Bargaining Update: Administration’s proposed salary increases don’t meet faculty needs

Published by Megan on

Executive Summary:

After 7 weeks to prepare a counter-proposal, the administration submitted a salary increase plan that ignores our members’ salary priorities, and fails to keep up with inflation. If we were to accept this proposal, most OSU faculty members would lose money each year due to inflation. Register to attend our next session at uaosu.org/july15.

Full Update:

The UAOSU bargaining team and the administration team met 11:30–1 on Thursday, July 1 on Zoom. Thank you to the faculty members who observed the session. Our membership empowers us to negotiate the salary increases you and your colleagues deserve, so if you haven’t joined UAOSU yet, you can do so at uaosu.org/join.

As you may recall, we agreed to postpone bargaining for several weeks in order for the administration team to put together their first counter to our proposal from May 12th.

At this session, they presented this counterproposal. It is essential to note where it differs from our initial proposal:

  1. Their proposal offers only merit increases, whereas we identified additional pools for across-the-board raises and equity adjustments, as well as adjustments to salary minima. While the administration continues to reject the concept of across-the-board raises for OSU faculty, their proposal continues the confusing practice of calling “merit” a raise that is distributed to nearly everyone — with only a small fraction set aside to truly reward merit. In essence, they have ensured that neither appropriate merit raises nor sufficient across-the-board raises are possible. The Administration’s position on equity in particular is unacceptable and noncommittal. Equitable pay must be prioritized in order to recognize merit that has been ignored via implicit bias, and their proposal fails to address this extremely important issue.
  2. Their proposed numbers are lower than what faculty deserve, offering a total 2.5% in each of fiscal years 2022, 2023, and 2024. Inflation has been 4.6% over the last 18 months since we last received raises (and 4.2% over the last 12 months): this raise proposal amounts to faculty being paid less and less going forward, after accounting for inflation.

Their proposal is contingent on our union dropping a grievance related to the salary reduction program from this past year, directed by the agreement we reached in May 2020. Based on the administration’s reports of strong revenue for the year, we believe that the agreement would require that money be returned. The grievance is one way to try to push the administration to make this right.

We were happy to see that they accepted our proposed change to move raise dates up to July 1 for 12-month appointments and September 16 for 9-month appointments. This will get money into the hands of faculty sooner.

While this isn’t the proposal we had hoped to see, it is a step forward and we look forward to working from it to secure fair compensation.

The next salary bargaining session is Thursday, July 15, 10:30-noon, and you can register here. We plan to bring a counterproposal. You can also register for our campus reopening bargaining session from 12–1 on Tuesday, July 20 on Zoom here. We plan to bring several additional proposals, and continue to ask questions about the administration’s shifting and contradictory plans for fall. 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,

Your bargaining team

Categories: Salaries