Along with the majority of TTs– I am very happy we will now have a Union. Thank you to all who have worked to make this happen.
I want the Union to bargain for more TTs and smaller classes. I am teaching more than 35% more students than I was 10 years ago. I feel like I have to tell students to go away all of the time–that I want them to vanish–and this is wrong.
I want time for research and teaching. I know it is possible–we used to do much better.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Dog agrees with this sentiment
But there is a large mathematical/infrastructure issue that prevents this.
1) Compared to 10 years ago we have 5000-6000 more undergads.
2) We have not added scaled classroom capacity
3) We still teach the majority of our classes between 10 and 4
—> so the math means that the number of students per class has to increase significantly
4). We have increased the TT faculty by maybe 50 (10%) over the last 10 years and thus have hired a lot more NTTF to cover the increased student load. Now we have a union as a result of that. Easily predictable.
So I don’t see how its physically possible to achieve smaller classes sizes and more time for research. If the Union can pull of this miracle, then it is a good thing.
Not that dogs have any quality of life, but my quality of life as a “UO professor” (again due to clerical error), dramatically sucks more now than it did 10 years ago.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Work for shared governance, remind JH they work for us, and not the other way around. Get back some of the senate powers Bob Berdahl has given to Randy Geller.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Old Man speaks: The Senate need not adopt any policy edited or written by Geller until it is fully acceptable. It is not Randy’s job to make policy. He seems to think it is, but he’ll get over it, one way or the other, if the Senate hangs tough.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
I don’t want them: taking my money or speaking on my behalf.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
I want the Union to adopt the name “Frohnmayer Memorial Union”
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Or how about “Pernsteiner’s Folly”?
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Shared governance, ha ha. We’ve now signaled that we are a proletariat (albeit a phony one), and as such we are engaged in a struggle with university governance. Now all we’ll share is the table over which we confront “management.” Oops!
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Not sure what 11:56 is getting at. Our prole status will surely help us extract more money from private donors. The students will recognize the need for higher tuition. I’m sure the legislature will recognize how they’ve oppressed us over the years. What’s not to like?
Anonymous
03/14/2012
ditto to last several anon. The only thing worse on campus than recent management failure is the NTTF-establed junta without even a named leader. If certified,I will not join. and I will resist the union’s intrusion on shared governance at every opportunity. You do not represent or speak for me. If you want any kind of legitimacy, you should have asked the UO senate to run secret ballot elections among the separate categories of employees before manipulating a takeover of the TTF by the NTTF and OR. NTTF and OR were welcome to have their own union, but they chose otherwise, now we will all live with the consequences, whether we asked for them or not. As for me, I will oppose hiring any nonfull-time ‘career’ NTTF in the future. we should have insisted on TTF or fulltime TTF hires long ago, along with the necessary changes in instructional modes to make that financially viable. after a few years, as faculty composition changes and the union disaster unfolds, a move for decertification will take hold. i do like the name Frohnmayer memorial union.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Why do you think of the claim/fact that a majority of TTF signed? I doubt that this claim is not factual.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
It’s a done deal. Like it or not we’ve got to make it work now. TTF have to get involved in the union or all the bad predictions about what it will do to UO’s research quality will CERTAINLY come true.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
But can all research-minded TTF get involved? It sounds like the TTF with supervisory roles for post-docs cannot join the union (do they pay dues/fair share even if they are not allowed to join?). So some of the TTF with the largest research focus will not be allowed to help shape the priorities?
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Dog says
yes I am in this category and remain puzzled if that category has any voice in this process or whether it would have meant anything to sign the card, since, apparently, I am not eligible to be in the union.
Daniel Pope
03/14/2012
I’d suggest Anonymous 1:21 should calm down,notice that a majority of TTF also signed cards, and stop tossing around terms like “junta” and “disaster.” If you think unionization is going to do things you’ll dislike, why not participate in it and try to steer it in what you consider to be desirable directions. We intend to operate democratically and to respond to faculty desires and concerns in collective bargaining proposals.
You might also consider learning something about state employee labor law before making silly proposals that the UO Senate somehow manage elections. I wish the Senate well and want the union to cooperate with it, but what makes you think it’s the sole fount of legitimacy on campus?
UO Matters
03/14/2012
I agree with Pope. It’s a done deal. Like it or not, like the certification process or not, the rational thing to do at this point is try and make the union work for UO. That will be hard enough. I’m no economist, but I try to be rational anyway.
Daniel Pope
03/14/2012
And I agree with UO Matters. We must each be scratching our heads in wonder at having reached this convergence. And I agree that the union’s road ahead isn’t clear and straight and that it will require broad participation to be successful.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
It is a done deal. UO is finished. There is no point working for the institutional good any longer. Good luck with the administration, the legislature, the donors. I will tend to my own business. It is sad to see a place which has had so much potential destroying itself in this way.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
I’m so excited for them to take my money, restrict my salary, force me to take furlough days, line the pockets of their administrators, engage in corrupt practices, and fund political campaigns that I disagree with. Thanks everyone! I’m sure I won’t be punished for not signing a card, right?
Anonymous
03/14/2012
What I want: The rate of increase in salaries to be greater than that of our comparators by at least 1 percentage point (or whatever our dues end up being), sustained beyond just a one-time burst at the first contract negotiation.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
I need a t-shirt that says “I didn’t vote for the union and all I got was my pay garnished.”
Anonymous
03/14/2012
To continue, my salary started around $40k. I got into the $70k range through negotiation and hard work. When has anyone ever heard of a union doing that for them?
My wife quite because the union wouldn’t let her be promoted into the job her employer needed her to do and that she was qualified to do, because of a crazy “step” system that took no account of need or merit.
This is a very dark day for us.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
1. Transparency
That’s the key problem with the admin right now.
As of right now, I haven’t seen much from the union (what were the precise number of NTTF’s, OR’s, and TTF) in support.
Why does the law school get to opt out (and why are they ok with that)?
What is the goal of the union (we’ll sort it out once we unionize).
Anonymous
03/15/2012
The law school opted out because almost all the TTFs on the faculty did not want to join. The union was very accommodating presumably because, given the lack of support at the law school, leaving them out made it easier to get majority support among TTFs. One wonders whether the majority the union says it has among TTFs would have been a minority if the law school faculty had stayed in. I guess we’ll never know.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
I suppose it is alot easier to get a majority if you leave out people who would vote no.
How is that ok….they are an on a different calendar?! Every law school professor should be included as a no vote for the ERB.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
My department has also almost all of the TTFs against the union: how can we opt out? Is there a procedure we can follow? What is the percentage of TTFs against the UNION that you need to have to be able to opt out? How was that decided for the law school? Some transparency from the UNION on this issue would be very welcome.
Anonymous
03/14/2012
A union rep came to the offices last week. When someone said they weren’t going to sign the card he replied “we’re going to win this, and you’ll want to be on the right side when we do.” Yay! Mafia-like intimidation! This isn’t going to end badly for us.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
The Union organizers had no power to intimidate people into signing cards. In fact–Dept. heads in favor (which there were plenty) did NOT use their power to coerce yes votes. The Mafia-style intimidation was done by the NO votes who OPENLY coerced their junior colleagues to go against. Many of their junior colleagues quietly asked to sign cards at their homes! Hence we have this clear majority vote by the intimidated majority–and VERY LOUD angry bosses who can’t believe so many people voted against their openly intimidating leadership.
