12/20/2011. Last week it was Ed Ray at OSU. Now it’s Wim Weiwel at PSU. Next week I suppose we’ll learn that Pernsteiner did it too. From the Bill Graves Oregonian story:
Portland State University faculty will get as much as a 4.1 percent pay raise for each of the next two years under a tentative contract agreement reached with administrators Monday.
The agreement, which union members must still vote on, affects the 1,288 full-time teaching and research faculty who belong to the American Association of University Professors.
Wim Wiewel, PSU president, said he would like to see faculty – who are paid well below professors at comparable universities – get more. …
They are unionized. I haven’t heard a peep from the UO faculty union organizers as of late. The most recent post on their website is almost a month old. I thought they were going to seize the moment and start a card check in January. Anyone know what is going on?
I assume the union folks have been keeping their powder dry in preparation for a winter-term card check, but they need to step up and quick. Short-term, I want them to line up behind the bill(s) for UO independence in the Feb. 2012 legislative session and push to get our new shared governance arrangements contractually secured. Long-term, I want them to get us competitive salaries; lots of folks got paltry, insulting raises as part of the round that helped get RL fired.
Don’t know what’s going on–but I can say that passivity and silence is not what I’d be looking for if I were interested in union representation. If this isn’t a situation worth capitalizing on, I don’t know what is. And yet they do nothing, say nothing, play no role in anything. What am I to take from this, as an example of how they’d fight for me, on salaries or promotions or anything else? Not a pretty lesson.
Perhaps they’ve been reading the tea leaves and know from this that a card check would be a waste of time and worse, an embarrassment. The numbers most likely are just not there for a successful card check. UO faculty are just too darned independent and complacent to start a faculty union.
To confirm: The pay raises at OSU and PSU were just for faculty, right? Not admin?
Not interested in a union if PSU’s 4.1% is all that a union can leverage, given the abysmal starting point.
Now that is an excellent question, Anonymous! And did any of the OSU and PSU administrators have the university make their BMW payments?
How exactly is a union going to prevent admins from getting pay raises and perks?
A union cannot, as far as I know, compel admin to forgo giving itself pay raises and perks. But by directing more of the university’s resources to teaching and research, the effect would be the same.
“paltry, insulting raises”
Not a good attitude in this political climate…
I’m a classified employee and a few months ago I resisted having my job switched to faculty. Now I’ll be getting a step increase & a cost of living raise while my NTTF coworkers are still on a pay freeze.
They’re highly skilled people who got ignored in the equity raise and can easily get tech jobs, even in the bad economy. Some of them have even started looking.
I came out ahead by casting my lot with janitors instead of professors.
May I add a comment about the new university constitution and shared governance arrangements? United Academics support the recent constitutional amendments fully, and are willing to do what no existing institution in the university can do: make them contractually binding.
If certified, United Academics will almost certainly make the adherence to the constitution a condition of the collective bargaining agreement. That would subject to litigation any violation of the constitution on the part of admin; in order to avoid those costs, admin would have every incentive to adhere. To be sure, it has plenty of incentives already. The difference is that this incentive would be tangible.
Need I add that United Academics would not be subject to Randy Geller’s campus-wide monopoly on legal advice?
Randy’s working OT to fix that problem….
If we want to lose Phil Knight and other top donors, I think we crazy liberal faculty should unionize as soon as possible. I’m sure it will be helpful in the Presidential search to have something like this to explain to potential candidates as well.
I’ve seen the lights on in Johnson Hall too. Doesn’t mean anyone is home.
If a presidential candidate cannot abide a unionized faculty and donors wouldn’t give to a university with a unionized faculty, I wouldn’t want them. Last I heard, one of the features that distinguishes democracies from tyrannies was the right of workers to form unions. You could look it up!
A billion dollars for your ideals … Just saying …
Re effects of a union on containing administrative pay and perks, how did that pressure work out with SEIU and the Chancellor’s office?
If that’s a serious question, my answer would be that I do not know. But my hunch is that because SEIU keeps a certain amount of pressure on the university’s budget, they keep smaller the slice of our pie that admin can gobble up in positions, salaries, and perks.
If it’s a snarky question, then I suppose the answer would have be: SEIU’s efforts were at least as successful as all other efforts thus far to contain administrative bloat.
“At least as successful” is not a compelling argument for forking over 1% of my gross salary in dues.
Phil Knight is not an ideologue: He may care about the unionization of his overseas factories, but he doesn’t care about about faculty unions at the UO.
4.1% + 4.1% – (1% x 2) = 6.2%
not sure what the subtractions are (furloughs?), but didn’t you mean to compound?
I’m guessing the subtractions are for union dues. But not for the counterfactual. (Hey, it’s causal inference week at UO Matters!) Anon 2 back, the question isn’t whether we’ll get raises if we have a union. It’s whether they’ll be enough bigger than the raises we’d get without a union.
Yes, the subtractions are for union dues; and no, I didn’t compound.
Raises without a union? Don’t count your chickens.
Well, non-union OSU got raises this year (and so did UO). The article says that PSU salaries were well behind its comparables. They’ve been unionized since 1978. If faculty unions are so great at getting raises, how did they get so far behind in the first place?