It’s still a pay cut (assuming the revenue shortfall is large enough to trigger it) and it does nothing to constrain JH from pissing away money on the Phildo, Law School, etc. The cuts will apply to faculty and OAs – I’m not sure if that will include Knight Campus faculty & administrators. In exchange the administration agrees to take its pistol away from the heads of the 211 NTTFs up for renewal this year and give them full 1.0 FTE contracts. Here’s the UAUO explanation:
UA Town Hall
United Academics invites all members of United Academics to a Town Hall on Tuesday, August 4 from noon to 1:30. The Zoom link is below.
Please submit your question(s) here. We will also take questions during the meeting, but advance notice allows for us to make sure your questions are addressed. If you are unable to attend live, a recording of the meeting will be available on our website.
We have a deal!
After four weeks of tough bargaining, we struck a tentative deal with the administration over the restoration of FTE, a progressive salary cut package, and the outlines of how we will revise the system for employing Career faculty. The bargaining team believes this is a good deal and a vast improvement on the salary cut plan offered in April.
Before we get to the details, the bargaining team would like to give a hearty thank you to all the members who tuned in to watch. Over 200 unique viewers joined some part of the sessions. Bargaining via Zoom is new to all of us, and it felt very different not to have the live feedback of supporters in the room, but we were constantly cheered knowing that people were with us (if at a safe distance).
We were not able to reach any agreement on a new Tenure Reduction Plan (TRP) or a buyout program for those wishing to retire. We agreed to meet to try to find agreement in the coming months, because both parties agree that the system needs revising, but both parties felt there was too much uncertainty about what faculty would want and what the administration can afford to change right now. We also will discuss whether we can find a way to help those faculty who are currently in their three years before going on reduced TRP hours to avoid taking a permanent cut to their retirement benefits.
We are still dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on this tentative agreement; when that is done, we will send out information on a ratification vote along with the finalized text of a Memorandum of Understanding. We will be voting on the FTE restoration and salary cut portions of the Agreement. We still have about a month of work to do on the system for Career contracts before it is ready for the membership to vote on it; expect to see the details of that plan in October.
A Summary of our Agreement with the Administration.
FTE fully restored: All Career faculty who received renewal notices in May with lowered FTE will have their FTE restored to the same FTE they held in AY19-20. All Career faculty who were issued new contracts due to receiving a promotion will have their FTE restored to the FTE they held in AY19-20.
Withdrawn promotions: Career faculty who had their promotion submitted to the Provost but withdrew their file can opt to have their file reviewed by the Provost as if it had not been withdrawn. The review should be complete before the start of the academic year.
Reduced amount of salary cut: The agreed-upon employee salary cut is up to $20M over one year. In April, the administration’s proposal called for up to $100M in employee salary cuts over four years.
Threshold: The Agreement calls for the administration to mitigate the first $15 million of any losses and any losses over $35 million. Employee salary cuts will mitigate losses between $15 million and $35 million. The administration’s April PPR called for all losses to be addressed immediately through salary cuts.
Lowered the rates for the lowest earners: The chart below calculates the effective salary cut for employees at selected base salary levels with a comparison to the comparable rates in the April PPR plan. Cuts do not impact stipends, awards, or overloads.
Percentage cut for salaries of the Tentative Agreement vs. the Administration’s April PPR.
Our plan is for one year; theirs was for up to four.
Although we were not able to bargain for a higher tier, we were able to raise the amount of the cut on those earning more than $200,000 from an April 16% rate to 18% rate. The money from this increase was used to raise the floor of the cuts from $30K in the administration’s April proposal to $45K in the Agreement.
Delayed implementation: There are two possible times that the salary cut plan could be triggered. If the university experiences a tuition deficit and/or a cut in state funding in November greater than $15 million, the administration could trigger wage cuts to save enough to make up for a decrease in revenue between $15 million and $35 million.
It is more likely that the salary cut plan will be triggered next summer. The administration can wait until summer 2021 and trigger the salary cut plan by combining losses due to tuition revenue decreases, cuts to promised state support, and state support in the 2021-23 biennium budget.
