AAPS Consultations: Indigenous Member Consultations on the Temporary Language in the AAPS Collective Agreement
Dear AAPS Members,
We are beginning the consultation process for Indigenous AAPS members on the temporary language in articles 12.4, 12.11, and 1.1 of the 2022-2025 Collective Agreement.
We are sending this email to all AAPS members to ensure our invitation to participate reaches all members who are Indigenous to North America, such as First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.
We encourage AAPS members Indigenous to North America to participate in the consultations through a Zoom meeting or by filling out the feedback form on our website.
We also hope to make everyone aware of the consultation process so that non-Indigenous members, regardless of where you were born, can make space, time, and encourage your Indigenous colleagues to participate in the consultations.
We also wanted to provide some background to the context of these specific consultations.
Background
AAPS recognizes the lack of Indigenous member engagement in the past as a missed opportunity to gather issues and concerns unique to the Indigenous membership. We apologize for this oversight and are hopeful to gain insight, understanding, and effective improvements to the Collective Agreement language with your participation in this consultation.
For our 2025 collective bargaining consultations, we will work with the AAPS Board of Directors to develop a more substantive engagement process with Indigenous members to understand your bargaining priorities and how we can decolonize the AAPS Collective Agreement.
In this latest round of collective bargaining, AAPS and the University reached an agreement to start the process of decolonizing our Collective Agreement.
In the round of bargaining that ended this summer, the parties agreed to amend the definitions of articles that relate to bereavement leave for Indigenous members (Article 12.4), paid leave for Indigenous cultural events and ceremonies (Article 12.11), and the opening language of the Collective Agreement (Article 1.1). AAPS and the University agreed that both parties would separately consult with Indigenous members about these changes.
At AAPS, we are consulting exclusively with Indigenous members of AAPS, while it is our understanding that the University will be consulting with the broader Indigenous community at UBC. This particular consultation is quite specific, based on our negotiations with the University and direction from the Province of British Columbia.
We hope that Indigenous members will participate and get the language and definitions that represent you into the Collective Agreement so that you use your entitlements under each article with ease.
Invitation for AAPS members Indigenous to North America
We are asking for your advice and recommendations to ensure the language in the Collective Agreement reflects your needs, values, and effectively defines and provides examples of cultural ceremonies and events, the members of your community you may need to take bereavement leave for, and provides appropriate acknowledgement.
Your feedback will form our proposals and negotiations with UBC to determine the ongoing language. Your participation will help ensure accurate definitions of family members, cultural events, and ceremonies that will hopefully help ease your use of the articles and make taking time off more straightforward.
You can review the temporary language in the articles on the AAPS website.
There are a number of ways that you can participate in the 2022-2025 Collective Agreement temporary language consultations.
Participate through the Feedback Form
The form is now open and will remain open until 9am, March 15, 2024. You are welcome to submit multiple times or just respond to one article at a time, as you prefer. You are welcome to fill out the feedback form as well as participate in the live consultation events.
- You can review the articles on our website or download the PDF
- Here is the link to the feedback form on the AAPS website
Participate Through Live Consultations
We are hosting three online Zoom consultations in February and March of 2024. You can RSVP by following the link to our Zoom registration form. Please note all the sessions will be the same and you are invited to sign up for the date that best suits your schedule.
If you have participated in an AAPS consultation process before, this will be similar. We will go through each of the questions on the feedback form as a group and collect your input. AAPS staff will be there to take notes.
Thank you for making the time to participate in these consultations.
A Note about Information Collection
We are asking for your name, job title, and department to confirm that you are a member of AAPS. We are asking for your email in case we have any follow-up questions as well as to let you know when AAPS and UBC have reached an agreement on the language and share information about future consultations for Indigenous members.
We invite you to share the name of your community if you wish to. It is not required to fill out the form. The question is designed to prevent non-Indigenous members from filling out the form in error and to help us get a sense of which communities our Indigenous members are from.
Personal information that you submit to the form will be held in confidence and the feedback regarding the language in the Collective Agreement will be amalgamated before it is reported on.
If you are experiencing any challenges participating or have other feedback on how we should be hosting consultations with our Indigenous members, you are invited to contact AAPS Executive Director, Joey Hansen at joey.hansen@ubc.ca.
Sincerely,
Lauren (Ilaanaay) Casey Joey Hansen
AAPS Acting President AAPS Executive Director