It is a very HAPPY day for the majority of TTs who have voted for a stronger voice. Yes, you can choose to believe that the majority of TTs around here are lazy, or under-performing, or whatever you want to believe. The reality is this place has clearly not been keeping the majority of TTs happy–or they would not have voted for this.
All YES votes were people willing to SIGN a card for a Union. NO votes included all who weren’t sure (abstaining), all who were not available (a significant number were unavailable/away), or all who were strong NOs. Hence, the No votes had the advantage of including all abstentions–and STILL the YES votes were loud and clear.
The faculty at the UO wants a UNION. The majority has voted. YES to Union!
Anonymous
03/15/2012
indeed!
Anonymous
03/14/2012
Sorry you forced this on your collleagues and you are going to have to deal with opposition and a considerable group of TTF who is not going to submit quietly
Anonymous
03/14/2012
The number of weird fantasies people have about union fiat and dictatorial power in this thread–based almost entirely on anecdotes–is amazing. People would rather see their pay unilaterally cut off and their health benefits slashed little by little, in the hopes that maybe if they’re really good and play ball, they’ll get some of that sweet trickle down for all their hard work. The only time negotiation works in my category is if you have an offer in hand somewhere else and you’re willing to leave if they say “no” here.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
to anon327 and 336, my sentiments exactly,so sad.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
toDan, we elected a senate with anonymous ballots, and nothing in oregon public labor relations law prevented our senate from holding secret ballot advisory elections to guide the composition of the bargaining unit and have us all vote on a bargaining unit in which each segment had a majority vote in secret balloting. the actual certification election of course would have been supervised by te ERB.It doesn’t take my graduate degree in labor relations to understand why United academics didn’t want elections.I know that you know that I know that you know, too! The senate isn’t the sole font of legitimacy, but we did elect it in formal elections. who elected united academics in a formal election? nuff said.
Daniel Pope
03/15/2012
I don’t know (perhaps you do) what the turnout has been in Senate elections, but I bet it’s a lot lower than the proportion of faculty who made conscious, uncoerced decisions about signing a card. Why has United Academics used the card check procedure? Because it’s a legal process for public employees in the state of Oregon. Because it is meant to confer _greater_ legitimacy than an ERB election when fewer than half sign cards and only a fraction participate in the election. We chose a stringent test of support and met it. Because the “secret ballot” procedure is subject to all sorts of abuses of the sort that have crippled the NLRB over the last 30 or so years.
UO Matters
03/15/2012
I agree with Pope again. A secret ballot election would likely have been decided with turnout around 50%. The union organizers would have made big efforts to turn out their vote, the opposition would have been unorganized. The union would have been certified with the expressed support of maybe 30% of the faculty, perhaps even less.
Additionally with an election it would have been impossible for the ERB to verify claims about support among the TTF’s, etc. I don’t know if they will now, but at least they can. The card check seems better. In any case, it’s done, lets move on.
UO Matters
03/15/2012
UO has plenty of money to increase faculty salaries. The last round cost $3.1 million. We’re currently spending $2 million on the jock box tutoring and we’ve increased UOPD spending by $1 million. Bad decisions by our administrators.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
as for the assertion that TTF ‘will have to do this or that’ The great thing about ultimatum games of ‘take it or leave it’is that ‘leave it’ is actually a choice once that’s the game. You chose the game. we get to choose, not you. many ttf on this blog offered to play a more cooperative game to lend greater legitimacy to the outcome, but prounion advocates chose the ultimatum game.
Michael Raymer
03/15/2012
I would like to see an elective bargaining agreement that does NOT call out salary minimums and other fiscal requirements, but instead focusses only on working conditions, including self governance, which some of the union proponents claimed were their main concern. I fear that this is really all about simply increasing everybody’s salary – a very short sighted approach.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Dog says
you can’t increase everbody’s salary – not enough funds for that – you can establish salary floors within the ranks and therefore redistribute salary dollars among the workers, thus promoting more equity within the ranks.
Peter Keyes
03/15/2012
Actually, there is enough money to provide raises for everybody, if this is the priority. Look back at the White Paper update, which showed how everything else at the university grew at twice the rate of faculty salaries. The Senate Budget Committee estimate was that it would take under $10m to get TT faculty member’s salary to the average of comparators. $10m out of an overall budget of $600m at that point, or out of $300m or so if you exclude auxiliaries.
This was also in the ballpark for the figures underlying the Lariviere administration’s salary equity plan. I think that plan was the only serious attempt anyone had made to deal with this issue in the past 20 years; the administration went out on a limb for the faculty, and that limb got chopped off. Perhaps the implementation of phases 2 and 3 of that plan would be a good starting point for contract negotiations?
Anonymous
03/15/2012
When morale is collapsing, when a decade plus effort of raising faculty salaries fails, when retention is left to triage and a few high paid chairs, then why does Raymer think raising faculty’s salaries is short sighted, especially as faculty teach more, conduct more service, have higher research productivity, their benefits are sliced, etc. Obviously pay issues are not a fix all, but the moral math is very simple (as is the actual financing): investing in faculty across the board will do more to boost excellence and morale than a few big raises here and there. Think as a community please, or at least like some one who cares about the human resources dimension of an institution like this rather than only your vision of the meritorious.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Exactly – think as a community and realize that the larger community (i.e. the public) isn’t going to be very sympathetic to your whining about salaries when everyone is being asked to do more for less. Furthermore, how exactly are salary floors going to promote excellence? They’re going to do just the opposite – taking money away from merit raises.
If the morale of UO professors is collapsing, then they need to get out of their offices and get a little perspective. This union is just going to make you look like a bunch of entitled babies. I can’t wait to read the Reg Guard/Oregonial articles and letters to the editor.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Dog to Peter Keyes
The senate white paper is about TTF faculty – all 650 of them. I agree there is enough money for that. But we are talking now about 1950 or so “union faculty” and I don’t see there to be “easily” enough money for that.
Here’s a quick round number calculation: 10% raise for 2000 “union faculty” at average salary plues OPE = 90,000 is 18 million increase in overall faculty salary baseline. So while that may be technically doable, I doubt its gonna happen. The OPE part of this is heinous. I wonder if the average reader of this forum understands just how high OPE is here? If I hire a postdoc at 35K I get to pay an extra 70% on that for OPE. Nice ….
Peter Keyes
03/16/2012
Dog –
You’re right that the White Paper was just about TTF – as I stated. And the Lariviere administration salary equity plan was also about TTF; categories for TTF are straightforward and comparable, whereas figuring out the comps for many NTTF is more complicated – the reporting categories are not standardized across institutions. No one that I know of has done the calculation on what that would cost, nor even determined what the targets would be. Do we want to equal the average of what our comparator schools pay NTTF? Maybe we want to pay them more, maybe the pay doesn’t matter quite as much as the ability to get benefits? I think the first thing to do is to figure out what is going on elsewhere, and to ask the NTTF what they think.
I think your estimate for average pay may be high, although I don’t have time to do even an estimate now. I believe that many of the NTTF are not full time, I know that many are under 0.49 FTE (so they won’t qualify for benefits, which brings their cost down even more) and some just teach a few courses a year, the going rate for which is supposedly around $3000 per.
