01 Nov Administration’s Frightful Bargaining Position
While Halloween is over, frightening things still haunt us…
FACULTY BURIED BY WORKLOAD
How would you feel if your Dean told you next semester you had to teach an additional class without extra pay AND you were expected to keep up the same level of research and service? This happened last year in Applied Health Sciences. While faculty organized and used shared governance to push back, without enforceable contract language on how workloads are defined and updated, no one is protected from unilateral decisions to change faculty workloads.
FACULTY SALARIES FLATLINED
How would you feel if you were told full-time faculty at UIC are paid more than their peers? That is what was presented to the Board of Trustees in September. And just who are our peers? SUNY, Buffalo, U of Alabama at Birmingham, U of Cincinnati, U of Connecticut, U of Louisville, U of South Florida-Tampa, U of Utah, Virginia Commonwealth. However, compared to the other three Research 1 universities in Illinois, UIC tenure system salaries are well below Northwestern and U of Chicago. While comparable to UIUC, the cost of housing in Urbana-Champaign is 16% lower than Chicago. A 2% salary increase – the amount offered by UI administration’s campus wage program for this academic year – barely covers inflation and clearly doesn’t help close the gap.
Source: AAUP 2018 Compensation Survey Excludes part-time faculty members, medical school faculty members, faculty who are primarily administrative officers, and graduate teaching assistants.
While we hope the Administration will prove us wrong, next week we expect them to offer a scarily insufficient raise proposal and the same status-quo zombie proposals we’ve already put to rest on issues like workload. This would be in keeping with what we’ve already seen in our own negotiations, as well as what our fellow UIC unions have experienced (7 months of non-movement for UIC GEO’s contract negotiations, unilateral rewrites by Admin on articles they’d already agreed to with INA).
UIC United Faculty and our fellow unions are not a gaggle of terrified teenagers in a Halloween horror movie. We will send ghastly contract proposals packing and fight for what our members and the UIC community deserve: Fair, Transparent and Accountable workplace policies, and raises that make good on years of salary stagnation. We hope you’ll stand with us in this effort!
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Our next contract bargaining session is Monday, November 5th. Join us in respectfully observing the bargaining process from 2-5pm, at Student Center East, White Oak Room (on the 3rd floor). Even if you can’t be there, we are asking all our members to wear their UICUF T-shirts and pins that day to show solidarity and support for our bargaining team at the table. If you need a T-shirt, pin, or other UICUF materials, email us at UICUnitedFaculty@gmail.com.
Until we win a fair contract, we will be issuing periodic updates via email, facebook, twitter, and here on our website. We strongly encourage everyone to like and follow us on social media. With your support, we can make UIC an even better place to work and learn!
References in hyperlinks:
http://www.trustees.uillinois.edu/trustees/agenda/September-27-2018/r-sep-UIC-Performance-Metrics.pdf
https://www.insidehighered.com/aaup-compensation-survey
https://sites.google.com/a/bu.edu/zhuzhe/publications/3-tiers-of-us-research-universities-ranked-by-carnegie-classification-system
https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-true-cost-of-living-in-chicago