In July 2025, the Confederation of Faculty Associations of McGill (COFAM), composed of five faculty unions, began bargaining with McGill over the working conditions of Contract Academic Staff (CAS).
COFAM consists of the Association of McGill Academic Staff of the School of Continuing Studies (AMASCS/AMPEEP), the Association of McGill Professors of Education (AMPE), the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts (AMPFA), the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL/AMPD), and the Association of McGill Library Academic Staff (AMLAS). This bargaining process primarily concerns CAS faculty members at McGill.
Tenure-track academic staff must fulfill three areas of work: Teaching, researching, and contributing to the university community. CAS faculty, however, only need to fulfill two out of the three categories. Even though staff in both streams are expected to work full-time, they do not receive the same contract length, hiring benefits, and pay as other tenure-track academic staff.
In an interview with The Tribune, Kyle Kubler, AMPFA treasurer and CAS faculty lecturer at the McGill Writing Centre, explained that the main purpose of this negotiation is to fix the discrepancy in employment conditions between tenure-track and CAS faculty.
“We recognize that tenure-track professors have more job responsibilities in the sense [that] they have these three categories instead of two, but it’s not like […] by having more categories, they work more than us,” Kubler said. “We all work the same. Each individual person works slightly different hours depending on their setup, but there’s not an expectation that what we do is less than full-time and what they do is full-time or more than full-time.”
CAS faculty members generally must have six years of teaching experience at McGill before they may obtain a permanent contract. Kubler explained that this contract renewal system could create job instability.
“For CAS members, the university has the right to give you a contract of however long they want [….] There’s a lot of variability in those first six years before you become permanent,” he said. “That makes our jobs really insecure [….] Our proposal into bargaining is that we want to take the people that are currently CAS faculty lecturers and CAS professors and put them into the tenure stream [….] Where we get one for three years, we do a renewal process, and we get another for three years.”
On Jan. 20, COFAM met with the McGill administration for a bargaining meeting. McGill rejected COFAM’s initial proposal to eliminate the CAS system, instead offering a counter-proposal, which introduces teaching-intensive tenure-track positions.
Kubler expressed that while it is a step in the right direction, McGill’s decision remains inadequate in pragmatically improving working conditions for existing CAS faculty.
“What they’ve offered us right now is obviously insufficient in the sense that it doesn’t really address any of our concerns,” he said. “We’re happy to see them move in that direction, and we need a lot more information about details before we really know what to do with it.”
Julie Sénat, AMPFA vice president and French Language Centre faculty lecturer, was hired as a CAS faculty member on a two-year contract in 2022. In an interview with The Tribune, Sénat mentioned that amid McGill’s recent budget cuts, many CAS faculty are left questioning their job security.
“When I was hired, my colleagues and I were under the impression that [our jobs were] stable, [as] having a longer contract made me feel as if I was more secure,” Sénat said. “Later on, as McGill started budget cuts and I started getting more information, I realized that my position could be cut [….] If that were to happen, let’s say they were deciding to cut CAS positions, […] they could give me a non-renewable [contract] and I would not have any seniority. What would happen is that I would just [have to teach] the leftover courses.”
Kubler explained that while the current contract-length policy allows McGill to maintain maximum flexibility, it is unfair to CAS members.
“I’m not trying to say that this is something nefarious, but this is of course something they want,” Kubler said. “And then, of course, it makes sense for us why we wouldn’t want that, because we want certain clarity in terms of our employment. It becomes tricky [when] you’ve got someone who’s one year away from getting their permanent contract, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get renewed for that last year.”
Sénat then expressed dissatisfaction with McGill’s lack of transparency with its employees.
“We are way more precarious than our tenure-track colleagues, we’re way less paid,” she noted. “The feeling is that McGill’s culture has always been like everything is silent, things are not clear. It’s handled case by case. What we’re trying to do is to put together and clarify everything, negotiating together.”
The Tribune reached out to the McGill Labour and Employee Relations group, but they did not respond in time for publication.
In an interview with The Tribune, Steve Jordan, president of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) and associate professor in the Faculty of Education, explained that although COFAM and MAUT differ legally, they work in parallel to promote the interests of faculty members and staff.
“The Contract Academic Staff faculty lecturers are represented in MAUT,” Jordan said. “The MAUT Council is the governing body, and it’s composed of about 20 people [….] There’s a CAS representative [….] MAUT has been actively working with CAS around their working conditions. For example, in the last couple of years, we’ve had town halls and workshops specifically aimed at CAS, where we’ve invited CAS members to come along to air their concerns, their issues, as far as to provide support and feedback.”
He then explained that improving the working conditions of CAS members remains a priority.
“We have the Committee on Academic [Staff] Compensation, which is […] our body where we negotiate directly with the administration on salary, working conditions, and so forth,” Jordan said. “We’re quite concerned about CAS, because they have grown in numbers over the last several years, and so they become a really important part of our negotiations and our membership.”
Kubler also elaborated on why the collective bargaining process could take longer than expected.
“Because we’re unionized, the working conditions themselves get determined in collective bargaining,” he explained. “We’re in that process right now of trying to create this first collective agreement for faculty members [….] Employers are generally busy, and there’s not a huge incentive on their end to get things done super quickly […] there’s lots of unions on campus that they have to navigate with too, and some of them are also in bargaining.”
For many CAS faculty members, their ability to contribute meaningfully to the university is closely tied to a sense of stability in their employment at McGill. Kubler reiterated that McGill’s ambiguity around the working conditions of CAS faculty members will continue to dissuade them from committing long-term to the university.
“The best way that we can contribute to McGill is primarily through our teaching, because that’s largely what we do,” Kubler said. “If we want to develop new courses, and if we want to go to pedagogical conferences, if we end up doing advising [for] students or developing different kinds of programs […] these are all things that are there, like multi-year projects that require long-term investment. But if we don’t have these long-term contracts, then it makes it really difficult for us to commit and invest in that work and actually invest in McGill.”
Errata: A previous version of this article stated that COFAM consists of four unions. In fact, COFAM consists of five unions, including AMLAS. The Tribune regrets this error.