PHOTO COURTESY OF CAUT/ACPPU
Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association is proud to announce that Doug and Joyce Lorimer were each awarded the Donald C. Savage Award by Dr. Don Savage on Friday, November 27 at the Fall Council Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
The Award, which was established in 1997 in honour of Donald C. Savage, Executive Director of CAUT 1972-1997, was instituted to honour and to recognize outstanding achievements in the promotion of collective bargaining in Canadian universities and colleges.
Doug and Joyce Lorimer have committed themselves to promoting collective bargaining at the local, provincial and national levels since the late 1980s. Doug Lorimer was involved in the certification of the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association in 1988 and has been its chief negotiator in every round of negotiations since then. He has been the chief negotiator in the three collective agreements for the Part-time Faculty and Librarians at Wilfrid Laurier and has represented WLUFA at the provincial level on the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association’s (OCUFA) Collective Bargaining Committee since 1988, including as chair from 2002 to 2005. At the national level, Doug has been a member of CAUT’s Collective Bargaining and Economic Benefits Committee and is currently its Chair.
Doug’s advice to faculty associations on negotiating, and when seeking to certify their association, has been sought out across Canada. His experience in the organizing of, and bargaining for, sessional faculty is valued by associations from coast to coast. When Doug speaks, others listen. His commitment to improving the working conditions of faculty and academic librarians is exemplary.
Joyce Lorimer has been engaged in virtually every important activity associated with WLUFA, OCUFA and CAUT. She has served WLUFA almost continually since 1987 on the Executive Committee, including multiple terms as President and Vice-President. She worked tirelessly in the original organization and certification of WLUFA and later played a crucial role in organizing and certifying the CAS bargaining unit. She has been a Grievance Officer since 1993 and became WLUFA’s Grievance Co-ordinator in 2005.
At the provincial level, she served as WLUFA’s representative on the OCUFA Board from 1997 to 2000, later becoming its Treasurer for three years. Her considerable leadership skills, sensitivity to the needs of others, as well as her well-developed sense of humor were essential attributes in her work at the national level with CAUT. Joyce was elected CAUT President for two terms (1994-1996) and served two terms as Past-President (1996-1998), and as a trustee on the CAUT Defence Fund (2000-2002). Her intelligence, knowledge and diplomatic skills have encouraged others to seek her advice, both formally and informally as, for example, when she was a member of a three-person arbitration panel at Windsor University. In 1997, she and Harry Arthurs were appointed by the Board of Governors at Trent University to assist the University in coming to terms with the causes and consequences of the resignation of its President, Vice President: Academic, and Acting Deans of Arts and Sciences.From their early days at Wilfrid Laurier, Doug and Joyce Lorimer have been among the most important figures in faculty association bargaining in Canada. Their contributions to collective bargaining in Ontario was recently recognized by OCUFA with the establishment of the Lorimer Award in 2009.