Where's Our Money?

If you opened your paycheck or checked your banking information this week and noticed no change in your wage, you’re not hallucinating. We have been working for 31 days without a contract and therefore 31 days without a raise, and if past practice is any indication, our wages will remain stagnant until a new contract is signed.

When the 2% campus merit salary program was announced for this academic year, management made the conscious decision to withhold these wage pools from bargaining unit members while the contract was being negotiated, though this is by no means required by law. Our now-expired contract prescribes percentage merit increase for each bargaining unit or the campus salary program (CSP), whichever is greater. The campus salary program (CSP) is a merit raise decided upon at the system level and implemented by each university’s administration; faculty and staff not covered by a bargaining unit receive a raise up to the amount specified starting on their first paycheck of the academic year. Because we are currently working without a contract, we should be entitled to that 2% raise pool.

However, management has declined to act. Chancellor Miranda could decide to release CSP-funded raises until our contract is settled, but she hasn’t. She is making a choice, one that shows where her and management’s priorities lie. We should take note.

This withholding is as maddening as it is predictable. Our bargaining team started the bargaining process by submitting full contracts for both NTT and TT faculty – including proposals on compensation – yet as a result of management’s lack of urgency and utter unseriousness, we are still bargaining and still without the raises necessary to keep up with inflation.

Management’s NTT Compensation counterproposals would have us slide further backwards economically. (We still haven’t received the tenure-track version of Compensation, so we have no clue what management will counter for TT faculty.) Management’s counterproposal on compensation would:

• Eliminate both compression and equity raise pools. Compression is a situation where there is little or no pay difference between people with different levels or experience or rank–or even an inverse relationship. For example, if a faculty member who has taught at UIC for 15 years earns nearly the same amount as a faculty member who was just hired, the first faculty member’s wages are compressed. Equity pay addresses more general unfairness in pay between peers doing the same work. In past contracts (pre-2022), equity was paid as a percentage. Management maintains that both problems have been “solved.”
• Eliminate the lump sum payment. In our last contract, we won an across-the-board, dollar-amount raise in addition to merit percentage increases. These raises, which aren't based on percentages, disproportionately help those with the lowest salaries and mitigate the growing differences in pay between tenure-system and non-tenure system faculty. Our proposal maintains these across-the-board, dollar-amount raises.
• Include no raise in minimum salaries that secure basic fairness for our lowest paid colleagues. (For example, the minimum salary for Lecturers and Clinical/Research/Teaching Assistant Professors of $60,000 back in 2022 would need to be at least $68,000 to keep up with today’s inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. Our proposal is $70,000 to keep ahead of inflation and hopefully support these members through a two-year contract.)
• Limit the only raise we receive to merit raises dictated by the system through the campus salary program.
  The campus salary program as a whole – its construction, implementation, and distribution – remains a mystery. During the most recent bargaining session, our bargaining co-chairs asked management a series of questions meant to expose how opaque the campus salary program (CSP) is. They asked who determines the CSP; what are the guidelines for its development; could the president or chancellor change the CSP in the middle of the year (say, in the event of a crisis); could the CSP offer a higher salary to certain departments or colleges than others, or different bargaining units (TT vs NTT)?

Management admitted that they did not have any answers.

The lack of readily available answers to these basic questions underlines a lack of administrative transparency, especially when it comes to financial matters. Accepting management’s counterproposal of the campus salary program instead of continuing to bargain our own raises would give management unchecked and unaccountable control over our salaries, a mandatory subject of bargaining and one of our most fundamental rights as union members. It would be dangerous to accept management’s counterproposal of the campus salary program and effectively give up our legal right as a union to bargain over our salaries, overall weakening the union and our power.

The CSP is unserious and unacceptable.

Professional Development Funds
Need a new computer? Need access to publication subscriptions or up-to-date technology? Need to renew organizational memberships or attend a conference? Management’s position is: not until the next contract is signed. Some departments are reporting that management is withholding PD funds and delaying approval of new purchases until the next contract is settled. The extent of this issue is unclear, but Chancellor Miranda could also decide to release professional development stopgap funding, or give clear and transparent directives to departments on how to handle PD expenses without a contract, but she hasn’t.

In the next contract, management wants to keep the status quo for professional development funds of $1000 and an additional $750 for travel despite rampant inflation and skyrocketing flight and accommodation costs. Management is also trying to maintain the status quo for technology allowances, budgeting only $1,600 for new computers (not including relevant computing accessories) in a time where tariffs are increasing prices.

The status quo does not meet the moment.

We are fighting for a forward-thinking, problem-solving contract that fairly compensates faculty workers for the jobs they are performing in continued unprecedented inflation and economic uncertainty. A fair contract now.