UST faculty union files notice of strike
Following a deadlock after a year of negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the University of Santo Tomas Faculty Union (Ustfu) on Tuesday filed a notice of strike at the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) in Manila.
Ustfu president Emerito Gonzales led union officers in filing the notice at the agency’s National Conciliation and Mediation Board (NCMB), which will conduct meetings between them and UST management to resolve the deadlock.
Gonzales, an associate professor of philosophy, was accompanied by union leaders and negotiating panel members, namely professor Crisencio Paner; Dr. Edilberto Gonzaga; Adrian Romero, president of the UST-National Service Training Program Club; and professor Rene Tadle, UST Arts and Letters faculty union president.
Under the Labor Code, a strike caused by a CBA deadlock may be held 30 days after the notice is filed and after a strike vote supported by an absolute majority of union members. The actual strike may be held only seven days after the NCMB is notified of the strike vote results.
Ustfu represents more than 1,400 out of about 1,900 teaching staff at UST, Asia’s oldest chartered university. Due to the pandemic pause, negotiations on a new CBA covering 2021 to 2026 started only in March 2024.
Coercion
At the core of the impasse is management’s refusal to release the faculty’s share from the tuition increases (TFIs), which amounted to more than P220 million collected from 2020 to 2023, until after the CBA is concluded.
Gonzales said the “unjustifiable delay” violates Republic Act No. 6728, or the 1989 Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Act, and Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) Memorandum Order No. 8, series of 2012, which requires that 70 percent of TFIs be immediately allocated to the salaries and benefits of teaching and nonteaching personnel.
“Ustfu asserts that this amounts to economic coercion, pressuring faculty to accept inadequate (CBA) terms in exchange for what is already legally due,” the union said in a statement.
As to the salary, the union said UST had publicly claimed to offer an 8.489-percent increase, but the figure is allegedly inflated by aggregating three years’ worth of increases and fails to match the 23.9-percent cumulative inflation from 2021 to 2024.
Ustfu also described UST’s health-care proposal as “piecemeal and outdated” and demanded a comprehensive HMO plan or full hospitalization coverage at UST Hospital.
The union said the hospitalization benefit was last adjusted in 1998 and its real value has been eroded by inflation. The P100,000 cap in 1998 is now equivalent to P292,487, it added.
The union is also opposed to UST’s insistence on funding faculty promotions using the mandated TFI share of the faculty members.
The union said its request for a separate P26-million promotion fund was modest and well within the university’s capacity.
“Charging promotions to TFI forces faculty to pay for their colleagues’ rank upgrades, undermining equity,” it said.
The union said that as of July 31, 2023, UST holds P14.9 billion in net assets, P11.6 billion of which is unrestricted and available for discretionary use.
‘Just, sustainable CBA’
In a statement posted on its website, UST said that despite the deadlock, “the university remains steadfast in its commitment to fairness, transparency, and full compliance with the law [and] will continue to engage in good-faith discussions with Ustfu to finalize a just and sustainable CBA.”
UST said both sides will work “to align solutions with institutional goals and academic staff’s personal aspirations,” but noted that while immediate needs are addressed within the current CBA cycle, others may be deferred for future cycles or reevaluated based on their urgency and alignment with shared goals.
On the TFIs issue, the university said that with stakeholder concurrence and in compliance with government regulations, the fund serves “as a sustainable funding source to enhance staff salaries and benefits, improve operations, and upgrade facilities.”
In response to Ustfu’s health-care proposal, “the management panel proposed a balanced approach, considering contextual differences and available resources,” the university said.
