06/10/2026
Gordon Swaters gave his final President's Report to AASUA Council May 28, and opened the Council year-end dinner by sharing some remarks about his time at AASUA.
Swaters is retiring from his union and academic work after a long history of serving AASUA.
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.”
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."
