CUPE 3906

CUPE 3906 Statement on Anti-Black Racism

Despite our best efforts to work out all technical glitches in advance of today’s Executive elections, it has come to our attention that several of you have yet to receive your ballots via your McMaster email addresses. We have located a solution and, barring any further issues, those of you who have yet to receive your credentials should receive them soon, along with everyone who has yet to vote. Due to these delays exacerbating an overlap with a religious holiday, we will be extending the voting until 12pm, Monday, June 1^st.  We appreciate your patience and understanding as we navigate this new online platform.

All elections related information can be found here: https://cupe3906.org/elections-2020/

Click here for candidate statements.

As most of you will know by now, McMaster University has officially announced that the Fall 2020 semester will be hosted entirely online. We are in regular communication with the Employer about how this will affect our members, and you can expect more details from us soon. In the meantime, we would encourage you to track any hours spent preparing to take your Fall classes online. While the Employer has yet to definitively say whether they will acknowledge such work as Post-Contract work, we firmly believe that it should be treated as such and would thus encourage you to submit a Post-Contract Payment Form for any time spent moving or preparing to move your courses online. You can read more about what constitutes Post-Contract Work in Article 15.05 of the current Collective Agreement for Unit 2. The full statement from President Farrar can be found here. Should you have any additional questions, feel free to email us at either president@cupe3906.org or mecampbell@cupe3906.org.

Several weeks ago, we sent a detailed update on some changes the University has made to the PSF application process in the context of COVID-19. As a follow up, we’d like to remind you that applicants are no longer required to complete the Estimated Expenses and Estimated Income table in the PSF application form.

You can read the full update here, and a detailed overview of the PSF itself here.

As many of you will already know, applications for the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) opened today, May 15. CUPE National has created a helpful FAQ on the CESB, found here. Given that your potential eligibility for the CESB relates primarily to your student (not worker) status, we recommend sending any questions you may have to student associations within the University such as the GSA, who have remained apprised of the situation since the news first broke. We thank the GSA for their diligence in providing so many detailed updates to McMaster graduate students, many of whom are also our members!

As you likely know by now, the current circumstances of COVID-19 require that this year’s Annual General Meeting (wherein our Executive Committee is elected by the membership) be hosted online. Nominations are now open, and will close May 25 at 5 PM. Elections will then be open from 12 PM on May 28 to 12 PM on May 29.

To learn more about the elections process, and how to nominate yourself or a fellow member, click here.

Sessionals, earlier this week, you were notified via email of an upcoming election for the position of Alternate on the Unit 2 Bargaining Team. We’d like to remind you that nominations close at 5 PM this Monday, May 18th. For more information on the position of Bargaining Team Alternate, and how to nominate yourself or a fellow Unit 2 member, read the full announcement here.

Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) are hoping to to assess the impacts of COVID-19 on all types of workers from across the  province. OHCOW is a great organization that operates with the goal of improving the health of working people by providing clinical and prevention services, including research. The current survey is being offered in collaboration with health and safety union representatives as well as researchers from Duke University and the Institute of Work and Health. That being said, we would strongly encourage all of our members to not only participate in this survey, but also to share it widely within their personal and professional networks. You can find it here.