Local 4600 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees has reached a tentative agreement with Carleton University after 13 hours of bargaining.
CUPE 4600 represents teaching, service and research assistants and contract instructors at Carleton. The union’s nearly 3,000 members are divided into two units: Unit 1 for TAs and RAs and Unit 2 for contract instructors.
Both collective agreements with Carleton ended on Aug. 31 with bargaining ongoing since September.
The details of the deal aren’t public. CUPE 4600 will share them with its membership at a meeting on Feb. 3, followed by a ratification vote.
One of the union’s key demands was the implementation of AI guardrails.
At a rally on Jan. 22, about 50 people gathered in the Carleton University quad despite the weather to chant slogans, hear speeches and collect signatures on an open letter. After a march around the quad, rally organizers sent participants into buildings around campus to talk to students and get out of the bitter cold.
In CUPE 4600’s open letter, the union asked that TAs and RAs be protected from having to use artificial intelligence for grading and feedback, intellectual property being fed to AI and AI replacing their work or making hiring decisions.
Maria Vorobeva, CUPE 4600’s vice president of internal issues, told Capital Current before the tentative agreement was reached that she wasn’t surprised to get pushback from Carleton University on this novel issue.
“There isn’t a standardized approach right now to how AI is handled in the workplace, so we understand we’re kind of on the frontlines of getting these sorts of protections,” she said.
In fact, Vorobeva said that while the union’s bargaining committee learned that AI was a big issue for members, the university’s bargaining team wasn’t prepared to negotiate about it.
According to her, the board of governors didn’t initially give the university negotiators a mandate to talk about AI regulations.
Vorobeva said the rally was meant to involve the student body in pressuring Carleton’s board of governors to give their team that mandate.
We’re kind of on the frontlines of getting these sorts of protections.
Maria Vorobeva, CUPE 4600 vice president
In her speech at the rally, the union’s lead negotiator, Ariel Becherer, said there’s “still a chance to avoid a strike if Carleton can give us those AI guardrails.”
Steven Reid, Carleton University’s media relations officer, said in an email after the rally that the university “supports the responsible, ethical and human-centred use of technology” and is “committed to working with the union’s bargaining team.”
Carleton officials could not be reached in time for further comment on the bargaining mandate. They announced the tentative deal on Jan. 28.
Eighty-three per cent of TAs and RAs voted “yes” to strike in early December. According to a statement CUPE 4600 released on Dec. 11, it had “the most votes cast in the history of (the) local.”
The Dec. 11 statement also announced CUPE 4600 had filed for conciliation. An Ontario Ministry of Labour-appointed conciliator Paul Pooler was involved in negotiations on Jan. 27.
Contract instructors already ratified their tentative agreement with Carleton on Jan. 12., with 98 per cent of members voting for the new collective agreement.
Carleton contract instructors were less worried about AI as their last agreement with the university gave them intellectual property protections, Vorobeva said.
Dominique Marshall, the president of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association – which represents 950 full-time faculty and librarians at Carleton – also spoke at the rally, expressing CUASA’s solidarity with CUPE 4600.
In an interview after the rally, Marshall said “asking for more with less” from universities “threatens to degrade the trust that the public has in us, and the trust that the students have in us.”
After the Feb. 3 meeting, the union will hold its ratification vote online for three days before announcing the results.