The salary cut plan can only be triggered once and there can be no more than 12 months of salary cuts.
Research faculty exempt: Because their salary derives mostly from grants, research assistants, research associates, research professors, and post docs will be exempt from the wage cut plan. This is unchanged from the administration’s PPR plan.
The details of the above summaries will be sent to all members of the union shortly, along with information on the ratification vote.
Expectation of Continued Employment
The bargaining teams also agreed to the basis of a new system for employing non-funding contingent instructional Career faculty. We believe this will be a much better system, but there are many details to work out, as it will impact several articles in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Below is a summary of the key points. More information will be shared as we work on the details.
No more contracts and renewals: The current system of one-, two-, and three-year contracts is vastly better than having no job security at all. We have, however, run into some fairly significant problems. As Deans ordered cuts, departments and units were forced to choose among the faculty who happened to be up for renewal. This led to situations where only faculty who had achieved promotion could be non-renewed, which was not always ideal. We also saw an increase in contracts that offered low FTE in the second and third years of contracts – 1.0, 0.1, 0.1 contracts. And, of course, we had the events of this spring, a disaster we cannot allow to be repeated.
The system described below would address many of these issues and only applies to non-funding contingent Career faculty. It will not be perfect, and it will not guarantee that a Career faculty member can never lose their job, but we believe that this will be a much better system with stronger protections than our current one.
Expectation and rationale: Non-funding contingent Career faculty will have the expectation of continued employment that can only be ended for legitimate financial, academic, or performance reasons after the first year of employment. Career faculty in their first year can be laid off for any reason.
Notice: Career faculty in their first year can be laid off with 30 days’ notice. Faculty in their second year, but who have not achieved promotion can be laid off with 90 days’ notice. Faculty who have achieved promotion must be given 12 months’ notice before the layoff goes into effect.
Earned seniority: Layoffs are based on the functions and skills required to perform necessary work, but layoffs will generally follow earned seniority. This means that Career faculty who have not earned promotion will be laid off before Senior I faculty and Senior I before Senior II.
Expedited arbitration: Faculty who have received a layoff notice will be able to challenge the legitimacy of the layoff through an expedited binding arbitration process. The goal will be to have the layoff notice formally reviewed before it goes into effect. This system will replace the current grievance-arbitration system that can take several months to complete.
FTE maintenance: Assigned FTE cannot go down, except by mutual agreement between the faculty member and university.
Rehire at same FTE: While we have not worked out a complete recall system, we have agreed that faculty members hired back by the university into the same category – instructor, research assistant, research associate, lecturer, librarian, etc. – cannot be hired at a lower FTE than what they held before they were laid off.
Though we have more work to do to complete the full contract bargaining we began in January, and though our current circumstances have complicated all of these processes, we believe the agreement we have reached is a good one. The bargaining team, again, appreciates all the support we have received. Without member support and participation, we would not have been able to sustain our energy and determination through this unusual time, and we would not have reached such a favorable agreement.
Ultimatum means last offer: take it or leave it. That’s really the whole point of the ultimatum. Of course it works best when there’s some sort of machine to trigger the threat automatically, without human intervention, if the offer is rejected. So I was very excited to hear your VP B.S. bragging on Zoom about his machine. Then it turned out he just meant that he had got someone to make him a spreadsheet. If only there was some sort of movie that explained game theory simply enough that administrators could understand it.
What is the business about cuts likely not happening until next summer? That seems like false hope. The same way the messaging 2 months ago was that by taking a permanent pay freeze, we would be preventing pay cuts. So be honest to us, given we have to plan our lives around pay and pay cuts. We will likely get pay cuts in NOvember, unless things turn around a ton with enrollment rights?
No false advertising. No hope for the best. Give it to us real with no sugar coating.
We are voting for a pay cut. And we will likely face some sort of pay cut.
And there’s no guarantee it will only be for 1 year. We just might be negotiating again about it next summer.
Was there no discussion of the tuition guarantee and the temporary increase in revenue it will bring? Isn’t that a 10 percent increase in tuition for incoming freshmen?? Or is the assumption that no freshmen are coming to campus?
