Teaching and research assistants at Concordia University have secured a 20 per cent pay increase following a week-long strike, a move aimed at protecting wages from inflation and improving working conditions for 2,000 unionized student employees.
The agreement, reached after a year of negotiations, will see the full wage increase phased in by the summer of 2026, the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) said Friday.
“This will change our lives,” said Ria Mayer, a member of the bargaining committee and a graduate student in philosophy. “We intend to build on our momentum and win even more in the coming years.”
Among the other gains in the new agreement is the implementation of a student-to-teaching assistant indexation system. The union said it is the first of its kind in Canada and guarantees a minimum number of teaching assistant hours per undergraduate student enrolled across the university.
Union representatives said the measure is intended to stabilize workloads and maintain the quality of education for students, which had been under pressure as workloads increased.
“For some time now, teaching assistants’ workloads have been steadily increasing, reducing the amount of time we can spend helping each student meet their needs,” said Mayer.
The union, CREW (Concordia Research and Education Workers), affiliated with the CSN last year and has focused on increasing bargaining power since then.
“The struggle is paying off,” said Dominique Daigneault, president of the Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain–CSN. “They invested all their energies into creating the balance of power needed to achieve these gains.”
Seleha Hedaraly, vice-president of the Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec–CSN, said the agreement reflects the importance of the assistants’ work. “It was high time that Concordia’s teaching and research assistants obtained an agreement commensurate with the essential contribution they make,” she said.
CSN president Caroline Senneville said the deal addresses the financial strain many teaching assistants face. “The rising cost of living is having a major impact on teaching assistants, who are often in a very precarious financial situation,” she said.
