Bargaining Series-, Summer, 2003

Bargaining Issues: About Salaries

Salaries always occupy a lot of time in contract negotiations. In the last quarter century, in the bargaining between UFF and the Board of Regents, salary was the only subject that *had* to be discussed annually.
The salary structure for Florida public university faculty divided raises into three components:

• ACROSS THE BOARD. This is not legally "cost of living" for several reasons (such as: it did not keep up with inflation). It simply meant that some raise money was given out at the same percentage rate, or the same flat dollar amoung, to all members of the bargaining unit. Usually, even if the basic raise was a percentage, there was also a minimum raise for each faculty member with at least a "satisfactory" evaluation.
  Unions tend to prefer across the board raises because it minimizes the games management plays. Management (and many employees) dislike it because it doesn't differentiate between more productive and less productive employees.

• MERIT. The individual departments are to develop their own formulas for measuring merit, and then they are also to measure the meritoriousness of their own faculty. This works better in some departments than others.
  A major study conducted for UFF in the late 1990s indicated that faculty prefer merit raises over other kinds, which has influenced UFF's bargaining strategy.

• DISCRETION. Evaluation data is to be forwarded to the colleges, where the deans are to use their own criteria (number of papers published, number of Student Credit Hours generated, pet ownership) to assign raises. While discretionary raises were originally for extraordinary situations --- eg, making counteroffers --- there have been a lot of discretionary raises during the last few years.
  In fact, an obsessive pursuit of discretionary (over merit) raises let to a glitch last year, when the university cleverly worked itself into a situation where no discretionary raises were legal (the old Board of Education had to break several laws to get into such a mess).

• TIPs, PEPs, and EXCELLENCE. Every few years, the Legislature would decide to ... do something ... about low faculty salaries. This would lead to a snazzy program that had faculty jump through hoops to get raises. Each of these programs was based on some passing fad, involved lots of paper work, and lasted only a few years.
  UFF was skeptical of these programs, and insisted that each program be implemented properly (which the USF Administration kept bungling). The recent Presidential Excellence Award scheme suggests that the USF Administration, like the Legislature, continues to want a salary structure based on the psychology of tire sales.

• The union lobbied legislators to fix the glitch, but that would require several million dollars in additional recurring funding (raise money would have to come from SOMEWHERE), and the Legislature never came up with the dough.

• The union's relatively low membership limited the amount of clout it had both in bargaining and in politics. With its low membership, it was unable to make fixing the glitch a higher priority with the Board of Regents.

1. The Salary Structure. Do we want the structure the way it is? Do we want to change it a little? Do we want to change it a lot?
   Major changes may be possible. For example, UFF once (or twice) proposed a Rational Salary Program, based on the step system used at places like the University of California. Instead of having just three ranks (assistant, associate, and full professor), there were 15 "steps," with a promotional raise attached to each. If you were not promoted one year, you just got the across the board raise; if you were promoted, you got the promotional raise in addition to the across the board. The Regents claimed that the Legislature would never approve such a plan, but that, in principle, is no longer an argument as we are no longer state employees.
   One warning: changing something as established as the salary structure is tricky. In bargaining, proposing major changes often produces unpredictable results.
2. The Size of the Raises. Over the years, the glitch has resulted in dramatically lower salaries for Florida professors than comparable professors in other states: according to the USF Administration's own figures (from the Long Range Plan), last year the (weighted) average USF faculty salary was 87 % that of the national average. Despite Florida's climate, Florida is bleeding faculty. Bringing faculty salaries to parity with the nation is one of the priorities of the Strategic Plan approved by the USF Board of Trustees: from 2002 to 2007, the plan called for increasing the weighted average salary by 34 %.
   But again, the money has to come from somewhere. Of course, there may be inefficiencies to cut, but the reality is that Florida universities are seriously underfunded (and even among these, USF is seriously underfunded). Furthermore, the Board of Trustees has already indicated that it prefers to raise the average salary exclusively by raising salaries at the top, which makes it look like most of us make more money than we actually do Hard bargaining may bring us a little more salary money, but to win substantial sums, UFF must help bring money to USF, and make sure that that money goes to salaries. We are talking about getting more state money. And for that, we need to collaborate with the Administration on lobbying.
   For the immediate future, there is (as of this moment) a "done deal" in the Legislature for an average 2 % raise --- and that's before bargaining. Keep fingers crossed.

