Crisis and Opportunity: Faculty Associations and the Challenge of Pandemic Bargaining

This article addresses two key questions. First, how have faculty associations and university administrations in Canada responded to the intertwined challenges of austerity and pandemic bargaining? And second, how can faculty associations apply strategic and tactical lessons from this period to future rounds of collective bargaining? The content of this article is informed by the secondary literature on university labour relations and faculty associations in Canada and is grounded in the author’s practical experience as Chief Negotiator for the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA) in the last two rounds of bargaining. The article uses the 2020 round of pandemic bargaining at Brock University as a case study to explore the obstacles and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 crisis within the broader context of the neoliberalization of higher education. The case study also serves as a jumping off point to compare and contrast the range of faculty association responses to pandemic bargaining and theorize more generally about how the pandemic intersects with strategic debates concerning models of faculty unionism. --From introduction