As for where this money can come from, as I said, it is all about priorities. Police force? Tutoring? NCAA investigations? I know that we all believe that Athletics is in a different universe, that somehow making comparisons between this side of the river and that side is ludicrous, but the nice thing about money is that it is fungible, you can decide to put it where you want. I accept there are market forces that say we have to pay a football coach an huge amount of money because of the benefit he provides to the university, but what about market forces for all the other employees there? My wife likes to compare her salary to the assistant volleyball coach’s. Last time she checked, my wife’s was lower. Are there irresistible market forces which say we have to pay coaches in sports that lose money more than we pay faculty who generate the vast majority of the income for the institution? The new budget model provides a rational basis for beginning to compare the costs and benefits of units on campus. I suggest we extend this level of analysis beyond the academic units.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
dog says
if .49 FTEs are in the union then my average salary +OPE is definitely too high. Moreover, I think that Salary equity arguments for part time employees are highly problematical. I don’t know anything about athletics, they don’t let dogs participate.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
I resent having my pay forcibly garnished for something I don’t want and did not vote for. Taxation without representation. I resent this. How many times can I say it?
Anonymous
03/15/2012
You had a vote, you just lost.
So your feelings now are similar to how I felt when President Bush took us to War in Iraq. I voted against him, but had to simply endure his unwanted leadership.
SO, I continued to pay my taxes and kept on going. Democracy can stink when you lose the vote. Taxes can go to bombing innocent people.
The majority of TTS have VOTED for a UNION, so now we will have a Union. Hopefully it will do things you like anyhow. It will continue to be democratic, so you can continue to vote in how it works.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Amen.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
If you think our feelings are similar to what you felt when Bush started the Iraq war then have some freaking sympathy and stop beating your chest!
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Are you needing some acknowledgment that some TTF did not want this to happen, indeed see it as detrimental? And knowing that union supporters can at least acknowledge the frustration felt by some of our colleagues might help move forward? Sympathetically…
Daniel Pope
03/15/2012
Thank you to Michael Raymer for posting his name with his message. I disagree with it (and I can’t imagine a union or any other employee organization choosing not to attempt to increase salaries), but unlike some of the more hysterical anonymous entries he’s talking about issues.
UO Matters
03/15/2012
Yes, lots of venting on this thread, at some point people need to settle down and move forward on the issues.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
If we now need UO Matters to advise us all to settle down and move forward, I guess this really is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Michael Stern
03/15/2012
No it is not the Age of Aquarius, it’s an age of reaction and self-fulfilling prophesy where it is considered collegial to call a union confrontational and not have the decency to congratulate folks on a hard earned victory, or it is deemed a sign of integrity to question other people’s honesty and then post slanderous, unsubstantiated attacks anonymously,or perhaps when it is even considered rational to call a union undemocratic and then refuse to acknowledge that you are invited to shape it…no need to go on. I’m done with this–this is no longer a forum for me.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
I totally agree with you. :-)
Anonymous
03/15/2012
I am anonymous 10:34 and I want to clarify that I totally agree with the sentence that if now we have UO Matters advising us to calm down it is really quite funny. We bad people that are against the union.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
It seems extremely irregular that TTFs who supervise postdocs cannot be in the union while the entire law school gets to opt out — for no good reason at all. If we are going to have a union, it should at the very least cover all TTFs, no matter who else is included or excluded.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Huh? Can someone explain this to me? And also clarify if the Law School actually did get to opt out and how on earth that was possible?
Anonymous
03/15/2012
I am wondering if I will be in and out of the union representation as the number of postdocs in my group fluctuates from 0 to some number and viceversa.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
And if I will pay “fair share” dues even if I am not allowed to join a union because I supervise a post-doc.
Anonymous
03/15/2012
What’s the process for getting rid of a union?
Anonymous
03/15/2012
Hey union guys – I noticed there were a lot of supportive comments from people on soft money on your webpage with the hope of more job security.
What are you plans for improving job security for soft money positions at UO?
Anonymous
03/16/2012
What Raymer, the Knight professors and the other 1% fail to understand is that focusing on non-salary issues is exactly what one would expect to hear from those with the highest salaries. The rest of us would like to see salary as the top issue. We are pleased that you are happy with your retention raises, but the 99% would like improvements inour base salaries.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Speak for yourself. I’m not anywhere near the top 1% in salary and I don’t agree with raising salaries by salary floors. I’d like to hear how the union is going to promote excellence rather than equity (i.e. mediocrity).
Peter Keyes
03/16/2012
I still don’t understand the argument that paying people badly promotes excellence. I think that if I were on the job market and thinking of coming to the UO, I’d look at what the average salaries were. Then maybe I’d look further down the chart to see what the compression was. Then I think I’d go somewhere else.
Of course, maybe I don’t understand what hiring is like in other units. Perhaps what the truly excellent faculty want is not to be paid well, but just to be paid better than others, as this reinforces their sense of superiority and makes up for not getting to sit at the cool table in high school. Maybe the conversations with candidates go, Well, we can’t pay you as much as those other universities, but at least here you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that many of your well-educated and hard-working colleagues will be paid much worse than you! We can’t offer low real estate prices, nor an excellent and well-supported school system anymore, but at least we can promise that your sense of superiority will be reinforced.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Dog barks
Academics really should not be that concerned with salary levels – they should be concerned about being paid fairly, by some reasonable standard. Dog has had positions at 6 Universities (eventually they tire of dogs and make them go away). Speaking for all other dogs, salary level was never a strong consideration (this dog took a 25% pay cut when the UO hired this dog). Other things are more important (to dogs) when it comes to being a productive faculty member. Some of those things are:
1) quality and availability of graduate students 2) time for research and institutional support for research 3) library and computing facilities 4) the kinds of academic programs that exist 5) chances for professional development 6) kinds of teaching opportunities 7) geographic location 8) the overall quality of the academic department.
Indeed I could have stayed in my very well paid analyst position on the East Coast forever but there was and is more to life (even for dogs) than sitting in a dark room surrounded by machines analyzing massive data sets that you don’t really want to be analyzing.
Peter Keyes
03/16/2012
Dog, I don’t think you speak for all other dogs – dogs seem to feel that having a salary floor, or any consideration other than “merit” (usually expressed solely in terms of number of journal articles published per year) count in the determination of pay level will lead to the demise of the academy as we know it. If all dogs are so altruistic, why are they so fervent on this issue? Is my department an anomaly – are all other departments so full of complete incompetents that we must use all pecuniary means available to shame them and get them to move to a lower-ranked school? If this is such a huge problem perhaps we need to abolish tenure – surely this is responsible for all the mediocre faculty we have – they can’t have been just hanging on, waiting for their chance to get to get rich by divvying up the excellent faculty members’ merit pay.
I agree with you (speaking for all other dogs), that many things matter to academics more than salary. No one took this job to get rich. But there is a limit to this. At some point you have to think about saving up to send the kids to as good a college as you went to, because you probably care about that kind of thing. If you’re not Tier 1 in PERS, you might be putting some thought into your emeritus years. (Or even if you are – no telling where the widespread urge to claw back this largesse will end up.) Like it or not, we live in a dogs-eat-Dog world, and no one up there (before Richard Lariviere) had our backs.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Dog says
I didn’t say anything remotely resembling your first paragraph – I did say earlier that salary floors will lead to salary redistribution. I didn’t say anything about the demise of academic departments or the academy.
