Over the last two years, McGill has widely publicized rise in the QS World University Rankings, which most recently identified the university as Canada’s top school and the 27th best worldwide. However, this publicity obscures a jarring campus reality from community awareness: Academic staff continue to call out McGill for the unfair working conditions that underlie such excellence.
For three years, McGill faculties have moved towards unionizing beyond the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), a body that does not permit academic staff to collectively bargain as true faculty unions would. Unionization has allowed professors—such as members of The Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL)—to formally strike for better wages and protections.
To avoid demonizing faculty strikes at McGill, it is crucial to examine the financial inequities that—until recently—McGill’s non-unionized professoriate has been subject to. Until McGill’s administration properly recognizes its staff contributions, the university cannot be the equitable, leading institution of excellence it proclaims itself to be.
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McGill’s professorial salary infrastructure, designed prior to faculty unionization on campus, is just one example of exploitative working conditions at the university. In an interview with The Tribune, Dr. Tim Elrick, Director of McGill’s Geographic Information Centre and Committee Chair of the May 2025 Report of the MAUT ad hoc Committee to Examine the Status of Salaries and Benefits at McGill, discussed the high income inequality across the university’s staff salaries represented in the report.
Using a metric called the Gini coefficient, the MAUT report indicates a “concerning case” of McGill setting aside a limited amount of money to pay all its staff salaries. A few “superstar,” public-facing, tenured professors net very high payouts through a merit-based salary system, while most other staff—often classified as faculty lecturers—earn much less.
Elrick, moreover, reflected on how McGill “[seems] to be putting women predominantly in low-paid positions” as faculty lecturers or untenured professors, resulting in structural differences in pay between men and women across its academic staff. Income inequality generally, as well as women’s predominant position as lower-paid faculty, is much less prevalent at other Quebec universities than at McGill.
Six years later, the Court issued its landmark ruling. It declared the Code’s three provisions unconstitutional and gave Parliament one year to introduce new legislation to protect sex workers.
Elrick further discussed how, at McGill, professorial salaries have decreased in real prices since 2016. Meanwhile, at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, median professorial salaries have increased over the same period in an effort to catch up with Canada’s rising house prices.
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“This is a very big problem for younger profs [at McGill], [whose] salary cannot keep up [with inflation so that they] cannot purchase a home,” Elrick asserted. “Do profs need to purchase a home? Maybe not. However, rental prices are linked to housing prices. So when housing prices go up, rental prices go up as well.”
Under these poor salary conditions, McGill’s employees can expect paltry pensions, as they can only contribute a fixed amount of their salaries to the funds, which is partially matched by the employer. Beyond poor input, the McGill University Pension Plan (MUPP)’s structure reinforces deep inequities that further disadvantage early-career professors while also threatening the stability of even established, tenured professors’ pensions.
Kevin Skerrett, director of Carleton University’s Financialization Research Lab and former Canadian Union of Public Employees pensions specialist, was recently asked by a colleague in McGill’s Faculty of Law to review the MUPP. In an interview with //The Tribune//, Skerrett described McGill’s pension as “technical and complicated,” even with his expertise.
McGill offers a two-tiered pension plan to its employees: One for staff who began working at the university before January 1, 2009 (Part A), and another for all those hired afterwards (Part B). Part A is considered a hybrid plan, combining elements of both defined benefit pensions and defined contribution pensions. Part B can be considered an exclusively defined contribution pension.
Skerrett outlined that, under the hybrid model, McGill guarantees the pensions of Part A employees, legally promising they will receive a minimum payout upon retirement, calculated directly on the basis of their pre-retirement salary and years of work at the university.
“The employer essentially backstops and secures and guarantees that the plan will deliver what's promised, [regardless of the value of the employee’s contributions alone], and sometimes that might mean [McGill has] to kick in extra money,” he explained.
Skerrett posited that McGill’s decision to redesign its pension structure was likely due to the 2008 financial crisis, which heavily impacted such investment funds and forced employers like McGill to take on a heavier financial burden to guarantee minimum payouts. For McGill’s post-2009 Part B employees, there is no guaranteed pension amount.
“The only thing that's secure [in this defined contribution plan] is how much money gets set aside, but no one has any idea what it will end up producing as a retirement income,” he said. “There are no risks for the employer […] of [needing] to contribute more […] even if things collapse [....] It's a very inferior, much less comforting and secure pension arrangement.”
Skerrett reported that at McGill, the university contributes payments equivalent to between 7.5-8 per cent of an employee’s salary to both Part A and Part B employee pensions, while at other universities, such as the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, and the University of British Columbia, the employer typically contributes between 9-12 per cent. These lower contribution rates further weaken pension security at McGill. When the employer invests less in employee pensions pre-retirement, there is less money appreciating in value over time in employees’ pension funds.
Skerrett emphasized how the stark inequalities presented by McGill’s two-tiered pension model are known as ‘orphan clauses’ in Quebec, which refers to how they alienate newer workers from their employers and older colleagues.
“You know this myth that sex workers just are passive […] beings that cannot stand up for their rights or don't know what their rights are, or that they're being exploited all the time,” Clamen said. “The reason that these stories of resistance are so important is to really counter narratives, to demonstrate that's not actually who sex workers are. They're always resisting conditions. They're strong and vibrant people.”
“[The university is] basically saying, ‘Okay, well, let's protect our current employees, and let's screw the young people,’” he summarized.
Additionally, McGill no longer applies indexation, or adjustment for inflation, to its pension plans, meaning neither its staff pensions nor its staff salaries are attuned to Montreal’s rising cost of living. Meanwhile, Skerrett reports, at the University of Toronto, staff pensions account for indexation protection.
