Employment Insurance
Please note that the final pay for this past term was April 23rd. This represents what Service Canada refers to as an ‘interruption of earnings’ and should be the date you list on your EI application as the last pay date (not the date for which you were last paid). The ‘day for which you were last paid’ and your ‘last day worked’ should be listed as April 16th. We would encourage all Sessionals who may utilize Employment Insurance at any point in 2021 to apply immediately, even if you are employed during the coming Spring term.
The first pay in the Spring term, for those of you who are employed, will be on May 21st and the first day of work will be May 2nd. This means you should be able to collect EI for a brief period of time prior to May 2nd, if you have enough insurable hours. If you are not working this Spring, you should be able to collect starting now and throughout most of the summer.
For information on EI, click here. If you have already served a withholding period in the past 52 weeks, you will be able to collect EI sooner. If you have not served a withholding period, you can serve one week over the holidays and should be able to collect EI sooner in late April. If you have yet to serve the one-week withholding period in the past 52 weeks and plan on accessing EI over the spring/summer, we would strongly encourage you to apply for EI over the holidays to serve the withholding period.
In certain instances, it is possible to both work and collect EI (with some clawbacks) if the amount of work have in the winter has dropped substantially from the work you had during the fall term. More information is available here.
The employer will upload your ROE automatically to Service Canada. You can apply for EI at any point after you see it uploaded to your Service Canada site.
Post-Contract Work
Remember, any post-contract work (that is, work requested by your supervisor and done after your final grades have been submitted) is separate from your contract and payable at a rate of $66.70/hour. This would include reviewing grades that are being challenged, marking exams that have been deferred, and dealing with cases of plagiarism. This is not an exhaustive list, and more information, including the appropriate form you’ll need to fill out and submit to get paid, is available here.
Large Class Supplemental Fee
If you have yet to be paid the Large Class Supplemental Fee, please let us know. For those of you earning the base rate and teaching a class with more than 75 students, you are eligible for this added supplement. For a typical 3-unit course, this would amount to $6.00 per student for each student above 75. If you taught a class with more than 75 students, you may wish to remind your department (we’ve had HR do this as well), and please confirm that this additional supplement will be paid prior to the end of contract (and contact us if you haven’t received it!).