Peter Keyes
03/16/2012
Dog – of course you didn’t say anything like that, and I didn’t say you did. I said you were NOT speaking for all other dogs, as many other dogs seem to be saying exactly what I said they are. Even though we don’t always agree, I believe Dog makes respectful, rational arguments, in contrast to the unsupported, raving assertions coming from many other dogs.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Dog says
okay
I guess I failed to make the distinction between the Dog and the many dogs. Sorry.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
Peter- I’ll chalk up your nasty sarcasm as a response to some of the vitriol here. As to your other points, who looks at average salary or compression when deciding on a job? Don’t candidates consider their specific offer? My belief is that salary floors distribute resources in a way that make it more difficult to reward excellence.
As a flip-side to your sarcastic comments – can we recruit excellent faculty to UO by telling them that they won’t make much but at least they’ll make the same as everyone else?
Peter Keyes
03/16/2012
If you think that is nasty sarcasm, you must have lived a very sheltered life. And as someone who hasn’t objected to being referred to as a lying sack of fecal matter, or even more distressing, the anti-Nathan, I think you protest too much.
Maybe people don’t look at average salary or compression, but guess what? They should. Unless this is the University of Lake Wobegon, where everyone’s salary is above average, those numbers matter more than the offer you got coming in. How many years that you have worked here has there been a pay freeze? A quarter of the time I’ve been here. It takes a lot of good years to make up for that.
Faculty must be like college football players, who all think they’re going to make the NFL. Someone has to be “average”, and when I look around at my colleagues, I think that the performance level for “average” is somewhere between pretty damn good and amazing. I don’t see a lot of slackers, and I do see a lot of people who just put their heads down and do the work that needs to be done without complaint and without much recognition. I regard much of the argument here about excellence and its rewards as a symptom of our winner-take-all approach in society now, which I see as a rather callous and gross consequence of 30 years of radical Republican rule. But maybe I’m just old-fashioned (or plain old) in caring about the welfare of my colleagues.
So what happens to you after you negotiate a decent starting salary here? It just starts getting worse relatively, and the longer you stay, the worse it gets. I have many excellent younger colleagues, who began at reasonable salaries, and I worry that many of them will leave, as they can’t all get Knight Chairs. I’d like to think that people can do good work and expect fair recompense. Maybe we can move away from a system that is always being gamed, where people have to threaten to leave to get a raise. The raises last spring started to change the game, maybe a union can keep it going.
And as for your last question, first, you’re being a little disingenuous (I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by saying that). No one is saying everyone makes the same salary. No one is saying no merit pay. What we are saying is that there are some gross inequities in the system, and it would be nice to lessen them.
Second, I don’t know. Dog says that faculty aren’t motivated by salary, but maybe he’s a hopeless idealist, given all the other dogs fighting over the bones. The Finns decided to reform their school system a while back, and decided that what they needed was to make it completely equitable. And guess what it turned into? The most excellent school system in the world.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
“Maybe people don’t look at average salary or compression, but guess what? They should.” You could be right, but I think focusing on what people do, rather than what they should do, is most relevant to recruiting and retention. You certainly raise an interesting academic question, however.
My last sentence was disingenuous? My point was to do just what you’ve been doing – going to the extreme – I just went the other direction. The sad part is that you apparently believe your extreme view that anyone against the union or salary floors doesn’t care about their colleagues. This is shaping up to be quite the nightmare.
Anonymous
03/16/2012
The Dog (as opposed to the male hopeless idealist dog) offers the following:
1) I still think that overall working and infrastructure conditions are ultimately more important to faculty than maximizing their salary. I admit, I could be wrong here. In my own case, the primary reason that this Dog is thinking about finding another University has nothing to do with salary but everything to do with “teaching conditions”. I would like to finish my career teaching smaller classes in better facilities.
2) On the salary issue: While there is lots to say here, I simply want to point out that our “raise” process around here, over at least the last 10 years has been sporadic and ill defined. The last significant merit raise pool was in the year 2000. The CAS equity raises done in May 2011 were the next most significant event. I think if the Union could effectively negotiate where all its members got some kind of annual raise (call it a COLA or whatever) that would help a lot.
3) Negotiated salary floors I remain neutral on. I see both points:
a) salary floors may lead to salary redistribution b) salary floors are an effective means of dealing with salary compression, although the distance between the floors may need to be large.
c) I still remember the only time I was pissed off about salary issues is when, again through clerical error, the Dog got promoted and got a whole $1800 extra salary because of that. Fortunately, that has changed so that one now gets a decent % raise at promotion (again in CAS) – however, that opportunity, as have most, has by passed this Dog.
Those were the days ....
03/17/2012
Dog,
The original “White Paper” addressed all of these concerns perhaps as well as they ever could be addressed. It’s too bad that it petered out and essentially died. It was kind of resurrected with the 2011 raises — but in a manner and spirit (necessitated by the state) that was nothing like that envisioned in the WP.
Those were the days ....
03/17/2012
All of this talk about average salaries, comparable salaries, competitive salaries seems a little detached from real world data.
The Senate Budget Committee used to publicize salary comparisons and total compensation comparisons for the various ranks.
What do these data look like now? How have they improved or deteriorated over time (relative to “comparators”?) Is UO in fact at or near parity now (in salary, compensation, or both)? For all I know, we may be in one or both after the 2011 raises. I wish these data were conveniently brought to everyone’s attention, updated regularly, and, especially, WIDELY PUBLICIZED as in the early White Paper days (gone, alas). Maybe the updating has been going on, but the publicizing sure hasn’t.
I am a Tier 1 full professor in the Optional Retirement Plan. When I look at the huge value of the contributions to my pension — both the direct contribution to my ORP account of about 22% of my salary; plus the value of the 8% guarantee on my PERS account (in which I was member for several years before shifting to ORP) — I realize that while the salary of myself and of people in a comparable situation may not be so high, the total real monetary value of my job (total compensation — add medical benefits) is not bad at all (again, relative to our comparators), and may be up to par.
Others, of course, are in a different situation, e.g. not Tier 1 or Tier 2. That’s why we need the data — otherwise there is no way to have a rational discussion.
Again, the early White Paper days were so much different. I don’t know why the administration seemingly lost interest. They would deny that that was the case, that the money just wasn’t there. I don’t believe that, and in any case, where there’s a will there’s a way — priorities and tradeoffs, as we used to say.
Peter Keyes
03/17/2012
Salary (and total benefits) comparison date is published on the University’s IR webpage. The information there is based on AAU reports, but it is over a year old, and so doesn’t include the effect of last spring’s raises. The UO might be able to update our data, but probably can’t get more recent data from other schools.
In the salary equity plan calculations, the 6% state pick-up of the employee contribution was included in the calculations of UO salaries, since it was set in lieu of salary increases. Excluding this, in general, UO benefits are still somewhat higher than comparator schools, but it is hard to compare directly, since there are so many variables (whereas salary levels are much simpler to define). For example, it might be reported that the UO pays more than other schools for health benefits, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we receive more benefits, it might just mean that PEBB has negotiated less cost-effective plans than other schools.