He also pointed out that under changing Quebec legislation through the 2010s, a new pension plan structured like the MUPP would //no longer be legally permitted by the provincial government//. In fact, McGill’s restructuring was not subject to collective bargaining with any of its unions or employee groups, further removing the pension plan from the people who depend on it.
“McGill in 2009 had a wonderful situation from an employer perspective, which is, they could make whatever changes they want, and they wouldn't have to negotiate them with nonexistent faculty unions. So they did,” Skerrett stated. “They took full advantage [and] imposed this horrible, very reactionary, inequitable change [....] This is very bad, what McGill has done, and they've done it unilaterally.”
McGill’s lack of employee consultation on its pension restructuring is reflected by its current Pension Administration Committee (PAC). Rather than operate under a joint governance structure, where both employers and faculty union representatives would oversee pension management—as the University of Toronto’s plan does—five of the PAC’s nine members are appointed by the McGill administration’s Board of Governors. There is only one annual public meeting that all MUPP members can attend.
“[The PAC] is an utterly employer-dominated structure,” Skerrett asserted. “[The PAC is] also entirely bound by confidentiality, so none of us know what goes on behind its closed doors [....] They are not meaningfully accountable to anybody. By all appearances, the PAC, which is chaired by [McGill’s] Associate [Vice-President] of Human Resources, has never challenged anything the employer decides.”
McGill’s Media Relations Office referred The Tribune to the existing, public resources on McGill's website to find information on the university's pension and salary systems.
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The importance of addressing salary and pension inequities impacting both newer and older professors at McGill, permitted by McGill’s bad-faith fiscal governance, represents a moral drive behind campus unionization, perhaps even more than a financial one.
The importance of addressing salary and pension inequities impacting both newer and older professors at McGill, permitted by McGill’s bad-faith fiscal governance, represents a moral drive behind campus unionization, perhaps even more than a financial one.
In an interview with //The Tribune//, Associate Professor in McGill’s Faculty of Law and its Faculty of Arts’ Department of Political Science Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli emphasized that the primary motivation behind increasing faculty unionization on campus is the desire for true collegiality amongst staff, rather than financial gain.
“The people who have traditionally been against the unionization of faculty mean by collegiality […] that we settle our disputes over a glass of sherry with the [President of the University],” he explained. “In the few moments when [this] was the case, it was when the university looked very different, [and] generally did not include women, did not include minorities, did not include Jewish people, and certainly did not include people who were outside of the favour of the administration [....] By collegiality, [new faculty unions] mean governance by colleagues, all colleagues, everyone who has an academic title.”
Muñiz-Fraticelli continued by describing this expansive vision of a university where everyone—from contract academic staff to tenured professors—is entitled to participate in governance. He explained that currently, when professors at McGill promoted to the administration receive disproportionate salary increases, they do not return to the professoriate, which erodes the alternation in governance on which collegiality depends and inspires calls for financial justice.
“When the administration […] doesn't regard us as equal, it doesn't trust us. We have no reason to trust them in return, and […] this eroded collegiality […] is what eventually led to unionization,” he stated.
Muñiz-Fraticelli discussed how McGill has “been centralizing authority tremendously in James Hall and taking it away from faculties” in recent years, using the 2020 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as a case study. The administration did not adopt recommendations from both the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health and the Faculty of Law describing how to better equip McGill’s campus to fight the virus.
“During the COVID crisis, I think a lot of us finally realized that we were employees, because we were treated as employees and only as employees by the administration, [who] was beholden more to political pressure [and to pressure] from external donors and public opinion generally,” Muñiz-Fraticelli expressed.
In the ensuing push for true collegiality, respect, and visibility for professors—represented by AMPL’s ultimately successful unionization in November 2022—the stark discrepancies between what MAUT can offer academic staff versus a true faculty union became clear to Muñiz-Fraticelli.
During AMPL strikes from April to September of 2024, as the union fought for better working conditions in their collective agreement with the McGill administration, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Defence Fund offered AMPL an interest-free loan of $1 million CAD, allowing them to fully pay striking professors’ foregone salaries.
For Muñiz-Fraticelli, this massive show of solidarity from CAUT and other groups, such as the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université, helped validate that unions are necessary and sustainable modes of labour advocacy.
“[Myself and other AMPL members] broke down crying because we realized that we could win, but winning takes resources, because we all have to have to pay our mortgages during the strike, and the union, with the help of CAUT, covered our net salaries during the strike so that we could hold on until the university met our demands,” Muñiz-Fraticelli described.
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As McGill increases austerity measures and slashes hundreds of jobs amid financial challenges, public attention often falls on how budget cuts will impact the university’s student experience. Yet a massive driver of this student experience is McGill’s professoriate, who, austerity measures aside, have been poorly compensated for their excellent teaching and groundbreaking research for decades.
Campus unions’ emphasis on true collegiality—which would increase transparency and accountability throughout McGill’s community—is a critical step in calling attention to, and inspiring campus-wide empathy in the face of, systems at McGill that put employees second time and time again. The university’s murky salary and pension systems can only be addressed when brought to light. And only when McGill’s administration pushes towards stronger fiscal and governance protections for academic staff can it wear the mantle of excellence in good conscience.
Muñiz-Fraticelli stated definitively that unions—though they may cost professors higher dues than MAUT—provide academic staff the resources they need to fight for and achieve better working conditions at McGill.
It is naive to believe that the criminalization of this profession will somehow result in its total eradication. Criminalization does not abolish sex work; it worsens the already challenging conditions in which sex workers live and labour.
“The university originally was a guild, a labour union of sorts,” Muñiz-Fraticelli emphasized. “[Unions] have better and more effective representation, more effective bargaining power, […] the possibility of strikes and withholding our labour. The result is higher benefits, higher salaries and better working conditions. So in fact, you shouldn't think of [union dues] as just paying more money, but rather as an investment.”