By now, you should have received notice of your merit raise for the upcoming academic year. We are hearing from across the country that non-unionized academic faculty are receiving no or very minimal raises, so we’re proud to have fought for and won guaranteed raises of at least 2% for all OSU academic faculty! We’re also happy to see that the raises we bargained for are being applied to unrepresented faculty as well as unionized faculty (professional faculty and academic faculty with supervisory roles are receiving raises using the same scale established in our contract). The administration has a history of denying raises to faculty for years after the 2008 financial crisis, so we’re glad that our contract is guaranteeing annual raises for faculty, especially in these uncertain economic times. These raises recognize the hard work that our members have put into the university this past year.
Earlier this year, you may have seen guidance to supervisors from HR stating that raises above the 2% minimum need to be the result of “transformative” work by faculty. When the administration insisted on merit raises without a dedicated pool, rather than cost of living adjustments, we made it clear that such raises would not be used as a justification for the bare minimum raises. The administration agreed to this. We immediately raised our objections to the use of “transformative”, as any additional criteria designed to limit the distribution of merit runs afoul of this shared agreement. We are currently working with OSU administration to ensure that our CBA is being implemented properly, as well as making sure that this type of confusion does not happen in the future. We are also working with Employee-Labor Relations to create a process for streamlining review of problematic merit decisions. If you have any questions or concerns about your raises (e.g., the amount, the process used to determine it, if it doesn’t match your performance review, etc.), please reach out to us at info@uaosu.org.
Finally, we wanted to let you know about a few upcoming events our union is hosting.
- On Wednesday July 29th the UAOSU Queer Caucus is hosting a Queer Faculty Ice Cream Social at 3pm at the Beaver Classic Creamery in Withycomb Hall. For more information please reach out to uaosu.queer@gmail.com.
- Please save the date for our annual Fall Picnic on Saturday, October 3 at Avery Park from 3pm – 6pm. More details to come.
We hope you can join us for either or both of these upcoming events!
In solidarity,
Diana Castillo and your UAOSU Communication Committee