AAUP Bargaining Recap for April 19

The negotiating teams for the administration and the PSU-AAUP met on April 19. Because we had brought three new counter-proposals the previous week, the AAUP had no proposals to bring this time. The Administration’s Negotiating Team offered a counter-proposal for Salary, but nothing for Benefits or Retrenchment. Below is a summary of our discussion:

Salary (ANT) – Since this was the only proposal we discussed, we have divided this recap into three sections:

• In their latest proposal, the administration is still only offering a 1% raise this year. Before taxes, that’s a little under $14.50 per week for faculty making $75K. They increased their offer for one-time merit bonuses for select faculty this year from .5% to 1%. Likewise, their proposed salary increases for 2019 and 2020 remain at 1.5% per year. We pointed out, again, how hard the faculty have worked over the past few years to realize the vision of integrated clusters — and how the chaotic transition has made that work even more difficult to achieve. Faculty have carried this heavy load despite being the lowest-paid tenure-track faculty in the system and, according to the administration’s own numbers, significantly behind the average of our comparators.
• The ANT’s latest proposal included a new element: in 2019 and 2020, for every full 1% of positive margin (up to 4%), they offered to set aside .5% of total salaries (up to 2%) for one-time merit bonuses for select faculty. We reminded them that one-time bonuses are poor substitutes for reasonable increases to base-salary, which offer long-term security for faculty and contribute to their retirement funding. Too, we are concerned these bonuses are determined by factors that are largely out of our control. Much of our discussion around salary has centered on the fact that faculty–who directly or indirectly generate 100% of the revenue of the university–have no control over the spending. Instructional spending has diminished in the last few years while the priority has shifted to consultants, major software purchases/developments, website redesigns, and rising spending on administrative salaries. Therefore, it seems profoundly unfair to tie faculty compensation to administrative spending.
• Finally, the administration raised their offer on overload compensation to $1200 per credit in 2018-19, and to $1300 thereafter. We appreciate the ANT is willing to move on this, but this offer is still well below our request for $1900 per credit. Because overload teaching can be especially difficult — particularly when it is necessitated by chronic under-staffing, last-minute requests from the administration, or by emergencies within departments — we believe fair pay for overload teaching is not merely a compensation issue, it is a workload issue.  

Both negotiating teams agreed that we need more time to work out the last few (but important) issues in this contract. Consequently, we scheduled two additional meetings for May 23 and June 4.

Our next bargaining session is scheduled for May 3.

Proposals that have been resolved and those that are still on the table: