Layoffs Talking Points Summary, and Reminder of Townhall Meeting Tomorrow, was FW: Layoff Grievances Updates

Good afternoon colleagues,

I hope you are all well and have been enjoying the unusually sunny day today!

One of our colleagues helpfully suggested I might distill the information on layoffs into summary / talking points, so here it is. (Note I am including the original full communication here for ease of reference to more detail should you find it useful. Note also that I am adding a few points throughout the summary that have been raised by some of our colleagues.)

**If you are able to, please join us for the KFA Townhall tomorrow at 1:00 so that we can discuss this topic and your questions.**

Summary:

General Update on the Two Rounds of Layoffs:

Thirty-eight of our colleagues have been fully or partially laid off as of September 1. This includes four women on maternity leave.

An additional 8 members have been issued layoff notice for January. Some of these have already been rescinded or partially rescinded.

Why do we say this is wrong?

We say that the Employer has manufactured conditions for faculty layoffs and has wrongly laid off all of these faculty. They made false claims around balanced vs deficit budget, false claims about needing to lay off regular faculty, false claims about how many regular faculty “needed” to be laid off, false and/or misleading claims about retention of administration, false claims about “break evens” for faculty salary vs tuition revenue, false statements about reductions of sections and impacts on the institution, false claims around institutional fiscal shortfalls, and false and/or misleading statements about the relationship between federal government (IRCC) policy and enrollments at KPU.

No mandate for balanced or surplus budgets

Fact: There is no current government mandate for balanced or surplus budgets, and numbers of public post-secondary institutions are in fact running deficit budgets.

No necessity to lay off faculty on the basis of the 2025/26 budget

Fact: The net faculty salary reduction target was fully met by the pre-layoff accepted retirement incentives plus reductions in non-regular faculty.  No layoffs of regular faculty were necessary to meet the target.

Excessive Reduction of Faculty

Facts: The increases of faculty FTE owing to the international student “boom” began in 2016.

The total reduction in faculty FTE will drop faculty FTE levels back to approximately 2010 / 2011 faculty FTE. This is through all of the reductions including retirement incentives, reductions in NR work, retirements / severance acceptances during the layoff process, and the layoffs themselves.

This is clearly excessive.

Insufficient Reductions in Administration

Facts: Administrative growth during the same period, 2016 to present, is far higher than faculty growth but reductions in administration are not in line with this rate of growth. Increase to student FTE since 2016 is about 21.5%. Increase to faculty FTE is about 11.8%. In contrast, administrative FTE increased during this same period by about 78%.

The ratio of admin to students and admin to faculty have declined significantly during this period, from 86.7 students per admin in 2016 to 59.1 as of 2024 (last year for which we have complete figures), and from 4.79 faculty per admin to 3.0 faculty per admin in 2024. Admin / faculty ratio after layoffs will be significantly less than 3 faculty FTE per admin FTE.

We understand that the upcoming proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal, 2026/27, includes a reduction in administration but given the massive increase in administration during the period since 2016 and the massive reduction in faculty in the current fiscal, it is insufficient and disproportionate.

Incentive? During one of the Step 3 grievance meetings, the Employer confirmed that administrators’ salary is determined in part by number of direct reports, and that once an administrator has achieved a certain salary level, their salary is “red circled” or in other words it is not re-evaluated based on having less workload.

Break Even Points are Far Lower than Claimed

Facts: The full cost of faculty salary is not borne by the institution. The government pays directly for at least about 60% of faculty salary as of the 2022-2025 Collective Agreement. Tuition revenue does not have to cover the full cost of faculty salary and benefits.

However, despite this fact of direct government funding without regard to tuition fees, the Employer calculated faculty salary reductions on the basis of zero gov funding for faculty salary.

Note: For the upcoming 2026/2027 proposed budget, we see it includes the grant unreduced. This is mighty curious given that the grant is predicated in great part on the full funding of salaries, and faculty salary is the major salary line item.

Full Classes Not Necessary to Generate Excess Revenue at the Individual Level

Facts: At top of scale, the true break even on gross faculty salary and benefits for each section, based solely on current tuition fees and on the full funding since 1995,  and not on any other revenue sources, is approximately:

• 22 domestic student enrollments per section (which yields excess revenue) with no international enrollments, or
• 5 international student enrollments (which yields excess revenue), and
• Proportional admixtures of domestic / international enrollments.

These break-evens are calculated at top of scale, using a 125% of salary basis to estimate benefits costs. We must recall that many faculty are not at top of scale.

Full Classes Not Necessary to Generate Excess Revenue at the Institutional Level:

Facts: During all of the years in which total student/faculty FTE was between 17 and 19 student FTE to faculty FTE, the institution saw massive revenue surpluses year after year. One student FTE is ~6 sections; one faculty FTE is ~8 sections. Recall in addition that many faculty are not teaching classes of registered students. This clearly indicates full classes are not necessary to “break even” on faculty salary and benefits on the broad scale..

Thus, by calculating layoffs on the basis of 100% of faculty salary and benefits, and projecting layoffs based on shortfalls of sections enrolled at maximum capacity, and proceeding on these incorrect bases to cancelling sections and laying off faculty, the Employer has not only incorrectly issued layoff notices, but has also reduced institutional revenue solely as a result of cancelling the sections and laying off faculty.

Cutting Sections Early Results in Enrollment Declines

Facts: The Employer cut sections during the first two weeks of classes in Fall. The claim was that cutting sections would not reduce total registrations. This claim in not supported by historic or current data.  

Current: In comparison to the Fall 2024 semester, the number of fulltime students has decreased as a proportion of all students, and students overall are enrolling in fewer sections. If student enrollments were not affected by reductions in section availability, then we would expect to see the numbers of sections per student remaining the same on average. They have not.

Historic: Total numbers of registrations as well as fill rates both steady increase during the first six weeks of registration and continue to increase into the first week or so of classes. Thus, early cancellations in and of themselves have contributed to reduced enrollments.

No Fiscal Shortfalls

Facts: A confirmed $10M surplus in 2024/25 (when the layoffs were projected and planned for the current fiscal), and a projected surplus of between $5M to $10M for the current 2025/26 fiscal, according to the Chief Financial Officer who stated this publicly on a number of occasions, clearly indicates there is no fiscal crisis that requires such severe reductions in faculty.

The Employer was informed by successive CFOs that the over-reliance on international students to underwrite burgeoning University budgets was a significant risk, to no avail. During this period, four successive CFOs have exited the institution within a relatively short period of time, with not much in the way of explanation for their departures.

And faculty members are paying for this mismanagement and this failure to adequately assess and act appropriately upon the risks, with no apparent accountability or consequences for administrators.

And faculty members, whose labour earned the hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses that have accumulated, are not being provided with a just transition to a reduction of faculty in the institution.

Misleading Information Regarding the relationship between federal government (IRCC) policy and declining enrollments at KPU

Facts: The IRCC sets a cap for each institution, and although other institutions in or sector are meeting their cap limits, KPU is not. KPU high level admin recently have stated publicly that there has been “no marketing plan since 2018” and when asked if there was a plan in place now, have responded there is not, and have responded by pointing at a program for retention, not any plans or actions aimed at recruitment. The problem is not the IRCC, or at least certainly not all the IRCC.

Numbers of domestic students are decreasing and have been for years, in the region with the strongest growth in domestic post-sec aged students in the province. For comparison, from last Fall semester to this one, there has been a decline of 90 students for that semester. This is about a 1% decrease by headcount: 9378 for Fall 2024 vs 9288 for Fall 2025. (This is using the institution’s own enrollment tracker.)

The numbers of adults who do not have any post-sec are also very high in our region.  Yet KPU has axed or reduced programs that allow mature students to enter KPU, and has axed an extremely successful program that supported students who have multiple barriers to entry and success in post-sec.

Why is the Employer continuing to undertake this set of actions? What can they be hoping to gain from it?

One easily could speculate that it is in part the bolstering of their own salary calculations, as per above. But that would not explain the whole thing.

These administrators have long held and acted upon two desires:

• to increase faculty precarity and reduce numbers of regular faculty
• to take work outside of the bargaining unit to make it non-union work in CPS

Facts: Non-regular faculty work costs less in numerous ways than regular faculty work, and NR1 work costs only about 2/3 as much as regular faculty work. Non-regulars have no right to ongoing work, except through the regularization rights in the Agreement which the Employer is currently actively seeking to undermine, alongside undermining recall rights. NR1s have no access to benefits. All of this amounts to precarity of work that lends itself to all the ills that go along with that, including a much more controllable and much more disposable workforce.

CPS non-bargaining unit work likewise generally costs a lot less to deliver than bargaining unit work. People developing or delivering CPS non-bargaining unit courses have no rights to any of the benefits or provisions of the Collective Agreement. For example, members who develop and/or deliver non bargaining unit CPS courses:

• have no intellectual property rights to the courses or curricula they develop, and
• have no guarantees to ever deliver the courses they create or to continue to deliver the courses they create, and
• have no academic freedom rights
• have no rights to take the courses elsewhere to teach
• have no access to FTE accruals and thus no access to any of the rights around FTE including accrual of FTE to prevent layoff or to access salary increases.
• have no access to health benefits or pension contributions. 
   

All of this amounts to a clear advantage to the Employer from preferring and promoting non-bargaining unit work in CPS, both financially and, again, in having a more precarious, disposable and controllable workforce.  

Thus, laying off regular faculty members makes way for meeting these long held goals to increase faculty precarity inside the bargaining unit, and take faculty work outside the bargaining unit.

Conclusions:

This situation is unnecessary, and the actions of the Employer in laying off regular faculty have been a choice, and not a necessity.

I respectfully direct you to the longer “Final Thoughts” section in the original communication, below, for a more fulsome conclusion. I don’t see how it can be summarized effectively and still retain its meaning, but perhaps that’s just me. : )

I hope this summary is helpful, and as ever, I welcome your thoughts, questions, and input. I also hope to see as many of us as possible at the Townhall tomorrow afternoon.

In solidarity,

Diane.