Student Employee Update

Student Employee Update

The FSA has begun receiving requests for students to be employed over the summer in developmental roles such as supporting research activities. As many of you will recall, the FSA collective agreement requires the agreement of the FSA for all student employee appointments and prohibits the use of students in roles that might be performed by other FSA positions, including Lab Assistants. The FSA has agreed to the use of student employees in developmental roles on a case by case basis and we have agreed to continue to do so while the Institute negotiates with us on the changes needed to the collective agreement to properly capture the requirements of applied research activity at BCIT. That agreement was to have expired on December 31, 2016. When the employer experienced wide spread turnover in Human Resources and Labour Relations, we agreed to extend the agreement to June 30, 2017. The FSA currently will not agree to have student employees working outside the scope provided for in the collective agreement after June 30, 2017.

We recognize that this timeline poses a significant obstacle to student work in research projects that might otherwise take place over the summer. We also believe that this time line has contributed to the employer’s readiness to resume discussions around research beginning on Monday, February 20. Over the last couple of weeks, we have had discussions with senior levels of government seeking their agreement to allow BCIT to address these issues with us. We are anticipating more such discussions in the next few weeks.  As resolving this issue depends on some participation from government, we have to act on the momentum created by the June 30 deadline before we enter the election period at the end of March.

We will be taking every opportunity to meet with the employer and with government over the next few weeks to advance this issue. Depending on the progress achieved over that period, we will reassess the status of the existing agreement with BCIT on student employees.

In our discussions very recently with government, they showed an interest in understanding both the scope of the problem and the scope of the potential to give students exposure to applied research activities at BCIT. We have described many ways that research activity can benefit students directly and indirectly, with the opportunity to work in a research environment being one particularly valuable kind of exposure. FSA records provide us some sense of the number of student employees already involved in research activities.  We would like to hear from FSA members how many students you anticipate hiring in research related roles this year. Please also let us know whether you or your colleagues would hire more students if there were no non-financial barriers to doing so. If it’s possible to estimate the number of additional student hires, please share that with us as well.

You can send your information directly to paul_reniers@bcit.ca.