After decades serving AASUA through political leadership and negotiating, Gordon Swaters, AASUA’s current President and Full Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, is retiring June 30.
Most recently, Swaters served as AASUA President and Negotiating Team member in 2024-25, and as AASUA Lead Negotiator in 2017-19 and 2019-22. Before AASUA transitioned to comprehensive collective bargaining, he served on AASUA’s Compensation Bargaining Team for each round of negotiations from 2001-2016.
His initial participation in AASUA can be traced back to 1998, roughly a decade after he began working at the university. At that time, Swaters stepped forward to voice his opposition to association leadership’s decision-making when it came to pursuing different salary increases for constituencies, as opposed to an Across-The-Board salary increases equal for all members.
“What was amazing was how welcoming the leadership was,” Swaters said. “They never got mad at me. They just said ‘Well, do you want to get involved?’ And I did.”
Since that time, Swaters said his participation in AASUA has allowed him to “grow much more as a person than I ever anticipated.”
“I was exposed to many different points of view, some of which I strongly disagreed with and some of which I embraced wholeheartedly, but all of which I wanted to protect,” Swaters said. “To me it was sacred that everybody in AASUA had the right to say what they wanted to, irrespective of whether the President agreed with them or not.”
Underscoring Swaters’ work has been the belief in the importance of academic freedom, and his high estimation of the University of Alberta as a core engine of the province’s prosperity.
“I truly believe that the U of A is special to Alberta,” Swaters said. “Central to that is having people who work here and are committed to that goal, and are amongst the very best in the world. It took a long, long time to build this university, and one can squander it if it’s not looked after.”
Introducing the Academic Childcare benefit
During his first term as AASUA President in 2004, Swaters worked as part of the bargaining team to introduce the Academic Childcare Benefit to the benefits plan, an achievement he says is his “proudest direct moment.”
“If AASUA members were reasonably assured that their children were in high quality, good daycare, those people would be able to contribute to the very best of their abilities,” Swaters said. “If you’re worried about where the care is for your kid, you can’t perform at your highest level.”
Not everyone was initially on board with the idea, so part of Swaters’ task was building consensus among academic staff, he said, some of whom remained attached to the status quo.
“People said, ‘If you want to have children, that’s your choice,’” Swaters said. “Someone on the Employer side said ‘I didn’t have a childcare benefit when I was a professor, why would you deserve to have one?’ and I said, ‘Well, times change.’”
Swaters worked to get the proposal to look into a childcare benefit approved by AASUA Council (at the time AASUA’s decision-making body) so a childcare benefit could become a main tenant of AASUA’s bargaining with the Employer. After navigating criticism and getting opposing groups on the same page, the childcare benefit was created.
“I helped what seemed to be at first, very divergent viewpoints find common ground,” he said. “Out of that apparent diversity, we crafted a unifying policy that everybody agreed with and that was supported by people, irrespective of whether their kids were already out of daycare or they themselves didn’t have a child.”
Making negotiations count
Through his involvement, Swaters also pushed AASUA to grow and try new approaches in negotiating for salary increases.
Assuming the principal role of “numbers person,” Swaters encouraged AASUA to formulate its Across-The-Board salary demands in the context of what it would take for average faculty salary at the UofA to be in the top 25th percentile of average faculty salaries among (what is now known as) the U15.
Prior to Swaters’ intervention, AASUA’s monetary ask had been based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Over the period of 2001-08, Swaters’ approach succeeded in buoying UofA faculty salaries to the Top 3 of the U15 for the period 2010-16.
“University Administration kept saying we’re a top Canadian university,” Swaters said. “I said ‘well, we should be paid commensurately.’”
Swaters’ stewardship of AASUA Members’ health and dental benefits plan also spans decades. In 2004-05, Swaters joined the Compensation Bargaining Team that created the Academic Benefits Management Committee (ABMC) and negotiated funding for the benefits plan on a per-capita basis.
