Salary Negotiations Update (August 20, 2006)

Recently, you received an email from VP for Human Resource Services Kyle Cavanaugh, one of the members of the BOT bargaining team, regarding ongoing collective bargaining negotiations, and I am writing in response to that rather misleading memo. I'll address some of the half-truths in his message in a separate email, but today I'm simply going to speak to the salary issues.

There are many reasons why your faculty Bargaining Team has not accepted the BOT proposal on salary raises:

(a) it does not address any of the problems, identified by the Faculty Task Force on Salaries, that your union has been asked to fix -- including the need to establish a stable, systematic salary plan that could eventually move the pay of current UF faculty into the top tier of public research universities;
(b) it is inferior to the package that most of the other universities in the State are giving to their faculty (more on that soon); and
(c) the BOT bargaining team has not budged from their initial proposal of July 13, refusing to move at all toward any of the union positions (first presented in April), even though the union has modified its positions four times in response to administration objections.

There are many objectionable elements in the BOT's proposal -- from the BOT's refusal to bargain a reliable method for compensating faculty who have increased administrative duties to its unwillingness to give individual faculty a breakdown of their raise. But let me focus for now on what may be the three most compelling problems:

1. UF is now tied for last among Florida state universities (with FAMU and UWF, for example) in the size of the raise given for promotions (and promotion-like awards such as SPPP). Most universities have 12% promotion raises, one has 12.5%, one has around 14%. Your union believes that since UF is the flagship university, with the toughest criteria for promotion/SPPP and the most rigorous review process, the BOT should have more respect for UF faculty than to reward such clear demonstrations of merit with the lowest promotion raise in the State.

2. While some departments have good merit pay practices, in most departments there is still little or no correlation between documented performance (presumably based on departmental criteria) and the actual merit raise. There is currently no distribution system to ensure that people found to be meritorious by their colleagues (and the Chair) actually get a merit raise. Moreover, there is currently no way for most faculty to be able to predict, even generally, what their merit raise will be based on their merit rating. Your union is insisting that there be a direct link between your merit rating (i.e., performance evaluation) and your merit raise -- and that if your department's merit criteria are not followed, you can file a grievance and have the misapplication corrected. Such a direct link between performance rating and merit raises now exists at most Florida universities. It still does not exist at UF, and the BOT has thus far refused to negotiate a way to correct or even reduce the problem.

3. The BOT claims that one of its top priorities is to raise faculty salaries at UF to the level of the top ten public universities. However, the BOT bargaining team has refused to agree to any of the existing objective ways to measure that target for any particular rank, specific discipline, or individual faculty member. In other words, it has refused to ensure that the UF average will be raised, in part, by raising significantly the salaries of CURRENT faculty, rather than raising the average mostly by adding well-paid new hires. Faculty have directed the union to negotiate a salary system that ties the salaries of productive faculty to national averages by rank and discipline at comparable research universities. Faculty have also directed the union to negotiate a mechanism whereby departments will have funds to address internal salary inequities due to capricious "lean" funding during a faculty member's most productive year(s). Almost all of the other Florida universities now have mechanisms that do most, if not all, of these things. The BOT is refusing to provide the same for its faculty.

Most people would define bargaining as a process of mutual give and take designed to result in an acceptable compromise solution to any particular issue. By that definition, the BOT has not even started to bargain salaries, since it has not yet budged from its initial proposal, or in any way tried to accommodate the faculty's concerns. That is why we do not yet have an agreement on salary raises.

There is also some encouraging bargaining news. Several very significant improvements in faculty rights have been agreed to, including landmark provisions on academic freedom, which I'll tell you about soon. In all, tentative agreements have been signed on thirteen out of roughly fifty articles and appendices projected to comprise the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (i.e., "the Contract"), plus two Memorandums of Understanding. These completed articles, including the relatively new one on academic freedom, can be viewed at the UFF/UF website: www.uff-uf.org -- then click on the link to "Bargaining."

More information on the language of TA-ed articles, on the Faculty Task Force positions underlying the union salary proposal, and on how to join your colleagues in UFF/UF is also available at www.uff-uf.org.

Sincerely,

Diana Bitz
President, United Faculty of Florida
238 Norman Hall, PO Box 117055
Phone: 392-0274
Email: president@uff-uf.org