Managing the complexities of collective agreements

Collective agreements, established through an employer or an employers’ organization through collective bargaining, are the documents that contain the terms and conditions of employment that are binding on the employer, the trade union, and the employees covered by the agreement.

In Canada, public school teachers make up many of those who are covered by collective bargaining agreements and they are often so complex due to the delicate and demanding nature of their occupation. Agreements outline a teacher’s salary, benefits, working conditions, sick leave, vacation, and protection against arbitrary treatment. Collective agreements also include rights and entitlements.

For school districts, who often have to manage several thousand educators, along with collective bargaining agreements for each of them, it can be daunting to trying to keep up with the ever-changing legislation, statutes, or guidelines as well as agreements that are set to begin, expire, or pending ones on the way.

Statistics Canada’s latest report on the number of school teachers indicates that Canada has nearly 800,000 teachers and professors, with more than half of them being K-12 teachers. Plus, on average, there are 22 teachers in public elementary schools and 56 teachers in high school. Further, these numbers don’t include support staff, principals or vice-principals. With the complexities of collective agreements, coupled with the numbers of teachers, it is easy to see how managing collective agreements can be confusing and frustrating.

The Edsembli | HRP Solution

Edsembli | HRP’s software solution, compliance is built at its core. Schools can effortlessly stay aligned with rules and regulations put forth by the Ministry of Education, CRA, and Service Canada.

Plus, we can seamlessly integrate and handle all aspects of employee lifecycle management, including complex union agreements, as well as non-union environments.

Edsembli understands the unique and complex challenges faced by administrators, educators, and students. Our platform was inspired by school districts to overcome sector-specific problems and provide a seamless experience across human resources, payroll, finance, and student information systems.

What does Edsembli offer?

• Seamless integration between all departments: With our included API school districts can eliminate the need for complex third-party integrations. The Edsembli Ecosystem enhances data connectivity across all departments, minimizing errors and improving operational efficiency.
• Efficiently track collective agreements, articles, and subsections, and easily define team members and leadership representatives for each.
• Full transparency from classrooms to the board: Improve decision-making at all levels with enhanced visibility over core processes at both the classroom and school district level, so focus can be reallocated to empowering the learning experience.
• Built-in compliance with policies and procedures: Our dynamic cloud-based model improves data security while keeping schools and boards fully and effortlessly compliant with the Ministry of Education, CRA, Service Canada, PIPEDA and other regulatory bodies.
• Stay on top of updates, amendments, and renegotiations with built-in compliance functionality that incorporates new changes.
• Contract Negotiation module allows Boards to build salary projection grids to estimate the Boards salary costs during negotiation.

The goal of a school district and its schools is to provide an innovative learning space for its students. With Edsembli Ecosystem, we are providing you with the solutions you need to manage collective agreements, payroll, human resources, and finance, so you can save time and reallocate resources back to student learning.

Speak with an education specialist today and book a demo on how this product can track collective agreements, streamline day-to-day operations, and ensure data accuracy.