Those were the days ....
03/17/2012
I’m not surprised that the data are posted somewhere — what is “the University’s IR webpage” — but the point is that it’s not widely publicized, or publicized at all. Nor is there much discussion about what it all means, what the long-term trends are, where it’s going. Of course, with the lack of interest of Frohnmayer, then the salary freeze from 2008, then the (necessarily) secret raises, the firing of Lariviere, now the union — all of this is not too surprising.
What I’m saying is that the issues could have been framed and presented much differently over the years, and if they had been, we might be in a far different situation now.
I want them to vanish!
Along with the majority of TTs– I am very happy we will now have a Union. Thank you to all who have worked to make this happen.
I want the Union to bargain for more TTs and smaller classes. I am teaching more than 35% more students than I was 10 years ago. I feel like I have to tell students to go away all of the time–that I want them to vanish–and this is wrong.
I want time for research and teaching. I know it is possible–we used to do much better.
Dog agrees with this sentiment
But there is a large mathematical/infrastructure issue that prevents this.
1) Compared to 10 years ago we have 5000-6000 more undergads.
2) We have not added scaled classroom capacity
3) We still teach the majority of our classes between 10 and 4
—> so the math means that the number of students per class has to increase significantly
4). We have increased the TT faculty by maybe 50 (10%) over the last 10 years and thus have hired a lot more NTTF to cover the increased student load. Now we have a union as a result of that. Easily predictable.
So I don’t see how its physically possible to achieve smaller classes sizes
and more time for research. If the Union can pull of this miracle, then it
is a good thing.
Not that dogs have any quality of life, but my quality of life as a “UO
professor” (again due to clerical error), dramatically sucks more now than it
did 10 years ago.
Work for shared governance, remind JH they work for us, and not the other way around. Get back some of the senate powers Bob Berdahl has given to Randy Geller.
Old Man speaks: The Senate need not adopt any policy edited or written by Geller until it is fully acceptable. It is not Randy’s job to make policy. He seems to think it is, but he’ll get over it, one way or the other, if the Senate hangs tough.
I don’t want them: taking my money or speaking on my behalf.
I want the Union to adopt the name “Frohnmayer Memorial Union”
Or how about “Pernsteiner’s Folly”?
Shared governance, ha ha. We’ve now signaled that we are a proletariat (albeit a phony one), and as such we are engaged in a struggle with university governance. Now all we’ll share is the table over which we confront “management.” Oops!
Not sure what 11:56 is getting at. Our prole status will surely help us extract more money from private donors. The students will recognize the need for higher tuition. I’m sure the legislature will recognize how they’ve oppressed us over the years. What’s not to like?
ditto to last several anon. The only thing worse on campus than recent management failure is the NTTF-establed junta without even a named leader. If certified,I will not join. and I will resist the union’s intrusion on shared governance at every opportunity. You do not represent or speak for me. If you want any kind of legitimacy, you should have asked the UO senate to run secret ballot elections among the separate categories of employees before manipulating a takeover of the TTF by the NTTF and OR. NTTF and OR were welcome to have their own union, but they chose otherwise, now we will all live with the consequences, whether we asked for them or not. As for me, I will oppose hiring any nonfull-time ‘career’ NTTF in the future. we should have insisted on TTF or fulltime TTF hires long ago, along with the necessary changes in instructional modes to make that financially viable. after a few years, as faculty composition changes and the union disaster unfolds, a move for decertification will take hold. i do like the name Frohnmayer memorial union.
Why do you think of the claim/fact that a majority of TTF signed? I doubt that this claim is not factual.
It’s a done deal. Like it or not we’ve got to make it work now. TTF have to get involved in the union or all the bad predictions about what it will do to UO’s research quality will CERTAINLY come true.
But can all research-minded TTF get involved? It sounds like the TTF with supervisory roles for post-docs cannot join the union (do they pay dues/fair share even if they are not allowed to join?). So some of the TTF with the largest research focus will not be allowed to help shape the priorities?
Dog says
yes I am in this category and remain puzzled if that category has any
voice in this process or whether it would have meant anything to sign
the card, since, apparently, I am not eligible to be in the union.
I’d suggest Anonymous 1:21 should calm down,notice that a majority of TTF also signed cards, and stop tossing around terms like “junta” and “disaster.” If you think unionization is going to do things you’ll dislike, why not participate in it and try to steer it in what you consider to be desirable directions. We intend to operate democratically and to respond to faculty desires and concerns in collective bargaining proposals.
You might also consider learning something about state employee labor law before making silly proposals that the UO Senate somehow manage elections. I wish the Senate well and want the union to cooperate with it, but what makes you think it’s the sole fount of legitimacy on campus?
I agree with Pope. It’s a done deal. Like it or not, like the certification process or not, the rational thing to do at this point is try and make the union work for UO. That will be hard enough. I’m no economist, but I try to be rational anyway.
And I agree with UO Matters. We must each be scratching our heads in wonder at having reached this convergence. And I agree that the union’s road ahead isn’t clear and straight and that it will require broad participation to be successful.
It is a done deal. UO is finished. There is no point working for the institutional good any longer. Good luck with the administration, the legislature, the donors. I will tend to my own business. It is sad to see a place which has had so much potential destroying itself in this way.
I’m so excited for them to take my money, restrict my salary, force me to take furlough days, line the pockets of their administrators, engage in corrupt practices, and fund political campaigns that I disagree with. Thanks everyone! I’m sure I won’t be punished for not signing a card, right?
What I want: The rate of increase in salaries to be greater than that of our comparators by at least 1 percentage point (or whatever our dues end up being), sustained beyond just a one-time burst at the first contract negotiation.
I need a t-shirt that says “I didn’t vote for the union and all I got was my pay garnished.”
To continue, my salary started around $40k. I got into the $70k range through negotiation and hard work. When has anyone ever heard of a union doing that for them?
My wife quite because the union wouldn’t let her be promoted into the job her employer needed her to do and that she was qualified to do, because of a crazy “step” system that took no account of need or merit.
This is a very dark day for us.
1. Transparency
That’s the key problem with the admin right now.
As of right now, I haven’t seen much from the union (what were the precise number of NTTF’s, OR’s, and TTF) in support.
Why does the law school get to opt out (and why are they ok with that)?
What is the goal of the union (we’ll sort it out once we unionize).
The law school opted out because almost all the TTFs on the faculty did not want to join. The union was very accommodating presumably because, given the lack of support at the law school, leaving them out made it easier to get majority support among TTFs. One wonders whether the majority the union says it has among TTFs would have been a minority if the law school faculty had stayed in. I guess we’ll never know.
I suppose it is alot easier to get a majority if you leave out people who would vote no.
How is that ok….they are an on a different calendar?! Every law school professor should be included as a no vote for the ERB.
My department has also almost all of the TTFs against the union: how can we opt out? Is there a procedure we can follow? What is the percentage of TTFs against the UNION that you need to have to be able to opt out? How was that decided for the law school? Some transparency from the UNION on this issue would be very welcome.
A union rep came to the offices last week. When someone said they weren’t going to sign the card he replied “we’re going to win this, and you’ll want to be on the right side when we do.” Yay! Mafia-like intimidation! This isn’t going to end badly for us.