The committee’s creation introduced the ongoing model where AASUA and the Employer jointly manage the benefits plan. Since 2014, Swaters has served as ABMC Co-Chair.
“There was a time our benefit plan was simply managed by the Employer,” Swaters said. “We kept hearing this refrain that benefit cost increases were too high. What I was part of was making the case that AASUA should have a hand in analyzing the situation.
“When we got a seat at the table, we discovered that the cost increases were not nearly so high as the Employer suggested.”
During the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, Swaters also participated in negotiating a number of Letters of Understanding (LOUs) to protect academic staff from potential negative impacts. Thinking back on that time, Swaters noted it marked a turning point for how AASUA conducts meetings, though no one knew it at the time.
“We had to figure out how to do union leadership business in those new circumstances,” Swaters said. “At the same time, academic staff in the classroom had to figure out how to teach their courses online — they had to turn on a dime. It was an enormous challenge.”
Swaters said one of the unexpected lessons that came out of the pandemic was that Zoom meetings made union events more accessible to a wider set of members.
“The turnouts were several times higher,” Swaters said. “Now we still have in-person events, but we’ve kept the virtual meetings to ensure more members can attend.”
AASUA’s first-ever strike vote
During bargaining in 2024-25, Swaters’ analysis of the Employer’s complex benefit funding model ensured AASUA members were well apprised of the stakes of bargaining. AASUA proposed to extend the current benefits plan to members working substantial part-time hours. Contrastingly, the Employer’s insufficient benefit funding proposal would have led to benefit cuts for those already on the plan.
Swaters’ galvanization of the membership around the looming threat to existing benefits led AASUA to call its first-ever strike vote supervised by the Alberta Labour Relations Board.
The looming vote forced the Employer to return to the table with a deal that preserved members’ existing health and dental benefits plan for the life of the now-ratified 2024-28 Collective Agreement.
“Members highly value the plan,” Swaters said. “The Employer understood that fact in the last round when it made a dramatic concession to substantially increase the funding of the plan.”
The past decade of bargaining has presented several challenges for AASUA: the Association was deemed a trade union for the purposes of collective bargaining for academic staff designated under Alberta’s Labour Relations Code (LRC), meaning AASUA had to quickly pivot from the familiar bargaining process of binding arbitration to the mandatory dispute resolution process in the LRC (i.e. Strike / Lockout).
Further, since 2017, the Government of Alberta has also introduced restrictive mandates that greatly constrain what public sector workers can achieve at the bargaining table. The U of A was also subjected to austerity with over $222 million in cuts to its provincial operating grant.
Through it all, Swaters has worked to steward AASUA’s negotiations and ensure AASUA members are equipped to navigate these new challenges.
“Over the course of my career, no doubt bargaining has become more adversarial,” Swaters said. “There used to be a shared consensus between the Association and University Administration before AASUA acquired the right to strike. Now the Employer simply says no to our proposals.
“We want to remain a top-four university, and to achieve that goal, we now have to have a heightened awareness of what it means to stand in solidarity as union members.”
Throughout his presidency, Swaters said he has made it a priority to advocate for AASUA’s diverse membership of academic faculty, teaching staff, librarians, administrative professionals, and researchers.
“Organizing such a heterogenous group presents both challenges and opportunities,” Swaters said. “What I certainly worked to encourage was helping the members rally around common focal points.”
In this new landscape, Swaters said the way forward is clear: organizing.
“Organizing has to be central to our objective,” Swaters said. “It’s a gradual process, and we took several steps in the last round. I know AASUA will continue to organize moving forward.
When asked about his plans in retirement, Swaters says he looks forward to turning his attention to his long-neglected ‘To Be Read’ list.
Books in the pile reflect Swaters endless curiosity: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, J. Michael Cole’s The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War, and Nouriel Robini’s MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends that Imperil our Future, and How to Survive Them.
“I always have a small stack of six or seven books that I’m trying to read,” Swaters said. “Now, I’m actually going to have some time to read them.”