Also based on TTF/NTTFs, this contract is a win for NTTFs, and a wash or loss for TTF. The only “win” is taxing admins more, by also taxing a very business profs (and our old provost) more. Hopefully the union recognizes their pattern of negotiation/concessions the next time they bargain. But I worry they know, they just don’t care.
“The administration can wait until summer 2021 and trigger the salary cut plan by combining losses due to tuition revenue decreases, cuts to promised state support, and state support in the 2021-23 biennium budget.”
Wait–What??? The faculty will hold the administration harmless if it does not secure good funding from the legislature during the next session?
There are so many things wrong with this I don’t know where to start. First, when have faculty ever taken salary cuts due to state funding cuts? Freezes, yes–but salary cuts? Second, against what benchmarks are we going to measure our outcomes? I certainly hope our union has clearly specified numbers for “promised support!” That is begging for opportunism by J-Hall. Third, it tells the state legislature that the last $20 million they give to UO might well go directly to salaries for faculty rather than for keeping tuition down or other priorities they actually care about. Good luck getting them to back that–it is asking for a cut in our support.
I’d also like to know how much of the incremental amount “taxed” away from high income individuals, as compared to the April set of numbers, is coming from TTF as opposed to administrators.
There’s a slight game here. We are not telling the governor cutting funding cuts salaries which discourages them from doing that.
Now not “not”
Now, what does UO decide Aug 26?
Some things are becoming clear. Others remain murky. First, it has become clear that NTTF and TTF have different interests and should not be in the same bargaining unit. People would not willingly enter a bargaining unit knowing that they would be asked to sacrifice their own families’ interests for the sake of other people’s jobs or FTE percentage. Especially when some of them are still paying a high price to move forward in their fields. Second, it seems unwise to advertise that we are willing to take pay cuts. If I were working on the State side, I would immediately count those cuts as part of the funds available to the University–and I would deal from that standpoint. Third, the protection of pay for people in their last three years of tenure is mission critical. This potentially affects their retirement benefits–i.e. the rest of their lives. And it cannot be made up. Finally, this degradation of working conditions for TTF does not make the long-term future look good. We are in the middle of all kinds of proof of concept experiments that may lead to structural changes very few of us want. Right now, it doesn’t feel like the union is keeping up with all this. I am, though, deeply thankful for its efforts!
It was clear to some of us early on the NTTF and TTF should not
be the same union. The research profiles are so vastly different
and that produces much different priorities. There was talk of this
early on. The Union organizers point was always that under state law, the definition of “faculty” included NTTF and TTF and therefore a faculty union is required. However, I fully realize that few, if any, are likely to believe following.
I did talk to many of lawyer friends in portland and elsewhere. The consensus was that the Union organizers point is consistent with State Law but it can be interpreted other ways. At this early time, if the TTF were sufficiently aggressive on this legal issue it might have caused the Union to be organized differently,
More importantly, at this time (2012) there were slightly more than 2 times more NTTF than TTF – therefore the union could have formed without a TTF voting positive at all. I think at this time most TTF didn’t give a shit that they would be mixed in with NTTF under the common umbrella that teaching is the only thing a faculty does …
Like I said, I doubt anyone will believe the above
Indeed, when you advertise this wage cut plan to the state, they’d be cool with it. The lowest earners are protected, and the highest paid people take the biggest hit? If anything this might guarantee state budget cuts so they can redistribute more money to other holes they have to fill.
What is your preferred alternative?
There’s a lot to be happy with here. I’m breathing easier knowing that the NTTFs are coming back in better shape. Thanks to everyone who worked on this. I’m guessing you don’t get thanked enough..
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the claim that this is the best that the union could have done. Why not hold out for some form of deferred compensation with well defined triggers for future raises, for example? Or demand that the pay cuts come in the form of an effective loan, whereby this money will be returned to the employees with higher priority than other future university spending (such as building new temporary athlete housing/permanent dorms)? Or why not reduced FTE rather than pay cuts, so as not to devalue our work?
If the union leadership really believes that they have so little bargaining power to fight on behalf of their members, then of what value is the union?
Define “hold out”.
