Upcoming negotiations around OSU reopening plan and faculty salaries

In light of the administration’s announced plans for campus reopening in fall 2021, we will be opening bargaining to clarify the details to ensure the reopening is safe for OSU’s students, staff, and faculty. This is one of our legal rights as a union: to come to the table to address changes to our working conditions. We are hosting a listening session about your campus reopening priorities tomorrow, May 6th at 12 pm. You can register for this session here.

Our bargaining team has also recently returned to negotiations specifically to reopen our compensation article to negotiate salary for the next three fiscal years. Thank you for your feedback on salary priorities, given through our salary survey, our lunchtime discussion session, and the discussion in our General Membership Meeting. The results are clear. Our members recognize that a variety of factors can disproportionately depress the wages of our colleagues, and we want to address this inequity in our next round of salary negotiations. An equity adjustment would help us address inequity by social identities like race or gender, inequity between tenure-track and fixed-term faculty within a unit or college, and by other factors.

In addition, faculty have clearly called for across-the-board increases. The cost of living is leaping up — in Corvallis, in Bend, and all across the state — and faculty salaries have not met the need. The graph below shows that while OSU revenue (and Corvallis housing prices) have grown steadily, faculty salaries have languished.

From the survey, it is clear that faculty are also critical of the financial priorities of the administration. We have pitched in, often taking on unexpected responsibilities during the course of the pandemic, and sacrificed for the good of the institution through our participation in the salary reduction program. The fiscal picture is looking up, and projected enrollment is high for fall; and it is time for administration to do the right thing for faculty compensation.

Our next bargaining session is 9:30–11 on Wednesday, May 12 on Zoom, registration at uaosu.org/may12. We plan to bring our first written proposal. Even if you can only drop by for half an hour, your attendance matters: show the administration that faculty are watching this process.

We appreciate your support.

In solidarity,

Kelly McElroy

UAOSU bargaining team lead negotiator