Unionized Nova Scotia Community College faculty and staff in two bargaining units have ratified new six-year agreements.
The faculty and professional support staff, both represented by the Nova Scotia Teachers Union, accepted the NSCC’s respective final offers in a vote held on Tuesday.
Rosalind Penfound, NSCC’s vice-president organizational learning, said they are happy to have the agreements.
“We’re very pleased to learn that our colleagues in the NSTU bargaining units . . . voted in favour of the most recent proposals that came out of our collective bargaining process. It’s good to get those agreements concluded and put that to bed.”
There are about 760 members in the faculty bargaining unit and 161 professional support staffers.
According to a news release from the NSTU, about 55 per cent of faculty members and 64 per cent of professional support staff voted in favour of the new deals.
Their previous contracts expired Aug. 31, 2014.
Each agreement covers from Sept. 1, 2014, to Aug. 31, 2020, and includes seven per cent wage increases over the full term of the contracts.
The wage pattern includes no increase over the first two years, one per cent in the third year, and 1.5 per cent in each of the other three plus another 0.5 per cent on the final day of each year.
“Because we are a public sector situation, thewage settlement follows the Bill 148 pattern,”
Penfound said. “And besides that, (it’s) just the regular sort of giveand- take that you’d find in any collective agreement.”
In the news release, the NSTU said that under the provincial Liberal government’s Bill 148 — the Public Services Sustainability Act brought into effect in August of 2015 — years of service used to calculate long-service awards were frozen as of March 31, 2015. However, under the new agreements ratified on Tuesday, employees can choose to collect their service award based on their salary at retirement, or collect it immediately based on their March 31, 2018 salary.
NSTU president Liette Doucet was unavailable for comment.