Bargaining Issues: Academic Freedom

This article is one in a series the Biweekly Newsletter is issuing on important concepts involved in collective bargaining. The chapter membership is developing a bargaining survey which will go to the bargaining unit in the early fall, gauging what are the unit's priorities on different issues.

1. It was understood in ancient times that it would be wise if Kings and the people listened to what sages and minstrels had to say. (And the gods that spoke through prophets and fools might not take kindly to censorship.)
2. Many academics, especially since the Renaissance, tend to see external or administrative authority as a self-serving special interest, which should not be permitted to interfere with a disinterested search for the truth --- a seach that serves the public (or even higher) interests. (Artists and writers have similar sentiments.)
3. Immanuel Kant argued that the enlightened society was one in which everyone in it could argue, as long as she or he agreed to obey civil authority. In his essay, "What Is Enlightenment?" he pointed to Frederick of Prussia as his model of an enlightened ruler. AAUP co-founder Arthur Lovejoy had studied Kant and borrowed this "argue but obey" bargain for several statements on academic freedom early in the 20th century, according to historian of higher education Philo Hutcheson.
4. American constitutional principles protecting the individual's freedom of speech and procedural due process justify academic freedom. The Supreme Court closely aligned academic freedom and the First Amendment in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, and Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the the importance of academic freedom was "almost self-evident:" "To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation" (354 U.S. 234, 250). The courts have not consistently ruled that academic freedom applies as much to individuals as to institutions. But the broader point is that the constitutional principles of free speech and procedural due process are political as well as legal principles, and those principles apply as much to academics as to our neighbors.
5. American political principles favoring protection for corporate and government whistleblowers justify academic freedom. In 2002, Time magazine named three whistleblowers as their "People of the Year," because they had risked their jobs and reputations to point out problems they saw in corporate and government action (or, in the case of FBI agent Coleen Rowley, inaction). The political support for whistleblowing should be one of the foundations for academic freedom. College and university faculty are whistleblowers in the deepest sense, telling their students, colleagues, and the general public uncomfortable truths about the conventional wisdom, the various flavors of political correctness, and the prevailing habits of the society.

Bargaining Issues: Tenure

1. Tenure is not the only device for protecting academic freedom. In many nations, faculty at public universities are protected by civil service regulations.
2. Since tenure originated in the feudal system as something like a property right (and in industry, it still is a sort of property right), the law regards tenure as a sort of property right.

1. Post-tenure review. The idea is that every few years, a tenured faculty member would be reviewed to determine if (s)he still deserved tenure. This undermines both the academic freedom and property rights components of tenure, although the innovation is too recent to tell if there has been any impact other than generating more forms to fill out.
2. The proliferation of non-tenure-track lines. Some instructional lines are comparable to assistant professorship lines, without the offer of tenure; and then there are the growing number of adjuncts paid (following the logic of Florida law) about $ 12/hour. At USF, about half the student credit hours are generated by adjuncts.