[“hold out”](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/holdout): to refuse to go along with others in a concerted action or to come to an agreement (this is definition 2 from Meriam Webster). But I don’t think that’s what you really meant. Instead, I think that you are asking what levers of power does the union have in order to achieve a more favorable outcome. And the answer there is manifold. The union can of course strike, or engage in work slowdowns or work-to-rule. The union can exert political power through lobbying. The union can [work without a contract](https://www.labornotes.org/2013/02/working-without-contract-strategy-whose-time-has-come), which provides certain novel powers. The union can engage in brinksmanship. Fundamentally, as in any conflict, the union can demonstrate to the administration that failure to meet (at least some of) the union’s demands will result in an unacceptable outcome for the administration.
Heraclitus, does that answer your question?
I tell my students that they should never start their papers with a definition from Websters, but my comment was oblique, and so your answer is fair enough.
I do not think that any of the strategies you list are at all realistic in these very special circumstances. First, we are not making a new CBA, so working without a contract is not relevant (those without a contract will not be working). Second, I do not think that there is a gnat’s crotchet of a chance that the UA membership would approve *any* kind of industrial action over the issues currently being bargained, and I believe admin sees it the same way. The bargaining that just happened was about the best we can do in terms of brinkmanship (as in, can we just get this done already?). Lobbying is more of a long term strategy.
I assume that admin has made the concessions that they have in order to prove good faith for future CBA negotiations (perhaps that’s your point about an ‘unacceptable outcome’?); also because they started with a lowball offer (the hostage situation) that they were happy to move up from.
This is all just, like, my opinion man, and if your judgment is different, I don’t have much in the way of data to argue. Still, what specific strategies, in this specific context, do you think could have improved this outcome? I’m not arguing to argue here: as an NTTF I have skin in this game, but I’m also really interested in what we can learn about labor relations in extreme contexts here, since I’m still not entirely sure why the admin chose to bargain rather than act by fiat. I wish Missy would tell us.
The value for TTFs is zero. I am curious, though, how many TTFs will stop paying into the union after this collaps. Unfortunately, there is no other signal we can send about what we think about them. Interesting experiment.
One cannot read the OP and come to this conclusion. For one thing, any TTF that make less than about 115K are better off under this plan than the one originally proposed in April just in terms of size of salary cut. That helps a lot of TTFs and some earning more than that are exempt as research folks with external support. This plan only envisions a single cut in a single year – obviously other cuts may still happen but they moved from certain to possible. That is an advantage for TTF. The UO will under this plan absorb the first $15 million instead of dollar one in cuts coming from faculty salaries alone, including TTF cuts. That is a benefit for TTF. There is much left to be desired about this deal and much to fight for in the future but the statement the “value for TTFs is zero” is erroneous and highly misleading. Most faculty, NTTF and TTF alike, are better off under this deal than the one in April that initiated bargaining. More to the point, how much worse would the damage have been absent the union and these negotiations? Sometimes it appears faculty opposing the union imagine a fantasy world where without the union the administration would shower TTF with more money, research support, and course releases.
This is just demonstrably false. The admin’s initial plan was a $25 million / year cut for up to 4 years. The agreement is for a potential one year, $20 million cut. Every single employee (including TTFs and others) benefits from the union’s push to reduce the timespan and the maximum reduction.
Even relative to the $20 million scenario floated in April (the table in this post), any TTF earning less than ~$120,000 (which I suspect is the majority of them) will experience a smaller cut.
Yes, but the administration’s proposal was based on the clear emphasis by the union on protecting NTTFs. Without the union, the starting point might well have been different–and reflect a differing focus by the administration. For our most senior TTF and those in higher-paid fields, it’s hard to believe without the union they would not have been better off than where they wound up. The prospect of a cut of up to 18%–even for a year–sends an incredibly strong signal to critical TTF faculty that we scour the world to hire and cointinually fight to retain. And it is not an encouraging one for the future.
