Bulletin
CapilanoU-Student Employee Update
May 21, 2025
To: All MoveUP Members at CapilanoU
The fight continues. Even after the University’s failed attempt to thwart our student employees’ unionization efforts, the employer continues to drag its feet in paying fair wages to those students.
On December 20th, 2024, following an amazing shared organizing effort, MoveUP applied to include Capilano University Student Employees into our existing COPE 378 bargaining unit. Unfortunately, our application was based on a count of student employees supplied by the university, which we believed to be accurate and provided in good faith. At the Labour Relations Board certification hearing the university produced an entirely new list of student employees which increased that count by half, forcing a renewed card-signing drive and subsequent re-application at the board.
On March 13th, 2025, the Labour Board approved MoveUp’s new application, and student employees were successfully added to the union certification and bargaining unit.
On April 16th, and 22nd, MoveUp met with the university to discuss a paid practicum project of five students in the Tourism Management Program and were able to ensure these students are provided the protections of the collective agreement as union members.
In preliminary discussions, the university has tried to carve out significant portions of the agreement away from student employees in the interest of keeping a status quo.
Despite their obligations under Article 2.04 of our Collective Agreement, the university has not yet met with the union to discuss salary grouping for these newly added student positions. Based on the existing terms of the agreement new roles will be placed appropriately in the existing salary groups according to their specification under the job evaluation system. The goal of that system is to ensure that equal work receives equal pay and was originally instituted to address gender-based pay inequities. Currently, the university’s policy is to peg student wages to minimum wage, regardless of the complexity of the work being done. We do not believe that a worker’s wages should be suppressed simply because of their age or university enrollment.
The union and university are currently scheduled to meet May 22nd to discuss salary grouping for student employees. Should no agreement be reached, and the university continue to resist paying its student employees fair wages, the matter will proceed to binding arbitration.
Thank you for your continued support and solidarity.
Chris Shier
Union Representative