. It is the result of a quarter century of bargaining between UFF and the Board of Regents, and thus is a compromise. The Administration currently contends the policy is that outlined in Rule 6C4-ER03-65 (on-line in a short .pdf document at .
In practice, tenure means that a tenured faculty member *will* be reappointed each year unless retired, resigned, dismissed for just cause, or laid off.
The normal process is for a faculty member to get on a tenure-earning line, and in the sixth year, apply for tenure. At this point the Agreement and the New Rules diverge. The Agreement requires that there be criteria for granting tenure, and severely restricts fiddling with the documentation submitted with the tenure application; the New Rules are silent on these points. Neither mandate the mas- sive review that many tenure-track faculty endure during the third or fourth year of their probation- ary period: that is the Administration's own invention.
As for the process in the sixth year: the applicant constructs a packet (current fashion, and not the Agreement, requires that the packet be huge), which (s)he submits to the Department. This is the biggest hurdle: typically, one (almost always) must be supported by one's own Department to get tenure. From the Department it goes to the College, usually to a college committee of faculty, which makes a recommendation to the Dean. (Since some departments are serious about the decisions they make, and others tend to want the College to make their decisions for them, this committee needs a nearly psychic ability to divine the Department's true intentions. Past history of grievances is strong evidence against the existence of said psychic powers.) Then the Dean makes a decision, and the packet goes to the Provost's office, which usually supports the previous decisions except when it does not. The Provost's decision is usually rubber-stamped by the President and the Board.
The tenure process tends to be the most prob- lematic part of the whole tenure operation. Many of the most difficult grievances are by faculty who were denied tenure (and some of the violations grieved read like satire). Unfortunately, under the Agreement, if a faculty member is denied tenure, and in the grievance process can prove to an impartial arbitrator that the denial was improper, the best that that faculty member can hope for, under the Agreement, is another shot at the tenure process: in the grievance process under the Agreement, an arbitrator may not require the university to give tenure.
And of course, USF has its own post-tenure review system, the Sustained Performance Evalua- tions described in the Agreement's Article 10. These are supposed to rely on the annual evalua- tions, and their function is largely punitive (don't expect a favorable sustained performance evaluation to result in a big raise). Interest- ingly, the New Rules do not provide for Sus- tained Performance Evaluations.
UFF's position on tenure is straightforward. UFF supports tenure as a pillar of academic freedom, and as a property right of the faculty it represents. UFF has no interest in winning tenure for weak faculty, but as the USF Administration has a history of botching the tenure process, UFF has a strong interest in making sure that (a) there is a coherent tenure process and that (b) the Adminis- tration abides by it. The Administration is not enthusiastic about (a) or (b), and it will be interesting to see what the Administration wants when bargaining resumes.

Bargaining Issues: Benefits

Different people take different views of benefits. To some of us, benefits are as essential as salary, and to be scrutinized as thoroughly. To others, benefits are an impenetrible thicket of legal jargon, to be left alone on the presumption that when we need the benefit it will, like magic, be there.
Let's begin at the beginning: what is a benefit? A "benefit" in contract law is, according to Black's Law Dictionary, a "legal right to which he would not otherwise be entitled." Our employment contracts, which would (in a previous century) entitle us to a salary, now entitle us to "adequate and affordable" health insurance, free university courses, a number of "employee assistance programs," "a pre-tax benefits program," etc, etc, etc.
There are three points to be made about these benefits.

1. First, tooting the union's horn, benefits were not given to employees by grateful and generous employers. They were won by decades of determined union activity. And they are expensive: many employers would get out of them if they could. (Indeed, a few of them do, legally or otherwise.) Although many employers offer them because the market demands them, continued union pressure maintains the bar on what benefits should be. This means:
2. Protecting benefits means protecting the contract. Without the contract, we are relying on the continuing goodwill of the Administration. Once again, courts are very respectful of contracts, and a benefit written into a contract is a lot safer than one granted by an employer who could withdraw it tomorrow. But this leads to:
3. Benefits are complicated things. There are a lot of details to get right, and some of these details belong in the contract --- while others do not. There are two complications:
   • There are many benefits, from the right of retirees to a departmental mailbox (Article 24, Section 4, Subsection (b), item (8)), to sabbaticals (Article 22, Section 3). Someone knowledgeable about one benefit may not be knowledgeable about another.
   • Unlike other issues, in which there are only two parties, many benefits are actually provided by third parties, like the State of Florida (if you are in the Florida Retirement Service plan) or an investment company (if you are in one of the other plans) or even an insurance company. There are a lot of details to get right, and some of these details belong in the contract --- while others do not.