Terezia Zorić for UTFA President

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External Link: 
Terezia Zorić's website
Original candidate statement: 
PDF icon re-elect_tz_2024_500_words_final.pdf
Platform statement: 
PDF icon zoric_platform_2024.pdf

 

Re-Elect Terezia Zorić for UTFA President

Skilled, experienced, and determined.

A collaborative leader who works with faculty and librarians to achieve economic gains, defend our individual and collective rights, and improve working and learning conditions at our University.

I am honoured to serve as your President and proud of the successes that we have achieved together over four challenging years.

My team is seeking your support for my re-election, based on my: ·

  • Expertise, values, and proven leadership
  • Substantial accomplishments during four years as President & four years as a VP
  • Vision for a more dynamic, inclusive, democratic, and capable UTFA
  • Clear and ambitious goals and priorities

In leading UTFA, a multilayered and complex Association with a broad mandate, there is no substitute for direct experience. Serving the membership, leading UTFA teams, building positive relationships with UTFA’s diverse constituencies, and working constructively with other University leaders cannot be an entry-level job.

My re-election is widely endorsed by those in UTFA’s governing bodies: the Executive, Council, and membership; colleagues both active and retired; full-time and part-time; Tenure Stream, Teaching Stream, and Librarians; from all three campuses; and across a large range of disciplines and professions.

Major Economic Wins for Members: Five Recent Highlights

  1. Won a 10% across-the-board salary increase for 2020-2023 and secured the increase for 475 recent hires.
  2. Negotiated major improvements in health benefits for all members.
  3. Protected equal health benefits for retirees against Administration efforts to reduce them.
  4. Mobilized members to pressure the Administration to restore our PTR payments in 2021 and prevented any repeat of withheld PTR.
  5. Eliminated UTFA’s structural deficit and established accountability mechanisms for work done at UTFA, while significantly increasing levels of service offered to UTFA members.

See here for more accomplishments.

Goals and Priorities

  • Bargaining forcefully for across-the-board salary increases that keep pace with inflation
  • Extending recent gains in mental health and other health benefits
  • Vigorously defending equal health benefits for retirees
  • Protecting full-time and Tenure-Stream faculty positions as the norm
  • Creating a path to permanency for part-time members
  • Defending our core values of academic freedom, collegial governance, and non-discrimination · Hearing our members’ expert advice on health & safety, pensions, housing, and more
  • Gaining modern negotiating tools and expanding the scope of negotiations to tackle key issues such as: growing precarity, affordable housing, cost of living, and ever-expanding teaching and service workloads
  • Working with the membership, chief negotiators from other Associations, and scholars to explore solutions or alternatives to our dysfunctional Memorandum of Agreement, including certification
  • Expanding membership engagement and participation
  • Ensuring that our pension plan invests ethically and responsibly
  • Advocating for safe and healthy workplaces
  • Continuing to lead UTFA’s ongoing, complex, Association grievances on pay equity, salary discrimination, and student evaluations (SETs)

*Not rank ordered.


Who am I?

In addition to serving as your President, I’m an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at OISE, where I’ve been a faculty member since 2004. Please see my website.