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September 20, 2021 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
News
Checking in with AGSEM
President discusses in-person learning concerns Catey Fifield Staff Writer
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arlier this year, the Daily reported on issues members of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) were experiencing with Workday, the HR system that the university implemented in Fall 2020. After hundreds of TAs and invigilators missed paycheques that semester, with some still missing those paycheques in Winter 2021, AGSEM wrote an open letter to Principal Suzanne Fortier and her colleagues demanding fair compensation and “the maximum penalty for McGill’s violations of employment law.” It’s been more than six months since that letter was published, and a lot has changed. For this week’s issue, the Daily caught up with leaders of AGSEM to get an update on the Workday situation and to find out how graduate student employees are coping with the return to in-person learning. “To our knowledge, all our members have received their full pay,” writes AGSEM president Mario Roy. The union’s request for an investigation to confirm this has yet to be carried out. Regardless, Roy adds,
“Workday is still a system that is creating a lot of frustration among users.” The confusing interface and technical difficulties acknowledged at the outset of the rollout have not disappeared, and the union maintains that “if the system is not satisfying the needs of the university, it should be changed for a better system.”
“Workday is still a system that is creating a lot of frustration among users.” - Mario Roy, AGSEM president Roy says the university made an offer of compensation for employees who received their pay late, but the union – which originally requested a $50 late fee plus a monthly interest of 1.24 per cent, the same penalties students must pay when they don’t make their tuition payments on time – found this offer “unsatisfactory.” Negotiations are ongoing, and AGSEM is “looking at all the options
available in order to resolve [the dispute] as soon as possible.” From the first annoucement that McGill would return to in-person learning, AGSEM members have had more than Workday on their minds. In an April survey of 704 graduate students, including 392 employees, nearly half of respondents said they would prefer that the Fall 2021 semester be conducted fully remotely, while 41.5 per cent said they would feel safe returning to campus only once the undergraduate population was fully vaccinated. Based on these results and members’ concerns “about the eagerness of McGill to bring the McGill community back to in-person activities,” AGSEM leaders wrote to the university administration over the summer to request accommodations – for instance, the ability to hold office hours over Zoom – for employees who wished to work remotely. “Very few consultations were made with the union during the summer,” Roy says, “and the consultations were mainly to inform us about their plan.” The McGill administration opted to leave the decision to allow graduate student employees to work from home to the students’ employers – that is, the professors and instructors they assist. This
Eve Cable | Illustrations Editor is worrisome, Roy says, “because some employers might refuse to accommodate our members when fairly requested.” With the spread of the Delta variant and the increase in daily COVID-19 cases in Quebec, union members are worried “that the lack of sanitary measures or the lack of enforcement for sanitary
Analysis: McGill’s COVID Protocol
measures currently in place could create a situation where our members would end up working in an unsafe environment.” Even greater is the fear that the university may not react quickly enough to protect its students and staff in the event of an outbreak – Roy believes an outbreak has a “high chance” of happening.
How McGill compares to other Canadian universities
Abigail Popple Coordinating News Editor
Note: the figures cited in this article are current as of September 17. Due to the rapidly-changing nature of public health guidelines and case numbers, the following information may not be entirely up-to-date.
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ublic health guidelines vary from province to province, as do universities’ requirements for attending school on campus. To get an idea of how McGill’s COVID guidelines stack up against other large universities, the Daily has analyzed the COVID precautions of large universities across Canada.
Case Tracking
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niversities’ policies concerning the report of COVID cases on campus vary widely; some universities provide students with a week-by-week case count, while others do not
report case counts at all. McGill makes their case tracker publicly available, as do the Université de Montréal (UdeM), the University of Toronto (UofT), and the University of Alberta (UofA).
Some universities provide students with a week-byweek case count, while others do not report case counts at all. However, the information included in case trackers varies from school to school. McGill’s website claims that all reported positive cases are included in case-tracking figures, but clarifies that cases are only
considered a result of community transmission if 1) the virus is found in two or more students who have been in the same class or area within the past 14 days, and 2) the cases “are not explainable by another epidemiological origin.” Some students claim that McGill’s contact tracing is not thorough enough, and have created Google Forms in order to track cases themselves. Likewise, McGill’s contact-tracing guidelines were subject to criticism from students last Fall, when students claimed that their positive test results were not being included in McGill’s overall case count. UdeM and UofA also claim to include every positive test result which is reported to them in their figures, but do not distinguish between individual cases of COVID-19 and instances of community transmission. While UofT makes note of “outbreaks on campus” – that is, community transmissions – in their case tracker, they do not specify what
counts as an outbreak. Some universities, such as Concordia University, X University
Universities have cited concerns about sharing personal health information to justify withholding case numbers. (formerly known as Ryerson University), and the University of British Columbia (UBC), do not make case counts publicly available whatsoever. At these institutions, students are made aware of COVID cases if they were in close contact with the infected individual within the 14 days leading up to their test; universities have cited concerns
about sharing personal health information to justify withholding case numbers. At UBC, a student-run website tracks cases by compiling the notices which students receive after a possible exposure to the virus – however, reporting from the Ubyssey indicates that UBC administrators claim that they cannot verify the data on this site in the interest of protecting “patient confidentiality.”
On-Campus Guidelines
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cGill, Concordia, and UdeM all require students to wear masks when indoors, but social distancing is not enforced in classrooms. Because the Quebec government currently does not include postsecondary educational institutions among its designated testing centres, these universities are not distributing COVID tests. In contrast, UofA, UBC, UofT, unvaccinated individuals to be tested frequently. While each of these schools require masks to