The Union organizers had no power to intimidate people into signing cards. In fact–Dept. heads in favor (which there were plenty) did NOT use their power to coerce yes votes. The Mafia-style intimidation was done by the NO votes who OPENLY coerced their junior colleagues to go against. Many of their junior colleagues quietly asked to sign cards at their homes! Hence we have this clear majority vote by the intimidated majority–and VERY LOUD angry bosses who can’t believe so many people voted against their openly intimidating leadership.
It is a very HAPPY day for the majority of TTs who have voted for a stronger voice. Yes, you can choose to believe that the majority of TTs around here are lazy, or under-performing, or whatever you want to believe. The reality is this place has clearly not been keeping the majority of TTs happy–or they would not have voted for this.
All YES votes were people willing to SIGN a card for a Union. NO votes included all who weren’t sure (abstaining), all who were not available (a significant number were unavailable/away), or all who were strong NOs. Hence, the No votes had the advantage of including all abstentions–and STILL the YES votes were loud and clear.
The faculty at the UO wants a UNION. The majority has voted. YES to Union!
indeed!
Sorry you forced this on your collleagues and you are going to have to deal with opposition and a considerable group of TTF who is not going to submit quietly
The number of weird fantasies people have about union fiat and dictatorial power in this thread–based almost entirely on anecdotes–is amazing. People would rather see their pay unilaterally cut off and their health benefits slashed little by little, in the hopes that maybe if they’re really good and play ball, they’ll get some of that sweet trickle down for all their hard work. The only time negotiation works in my category is if you have an offer in hand somewhere else and you’re willing to leave if they say “no” here.
to anon327 and 336, my sentiments exactly,so sad.
toDan, we elected a senate with anonymous ballots, and nothing in oregon public labor relations law prevented our senate from holding secret ballot advisory elections to guide the composition of the bargaining unit and have us all vote on a bargaining unit in which each segment had a majority vote in secret balloting. the actual certification election of course would have been supervised by te ERB.It doesn’t take my graduate degree in labor relations to understand why United academics didn’t want elections.I know that you know that I know that you know, too! The senate isn’t the sole font of legitimacy, but we did elect it in formal elections. who elected united academics in a formal election? nuff said.
I don’t know (perhaps you do) what the turnout has been in Senate elections, but I bet it’s a lot lower than the proportion of faculty who made conscious, uncoerced decisions about signing a card.
Why has United Academics used the card check procedure? Because it’s a legal process for public employees in the state of Oregon. Because it is meant to confer _greater_ legitimacy than an ERB election when fewer than half sign cards and only a fraction participate in the election. We chose a stringent test of support and met it. Because the “secret ballot” procedure is subject to all sorts of abuses of the sort that have crippled the NLRB over the last 30 or so years.
I agree with Pope again. A secret ballot election would likely have been decided with turnout around 50%. The union organizers would have made big efforts to turn out their vote, the opposition would have been unorganized. The union would have been certified with the expressed support of maybe 30% of the faculty, perhaps even less.
Additionally with an election it would have been impossible for the ERB to verify claims about support among the TTF’s, etc. I don’t know if they will now, but at least they can. The card check seems better. In any case, it’s done, lets move on.
UO has plenty of money to increase faculty salaries. The last round cost $3.1 million. We’re currently spending $2 million on the jock box tutoring and we’ve increased UOPD spending by $1 million. Bad decisions by our administrators.
as for the assertion that TTF ‘will have to do this or that’ The great thing about ultimatum games of ‘take it or leave it’is that ‘leave it’ is actually a choice once that’s the game. You chose the game. we get to choose, not you. many ttf on this blog offered to play a more cooperative game to lend greater legitimacy to the outcome, but prounion advocates chose the ultimatum game.
I would like to see an elective bargaining agreement that does NOT call out salary minimums and other fiscal requirements, but instead focusses only on working conditions, including self governance, which some of the union proponents claimed were their main concern. I fear that this is really all about simply increasing everybody’s salary – a very short sighted approach.
Dog says
you can’t increase everbody’s salary – not enough funds for that – you
can establish salary floors within the ranks and therefore redistribute
salary dollars among the workers, thus promoting more equity within the
ranks.
Actually, there is enough money to provide raises for everybody, if this is the priority. Look back at the White Paper update, which showed how everything else at the university grew at twice the rate of faculty salaries. The Senate Budget Committee estimate was that it would take under $10m to get TT faculty member’s salary to the average of comparators. $10m out of an overall budget of $600m at that point, or out of $300m or so if you exclude auxiliaries.
This was also in the ballpark for the figures underlying the Lariviere administration’s salary equity plan. I think that plan was the only serious attempt anyone had made to deal with this issue in the past 20 years; the administration went out on a limb for the faculty, and that limb got chopped off. Perhaps the implementation of phases 2 and 3 of that plan would be a good starting point for contract negotiations?
When morale is collapsing, when a decade plus effort of raising faculty salaries fails, when retention is left to triage and a few high paid chairs, then why does Raymer think raising faculty’s salaries is short sighted, especially as faculty teach more, conduct more service, have higher research productivity, their benefits are sliced, etc. Obviously pay issues are not a fix all, but the moral math is very simple (as is the actual financing): investing in faculty across the board will do more to boost excellence and morale than a few big raises here and there. Think as a community please, or at least like some one who cares about the human resources dimension of an institution like this rather than only your vision of the meritorious.
Exactly – think as a community and realize that the larger community (i.e. the public) isn’t going to be very sympathetic to your whining about salaries when everyone is being asked to do more for less. Furthermore, how exactly are salary floors going to promote excellence? They’re going to do just the opposite – taking money away from merit raises.
If the morale of UO professors is collapsing, then they need to get out of their offices and get a little perspective. This union is just going to make you look like a bunch of entitled babies. I can’t wait to read the Reg Guard/Oregonial articles and letters to the editor.
Dog to Peter Keyes
The senate white paper is about TTF faculty – all 650 of them. I agree
there is enough money for that. But we are talking now about 1950 or so
“union faculty” and I don’t see there to be “easily” enough money for that.
Here’s a quick round number calculation: 10% raise for 2000 “union faculty”
at average salary plues OPE = 90,000 is 18 million increase in overall faculty
salary baseline. So while that may be technically doable, I doubt its
gonna happen. The OPE part of this is heinous. I wonder if the average reader of this forum understands just how high OPE is here? If I hire
a postdoc at 35K I get to pay an extra 70% on that for OPE. Nice ….
Dog –
You’re right that the White Paper was just about TTF – as I stated. And the Lariviere administration salary equity plan was also about TTF; categories for TTF are straightforward and comparable, whereas figuring out the comps for many NTTF is more complicated – the reporting categories are not standardized across institutions. No one that I know of has done the calculation on what that would cost, nor even determined what the targets would be. Do we want to equal the average of what our comparator schools pay NTTF? Maybe we want to pay them more, maybe the pay doesn’t matter quite as much as the ability to get benefits? I think the first thing to do is to figure out what is going on elsewhere, and to ask the NTTF what they think.
I think your estimate for average pay may be high, although I don’t have time to do even an estimate now. I believe that many of the NTTF are not full time, I know that many are under 0.49 FTE (so they won’t qualify for benefits, which brings their cost down even more) and some just teach a few courses a year, the going rate for which is supposedly around $3000 per.