Maybe, but junior faculty have been being hired closer to market rates. The middle-earner TTF’s who have also been subject to most salary compression have a higher hit in this deal. Some of us only just got slight raises that finally bring us closer to AAU averages. Don’t forget the loss of COLA and merit that happened in a blink in the first ‘negotiations’ – merit is about the only way to continue inching forward these days. So that permanent loss for this year and probably near future is a permanent deficit that probably wipes out most of the recent AAU-based negotiations.
I also don’t see many safeguards or transparencies regarding the potential summer 2021 trigger.
It would be interesting if admin negotiated with the faculty senate instead of a union.
You’re ignoring many joint salaries at UO. One person is lecturer, other a tenured professor. She gets a pay hit while he get’s a raise. No one won anything.
Also nothing in this agreement prevents future cuts. We’d just bargain again next time, which unions love. They love to bargain as it justifies dues. That’s why the raises or floors aren’t just pegged to CPI.
Now it is clear that the union values instructors over tenured faculty. The conflict between instructors and tenured faculty was present from day one of the union (and post-docs and “pro-tems”). The union should always start from the position that there is no university without TTFs. You can slice and dice away your admins, custodians, and instructors but at the end you still need TTFs to have a university. The union seems to want to sacrifice TTFs for instructors which is backwards.
The dichotomy you pose between “instructors” and TTF is problematic. TTF *are* instructors. The Admin’s attacks–and that is what they are, attacks–on instructional NTTF is an attack on the pedagogical dimension of our vocation as TTF professors and on the pedagogical mission of the University. Threatening to eliminate large numbers of our colleagues who primarily do instructional work, as if they are expendable temp workers, is an act of respect for all of us who share in that work.
The deal we ended up with did slice the admin salaries more than others. And the cuts reached further down into ranks of classified staff and low paid instructors than I as a TTF think is fair or progressive. So complaining we didn’t shove more of the cost off on our other lower paid colleagues is…ugly. The pandemic is going to cost the institution–maybe quite a bit. Expecting everyone else, including our custodial colleagues and lowest paid instructional colleagues, to take the salary hits or layoffs in order to avoid TTF taking a *possible* one-year relatively small salary reduction is the worst kind of uninformed aristocratic mewling. You should have ended your comment with “let them eat cake.”
NTTFs do not supervise graduate student PHDs and most of them,
but not all of them, don’t have PI status. This is a significant distinction, particularly at a research University.
Yes, there are differences in responsibilities–but also overlap. The differences, imo, do not justify treating one class of employees as temp workers and the other as some kind of privileged class of whom nothing should be asked in a crisis. Similarly, being a research university does not mean the instructional mission of the university is eclipsed entirely in significance. The fact that we have a budget crisis based on concerns about enrollment illustrates that the university depends on its instructional mission more than its research mission to function. We are in this together fiscally, vocationally, and ethically. To face a crisis, and then look at the lowest paid employees on campus, and say “throw them overboard before asking me to lift a finger to assist” is craven. Most TTF I work with do not feel this way.
I believe that Dog is pointing out that given the differences in responsibilities, which I too think are large, the two differences should not be in the same union.
TTF don’t all have the same responsibilities either, especially in professional schools, which used to regularly hire the folks we now call instructors and professors of practice on tenure tracks. Almost all (perhaps all) research universities have professional schools.
Some TTF have relatively heavy teaching loads; some do not. Some TTF supervise doc students; some do not. At one time, professors who did not have Ph.D.s typically didn’t do research, at least not as it’s typically construed, but many did high-level professional work in addition to teaching a normal tenure-track load. And students benefited greatly. I’m both a Ph.D. and a longtime professional, and I’ve been around here since tenure track was the default for full-time faculty. In my opinion, that was a better system. Others, no doubt, will disagree. But at least at that point there was a belief that we were all in it together. Now, it’s too easy to foment division between the groups. If TTF and Career had separate unions, the administration would more easily be able to divide and conquer. Why make it easier on them than it already is?
I assume UA member is a TTF – come this fall if you still have a job and students to “teach” then you should be thankful. You are better off than many Americans. These are strange times, perhaps irrational times (like war) – it is a place where rational judgement often makes no sense.
I am an older TTF on my way out but I am happy to still get a paycheck at this point.
