staff fundamentally do not trust AU senior leaders (see below), who play a pretty important role in creating the circumstances in which staff might (or might not) be able to work effectively. Anyhow, onto the results (apologies for the poor resolution; you can click on them for larger images). There was a 70% response rate, which is higher than sector norms.



Overall, about half of staff appear engaged. The biggest thing to note are the ~20% drop in that numbers since 2020. There was no explanation offered for this change but key events during that time include COVID (massive workload increases), forced relocation to home offices, efforts to bust the faculty association and deprive people of pensions, terrible wage settlements after a near strike, and using staff as hostages in a fight with the government. Given this, it is not surprising that many staff are just throwing up their hands and checking out.

Scores were broken out by different dimensions of engagement. Basically, people have good feelings about their coworkers and immediate managers. They have bad feelings about the senior leadership and how well the organization lives its values, focuses on learners, and innovates. Again, the drops really tell the tale of the deterioration since 2020.



Only about half of staff believe the institution lives its i-CARE values. There have been 11- to 18-point drops since 2020. Honestly, I’m surprised the drops have not been larger.

These results show pretty clearly that the staff see the gaps between values and actions as occurring primarily at the leadership levels.

In terms of organizational culture, these are some worrying results about caring, safety, and consultation. Again, it’s the leadership of the organization that primarily controls these aspects of the organization. The idea that staff can change the culture through some sort of personal-responsibility magic is just gaslight.



The innovation results are also quite negative. Again, look at the drops over time. I would say this manifests itself organizational in a sense that people are just giving up trying to solve problems and improve processes because it is just hopeless. Instead, some people are giving up and others are working themselves sick trying to protect students from the impact (which is not a sustainable option).

This is probably the most important slide. The assessment of senior leadership is terrible. Naturally, these results got less than a minute of discussion. On almost every dimension, the ratings are net negative (positive < negative) and, where there is historical data, it again shows profound drops over time. In many cases, AU’s executive is scoring at close to half of the sector average.

This is pretty clear evidence that staff see profound leadership failure. Only 29% agree that senior leaders inspire employees, and only 32% think senior leaders effectively establish priorities, do what they say they will do, and are adequately visible. This is a clear call for a housecleaning in the executive suite.

Only 30% think senior leadership will act on the issues identified in this survey. This was almost immediately shown to be true when, after the results were presented, the president, the VPA and the acting chief human resources officer all leaned hard on the message that the issue was a communications problem and the staff need to pull up our socks and work harder to help stem the bleeding of enrollments. While there was some lip service to the results as “sobering”and "removing barriers" to staff increasing discretionary effort, there was no real plan to address the problems or any sense that the executive was owning the results.

This is pretty consistent with AU’s past engagement surveys (2020 and 2019). The time between surveys was increased to two years to allow for a meaningful consideration and response by the executive. There was, predictably, none. And today’s presentation suggests AU’s executive are going to continue just try to “talk away” bad news instead of changing their behaviours.

That doesn’t sound like a very effective strategy to me. The staff reactions I've heard so far include anger at the victim blaming, disappointment at the vapid sloganeering, and regret for the hour of time we all wasted listening to the results.

-- Bob Barnetson

AU sacks its president, but problems continue

Yesterday, Athabasca University terminated the employment of its president, Peter Scott, and appointed the dean of health disciplines as its fourth president in three years (cough, cough). The university has declined to explain why it chose to pay Scott half a year’s salary to go way. According to the Board chair’s content-free and nearly incoherent statement:

Dr. Scott did his part in the puzzle and we're moving forward with Dr. Clark just to continue to grow the university.

Internally, this is seen as political payback (likely orchestrated by the UCP government) for Scott’s opposition to the UCP’s demands that the university locate jobs in the university’s home town of Athabasca. Among the people I have talked to, there are several themes emerging.

First, the timing of the announcement (weeks after Scott’s wife died) is rightly seen as cruel and heartless, which is pretty much on brand for the UCP. The Board chair attempted to explain the timing to the CBC:

Scott's firing by the board comes nearly three weeks after his wife died of cancer. She had just been diagnosed in early December.

"It's terrible," Nelson said. "We have given him some time to deal with that before today."

"Unfortunately, the business of the world, including the business of Athabasca University, goes forward," he said.

"This was a step we had to make. I will continue to treat Dr. Scott with all the respect that he deserves and he does deserve respect in this time."

This reads like "we had a plan to sack him awhile ago, but when his wife died, so we had to wait until the heat was off." This is grossly indecent behaviour and is a real "mask-off" moment.

Second, none of the workers seem particularly upset by Scott getting the boot. The “highlights” of Scott’s time at AU include signing a lockout notice to help the government drive rollbacks during a sham round of collective bargaining and then turning around and stupidly fighting a stupid fight with the same government over the jobs in Athabasca issue. There is, indeed, a palpable level of glee watching a boss get treated as badly as he treated the staff and calls for more bosses to get the boot.

Drawing on (I presume) beauty-pageant conventions, the Board then appointed a runner-up from the last competition as the new president. The latest president faces a lot of big problems.

Enrollment is falling which means the university, after implementing every saving and revenue-generation strategy it could come up with, is still $5m short going into the next fiscal year. There appears to be no coherent explanation for this decline and, consequently, no real plan.

Last week, program directors were told that they would need to review hundreds of invalid and unreliable student evaluations and then use this garbage data to make changes to their courses. Presumably, the logic was that enrollment declines are, at least in part, the fault of faculty course design choices.

Then the next day that plan was scrubbed. That example is part of a consistent pattern of spastic and ill-thought out management decision-making, where staff are basically treated like rental cars (i.e., pin the gas, hammer the brakes, slam it into the curb, who cares about the damage). Years of this kind of shoddy leadership plus the demands of COVID have result is catastrophically low morale, deep cynicism, and burnout.

The university has not yet released the results of its staff survey in the fall (gee, I wonder why…?) but evidence of how bad the results are all around us. Some staff are burning themselves out trying to keep pace with the relentless demand. Some staff are outright quitting. I would say the largest number are just quiet quitting and doing the minimum. I don't know how you turn that kind of deep disengagement around. 

The university’s biggest initiative is the Integrated Learning Environment (ILE). This is basically a software system (called Brightspace), which is supposed to replace our current teaching platform (called Moodle) and other IT systems. AU runs 800+ courses and all were supposed to be migrated to Brightspace by the end of March.

As of last week, about 20 courses had been successfully migrated. From what I can tell, these are all very simple, low-enrollment courses (like one or two students). Another 250 are underway, but about 50 of these are “on hold”, which seems to be code for “oh shit, Brightspace can’t do what we need it to and we don’t know how to fix it.”

This failure to launch seems to reflect that the bosses didn’t do a good job of selecting the new software or grasping the difficulty the migration entails (because they don’t really know how the place works and they don’t trust the staff who do). I am hearing talk that it may take up to two more years to complete this transition.

The new president could make some major gains in credibility by just admitting the ILE project failed and firing the execs in charge of the mess. This might also save the university enough money that it could avoid what is increasingly looking like layoffs. I don’t hold much hope of that because the sunk-cost fallacy is basically AU’s operational mantra.

-- Bob Barnetson