As for where this money can come from, as I said, it is all about priorities. Police force? Tutoring? NCAA investigations? I know that we all believe that Athletics is in a different universe, that somehow making comparisons between this side of the river and that side is ludicrous, but the nice thing about money is that it is fungible, you can decide to put it where you want. I accept there are market forces that say we have to pay a football coach an huge amount of money because of the benefit he provides to the university, but what about market forces for all the other employees there? My wife likes to compare her salary to the assistant volleyball coach’s. Last time she checked, my wife’s was lower. Are there irresistible market forces which say we have to pay coaches in sports that lose money more than we pay faculty who generate the vast majority of the income for the institution? The new budget model provides a rational basis for beginning to compare the costs and benefits of units on campus. I suggest we extend this level of analysis beyond the academic units.
dog says
if .49 FTEs are in the union then my average salary +OPE is definitely
too high. Moreover, I think that Salary equity arguments for part time
employees are highly problematical. I don’t know anything about athletics,
they don’t let dogs participate.
I resent having my pay forcibly garnished for something I don’t want and did not vote for. Taxation without representation. I resent this. How many times can I say it?
You had a vote, you just lost.
So your feelings now are similar to how I felt when President Bush took us to War in Iraq. I voted against him, but had to simply endure his unwanted leadership.
SO, I continued to pay my taxes and kept on going. Democracy can stink when you lose the vote. Taxes can go to bombing innocent people.
The majority of TTS have VOTED for a UNION, so now we will have a Union. Hopefully it will do things you like anyhow. It will continue to be democratic, so you can continue to vote in how it works.
Amen.
If you think our feelings are similar to what you felt when Bush started the Iraq war then have some freaking sympathy and stop beating your chest!
Are you needing some acknowledgment that some TTF did not want this to happen, indeed see it as detrimental? And knowing that union supporters can at least acknowledge the frustration felt by some of our colleagues might help move forward? Sympathetically…
Thank you to Michael Raymer for posting his name with his message. I disagree with it (and I can’t imagine a union or any other employee organization choosing not to attempt to increase salaries), but unlike some of the more hysterical anonymous entries he’s talking about issues.
Yes, lots of venting on this thread, at some point people need to settle down and move forward on the issues.
If we now need UO Matters to advise us all to settle down and move forward, I guess this really is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
No it is not the Age of Aquarius, it’s an age of reaction and self-fulfilling prophesy where it is considered collegial to call a union confrontational and not have the decency to congratulate folks on a hard earned victory, or it is deemed a sign of integrity to question other people’s honesty and then post slanderous, unsubstantiated attacks anonymously,or perhaps when it is even considered rational to call a union undemocratic and then refuse to acknowledge that you are invited to shape it…no need to go on. I’m done with this–this is no longer a forum for me.
I totally agree with you. :-)
I am anonymous 10:34 and I want to clarify that I totally agree with the sentence that if now we have UO Matters advising us to calm down it is really quite funny. We bad people that are against the union.
It seems extremely irregular that TTFs who supervise postdocs cannot be in the union while the entire law school gets to opt out — for no good reason at all. If we are going to have a union, it should at the very least cover all TTFs, no matter who else is included or excluded.
Huh? Can someone explain this to me? And also clarify if the Law School actually did get to opt out and how on earth that was possible?
I am wondering if I will be in and out of the union representation as the number of postdocs in my group fluctuates from 0 to some number and viceversa.
And if I will pay “fair share” dues even if I am not allowed to join a union because I supervise a post-doc.
What’s the process for getting rid of a union?
Hey union guys – I noticed there were a lot of supportive comments from people on soft money on your webpage with the hope of more job security.
What are you plans for improving job security for soft money positions at UO?
What Raymer, the Knight professors and the other 1% fail to understand is that focusing on non-salary issues is exactly what one would expect to hear from those with the highest salaries. The rest of us would like to see salary as the top issue. We are pleased that you are happy with your retention raises, but the 99% would like improvements inour base salaries.
Speak for yourself. I’m not anywhere near the top 1% in salary and I don’t agree with raising salaries by salary floors. I’d like to hear how the union is going to promote excellence rather than equity (i.e. mediocrity).
I still don’t understand the argument that paying people badly promotes excellence. I think that if I were on the job market and thinking of coming to the UO, I’d look at what the average salaries were. Then maybe I’d look further down the chart to see what the compression was. Then I think I’d go somewhere else.
Of course, maybe I don’t understand what hiring is like in other units. Perhaps what the truly excellent faculty want is not to be paid well, but just to be paid better than others, as this reinforces their sense of superiority and makes up for not getting to sit at the cool table in high school. Maybe the conversations with candidates go, Well, we can’t pay you as much as those other universities, but at least here you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that many of your well-educated and hard-working colleagues will be paid much worse than you! We can’t offer low real estate prices, nor an excellent and well-supported school system anymore, but at least we can promise that your sense of superiority will be reinforced.
Dog barks
Academics really should not be that concerned with salary levels – they
should be concerned about being paid fairly, by some reasonable standard.
Dog has had positions at 6 Universities (eventually they tire of dogs
and make them go away). Speaking for all other dogs, salary level was never a strong consideration (this dog took a 25% pay cut when the UO hired this dog). Other things are more important (to dogs) when it comes to being a productive faculty member. Some of those things are:
1) quality and availability of graduate students
2) time for research and institutional support for research
3) library and computing facilities
4) the kinds of academic programs that exist
5) chances for professional development
6) kinds of teaching opportunities
7) geographic location
8) the overall quality of the academic department.
Indeed I could have stayed in my very well paid analyst position
on the East Coast forever but there was and is more to life (even for dogs) than sitting in a dark room surrounded by machines analyzing massive data sets that you don’t really want to be analyzing.
Dog, I don’t think you speak for all other dogs – dogs seem to feel that having a salary floor, or any consideration other than “merit” (usually expressed solely in terms of number of journal articles published per year) count in the determination of pay level will lead to the demise of the academy as we know it. If all dogs are so altruistic, why are they so fervent on this issue? Is my department an anomaly – are all other departments so full of complete incompetents that we must use all pecuniary means available to shame them and get them to move to a lower-ranked school? If this is such a huge problem perhaps we need to abolish tenure – surely this is responsible for all the mediocre faculty we have – they can’t have been just hanging on, waiting for their chance to get to get rich by divvying up the excellent faculty members’ merit pay.
I agree with you (speaking for all other dogs), that many things matter to academics more than salary. No one took this job to get rich. But there is a limit to this. At some point you have to think about saving up to send the kids to as good a college as you went to, because you probably care about that kind of thing. If you’re not Tier 1 in PERS, you might be putting some thought into your emeritus years. (Or even if you are – no telling where the widespread urge to claw back this largesse will end up.) Like it or not, we live in a dogs-eat-Dog world, and no one up there (before Richard Lariviere) had our backs.
Dog says
I didn’t say anything remotely resembling your first paragraph – I did say earlier that salary floors will lead to salary redistribution. I didn’t say anything about the demise of academic departments or the academy.