But I still would like to point out that now, essentially August 1,
we have no idea how much enrollment is done relative to last August 1. Somebody knows for sure, but that information is not forthcoming and that information I think, is one thing that the union should have demanded to know. For example, if we know now that we are down by 20% for enrollment, then I would expect to take a 20% pay cut…
I don’t think that’s enough. I don’t think a 20% cut in enrollment should affect everyone the same. As I said, there’s no university without tenured faculty. Chop away your (costly) administrators, instructors, humanities gtfs, and classified before you touch tenured faculty. There is a point of no return – if we lose too many TTFs we don’t have a university and yet the union wants tenured faculty to take all the risks to save instructors. Should we take a cut on a 20% enrollment drop? Maybe, but only after severe cuts to everyone else.
I agree with Taow. The idea that we won’t lose some of our best TTF’s because there are no other opporunities is absurd. We’ve worked hard to build up an excellent group of productive researchers. But right now, there are job openings in our field at other well-regarded research universities and we are already talking about who we are most at risk of losing.
I don’t think there is anything in this agreement that prevents UO from offering retention raises, as are allowed under the CBA.
But let’s flip this around: There’s no university without paying students and paying students want good teachers for their classes and much of that quality teaching is provided by instructors and GTFs. Are you so vain you think students come here because of your research? Please. That’s Shelton-level hubris. I suppose all the TTF earning more than 115K, those that “lose” under this deal, setting aside the various other benefits of the deal, will take those offers in hand from other places and leave this December if the plan is triggered. Right. Because only the UO is experiencing budget problems during this pandemic. We might lose our best TTF to those dozens of institutions with hundreds of open TTF lines with attractive startup packages! Stanford and Columbia beckon! Thankfully, those that don’t leave will be thrilled to pick up the teaching slack that pays the bills of the university. Right. Look, a vanishingly small share of TTF at UO bring in sufficient grant funding to fully cover all the costs of their employment (and those that do are largely exempted from cuts in this deal). That means those that do the much of the teaching here – instructors and GTFs – pay our damn salaries and make it possible for us to do more research. Our privilege is purchased by their poverty and precarity. I do agree we could probably fire half our administrators without any noticeable reduction in teaching or research quality. And no administrator should make more than 200K. That is just gross and there is zero in recent history to suggest they are worth it. It is the enduring hubris of the affluent to believe their compensation reflects their inner value rather than their class position.
I’ll ignore some of what you’re writing about hubris and class to focus on one thing – the union just offered up to cut the salaries of my colleagues MORE than the University had proposed (look at the charts posted here). Think about that. The group that emails TTFs about how much the university has it out for faculty agreed to cut some of our best TTFs by more than what the university proposed. That alone highlights that perhaps the interests of TTFs are not in line with the interests of the union. As the union sacrifices TTFs to save instructors, do tenured faculty members, pro-tems, post-docs, and instructors all have a shared interest that is represented here? You can believe that the university would function fine with just instructors and GTFs and I think that with this deal the union showed those are the interests that matter.
Again, to me, historically this about the issue the research profiles matter NOT to the union and am no longer sure how much they matter to the University – that is all that matters to the Knight Campus
The union “agreed to cut some of our best TTFs by more than what the university proposed”
.
No we didn’t. The administration proposed a 2-year cut plan, renewable for another 2 years, with no requirement that JH put anything in the pot first. This plan is much better, even for those making $200K+. They will pay for 1 year, not 2 or 4. (Unless of course things are still shit in 3 years, in which case all bets are off regardless of what deal we sign).
There’s no promise the cuts are only for one year. We could be at the table again next summer. In fact, union folks say they expect to be.
No one knows enrollment numbers for new students. It hasn’t opened yet.
registration for fall term started on June 1
Not for new students. Just for continuing students.
okay so where does enrollment stand for continuing students relative to this time last year?
I wasn’t aware of this (from Matella’s FAQ):
Will multi-year contracts be issued under this new MOU?
No. The increased FTE applies to the conservative FTE contracts previously issued. Under the MOU, those contracts have an end date of June 2021.
So even if someone earned a multiple year contract, they only get a year contract? And have to deal with the same BS next year?