Dog – of course you didn’t say anything like that, and I didn’t say you did. I said you were NOT speaking for all other dogs, as many other dogs seem to be saying exactly what I said they are. Even though we don’t always agree, I believe Dog makes respectful, rational arguments, in contrast to the unsupported, raving assertions coming from many other dogs.
Dog says
okay
I guess I failed to make the distinction between the Dog
and the many dogs. Sorry.
Peter- I’ll chalk up your nasty sarcasm as a response to some of the vitriol here. As to your other points, who looks at average salary or compression when deciding on a job? Don’t candidates consider their specific offer? My belief is that salary floors distribute resources in a way that make it more difficult to reward excellence.
As a flip-side to your sarcastic comments – can we recruit excellent faculty to UO by telling them that they won’t make much but at least they’ll make the same as everyone else?
If you think that is nasty sarcasm, you must have lived a very sheltered life. And as someone who hasn’t objected to being referred to as a lying sack of fecal matter, or even more distressing, the anti-Nathan, I think you protest too much.
Maybe people don’t look at average salary or compression, but guess what? They should. Unless this is the University of Lake Wobegon, where everyone’s salary is above average, those numbers matter more than the offer you got coming in. How many years that you have worked here has there been a pay freeze? A quarter of the time I’ve been here. It takes a lot of good years to make up for that.
Faculty must be like college football players, who all think they’re going to make the NFL. Someone has to be “average”, and when I look around at my colleagues, I think that the performance level for “average” is somewhere between pretty damn good and amazing. I don’t see a lot of slackers, and I do see a lot of people who just put their heads down and do the work that needs to be done without complaint and without much recognition. I regard much of the argument here about excellence and its rewards as a symptom of our winner-take-all approach in society now, which I see as a rather callous and gross consequence of 30 years of radical Republican rule. But maybe I’m just old-fashioned (or plain old) in caring about the welfare of my colleagues.
So what happens to you after you negotiate a decent starting salary here? It just starts getting worse relatively, and the longer you stay, the worse it gets. I have many excellent younger colleagues, who began at reasonable salaries, and I worry that many of them will leave, as they can’t all get Knight Chairs. I’d like to think that people can do good work and expect fair recompense. Maybe we can move away from a system that is always being gamed, where people have to threaten to leave to get a raise. The raises last spring started to change the game, maybe a union can keep it going.
And as for your last question, first, you’re being a little disingenuous (I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by saying that). No one is saying everyone makes the same salary. No one is saying no merit pay. What we are saying is that there are some gross inequities in the system, and it would be nice to lessen them.
Second, I don’t know. Dog says that faculty aren’t motivated by salary, but maybe he’s a hopeless idealist, given all the other dogs fighting over the bones. The Finns decided to reform their school system a while back, and decided that what they needed was to make it completely equitable. And guess what it turned into? The most excellent school system in the world.
“Maybe people don’t look at average salary or compression, but guess what? They should.” You could be right, but I think focusing on what people do, rather than what they should do, is most relevant to recruiting and retention. You certainly raise an interesting academic question, however.
My last sentence was disingenuous? My point was to do just what you’ve been doing – going to the extreme – I just went the other direction. The sad part is that you apparently believe your extreme view that anyone against the union or salary floors doesn’t care about their colleagues. This is shaping up to be quite the nightmare.
The Dog (as opposed to the male hopeless idealist dog) offers the following:
1) I still think that overall working and infrastructure conditions are ultimately more important to faculty than maximizing their salary. I admit, I could be wrong here. In my own case, the primary reason that this Dog is thinking about finding another University has nothing to do with salary but everything to do with “teaching conditions”. I would like to finish my career teaching smaller classes in better facilities.
2) On the salary issue: While there is lots to say here, I simply want to point out that our “raise” process around here, over at least the last 10 years has
been sporadic and ill defined. The last significant merit raise pool was
in the year 2000. The CAS equity raises done in May 2011 were the next most
significant event. I think if the Union could effectively negotiate where all
its members got some kind of annual raise (call it a COLA or whatever) that
would help a lot.
3) Negotiated salary floors I remain neutral on. I see both points:
a) salary floors may lead to salary redistribution
b) salary floors are an effective means of dealing with salary compression,
although the distance between the floors may need to be large.
c) I still remember the only time I was pissed off about salary issues is when,
again through clerical error, the Dog got promoted and got a whole $1800 extra
salary because of that. Fortunately, that has changed so that one now gets
a decent % raise at promotion (again in CAS) – however, that opportunity, as have
most, has by passed this Dog.
Dog,
The original “White Paper” addressed all of these concerns perhaps as well as they ever could be addressed. It’s too bad that it petered out and essentially died. It was kind of resurrected with the 2011 raises — but in a manner and spirit (necessitated by the state) that was nothing like that envisioned in the WP.
All of this talk about average salaries, comparable salaries, competitive salaries seems a little detached from real world data.
The Senate Budget Committee used to publicize salary comparisons and total compensation comparisons for the various ranks.
What do these data look like now? How have they improved or deteriorated over time (relative to “comparators”?) Is UO in fact at or near parity now (in salary, compensation, or both)? For all I know, we may be in one or both after the 2011 raises. I wish these data were conveniently brought to everyone’s attention, updated regularly, and, especially, WIDELY PUBLICIZED as in the early White Paper days (gone, alas). Maybe the updating has been going on, but the publicizing sure hasn’t.
I am a Tier 1 full professor in the Optional Retirement Plan. When I look at the huge value of the contributions to my pension — both the direct contribution to my ORP account of about 22% of my salary; plus the value of the 8% guarantee on my PERS account (in which I was member for several years before shifting to ORP) — I realize that while the salary of myself and of people in a comparable situation may not be so high, the total real monetary value of my job (total compensation — add medical benefits) is not bad at all (again, relative to our comparators), and may be up to par.
Others, of course, are in a different situation, e.g. not Tier 1 or Tier 2. That’s why we need the data — otherwise there is no way to have a rational discussion.
Again, the early White Paper days were so much different. I don’t know why the administration seemingly lost interest. They would deny that that was the case, that the money just wasn’t there. I don’t believe that, and in any case, where there’s a will there’s a way — priorities and tradeoffs, as we used to say.
Salary (and total benefits) comparison date is published on the University’s IR webpage. The information there is based on AAU reports, but it is over a year old, and so doesn’t include the effect of last spring’s raises. The UO might be able to update our data, but probably can’t get more recent data from other schools.
In the salary equity plan calculations, the 6% state pick-up of the employee contribution was included in the calculations of UO salaries, since it was set in lieu of salary increases. Excluding this, in general, UO benefits are still somewhat higher than comparator schools, but it is hard to compare directly, since there are so many variables (whereas salary levels are much simpler to define). For example, it might be reported that the UO pays more than other schools for health benefits, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we receive more benefits, it might just mean that PEBB has negotiated less cost-effective plans than other schools.
I’m not surprised that the data are posted somewhere — what is “the University’s IR webpage” — but the point is that it’s not widely publicized, or publicized at all. Nor is there much discussion about what it all means, what the long-term trends are, where it’s going. Of course, with the lack of interest of Frohnmayer, then the salary freeze from 2008, then the (necessarily) secret raises, the firing of Lariviere, now the union — all of this is not too surprising.
What I’m saying is that the issues could have been framed and presented much differently over the years, and if they had been, we might be in a far different situation now.