CHAPTER MEETING TOMORROW POSTPONED TO DECEMBER 14The UFF USF Chapter Meeting scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, has been cancelled due to multiple scheduling conflicts. However, we do need another meeting this fall semester, so the last regular Chapter Meeting of the fall semester will be on Friday, December 14, at 12 noon at CDB Restaurant at 5104 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa: that's at the intersection of 51st & Fowler, just east of the USF Tampa campus.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
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IN THIS ISSUEThis is the second of our two-part series on salaries of UFF USF employees. We last surveyed salaries in (October) 2010, when we looked at salaries across the colleges, gender, ethnicity, seniority and salaries, and salaries of year-round faculty and professionals. In the previous issue of the Biweekly, we set the context for the current survey: it's been two years, and UFF will soon be bargaining with representatives of the USF Board of Trustees. In this issue, we look at a longstanding issue not only at USF, but in universities around the country: the extent to which faculty and professional pay is keeping up with inflation. There is a common perception that pay is not keeping up; hence the contract often provides for raises based on "market equity". During this academic year, the only raises (other than counter-offers and compensation to resolve litigation and grievances) available will be Administrative Discretion, and the Administration has the authority to increase the UFF USF payroll by as much as 1 % in order to address special achievement ... and market equity. In this issue, we look at the situation.
SENIORITY AND SALARIESWe now compare 2012 salary versus seniority: we measure seniority by the number of years at that position and rank. There are many reasons why salaries of more senior employees would differ from that of more junior employees: pay raises may or may not have kept up with the market, hiring agenda and the candidate pool may change, employees may have spent several years engaged in a variety of activities that affected their pay, and so on. With these warnings about mixing apples, oranges, and pomegranates, let's take a look. We will use MS Excel's LINEST function, an implementation of (least square fit) linear regression, in which a line is drawn through a collection of data points in a way that minimizes the sum of the squares of the discrepancies (this sum is called the "variance"); this is one of the standard tools in the statistical toolbox. We start with the full professors, focusing on the 239 fulltime active professors on nine month salaries. The scatter diagram below has 2012 salary as the vertical axis and the date of appointment to their current rank and position on their horizontal axis. Notice that professors who were promoted to full long ago tend to have lower salaries than those promoted recently. 
The slope of the regression line is shallow: professors tend to earn $ 88 less for each year they've been at that rank at USF. What is more striking is the large number of recently promoted full professors – and their widely varying salaries. Unlike full professors, associate professors may seek promotion if they are dissatisfied with their compensation, which may have an effect on associate professor salaries versus time at rank. Again, focusing on the 326 fulltime active associate professors on nine month salaries, we see that they tend to earn $ 312 less for each year they've been at that rank at USF. (The vertical axis is current salary, the horizontal is the date of appointment to associate professor rank.) 
Perhaps the most curious results are those of Instructors, Level I and of Distinguished Professors. First of all, for whatever reason, Instructors, Level I tend to earn nearly $ 882 more for each year they've been at USF. The scatter diagram suggests what is happening: 
RAISESAccording to the U. S. Department of Labor's CPI Inflation Calculator, prices have risen 7.44 % in the last four years. Comparing the 716 USF fulltime active employees whose position and compensation arrangements were the same in spring, 2009 (before the 2009 raises in summer), and September 2012, we find that 70 % of them did not receive at least a 7.44 % rise over that period. (Indeed, the calculator says that prices went up 7.82 % over the last three years, and only 29 % of the employees saw their salaries rise that much since spring, 2009.) In fact, the median rise was 4.83 %. Thirty-one saw pay cuts (of up to 41 %), and fifty saw rises of over 20 % (up to 86 %), but those are outliers: the lower quartile saw a rise in base pay of at most 3.54 % while the upper quartile saw pay rises starting at 8.82 %. Looking at all 1038 fulltime employees who were fulltime then, the median rise was 12.6 %, a sign of promotions at work, although with the lower quartile at - 20 %, other transitions were in play, too; the upper quartile was 33.2 %. On the other hand, the 393 fulltime nine-month employees who stayed in the same position saw a 4.6 % median rise, the lower and upper quartiles being 3.5 % and 8.1 %, respectively; incidentally, 4.6 % rise over four years corresponds to a 1.12 % raise per annum. USF's ability to retain faculty and compete for more depends critically on the resources that the state provides. Bargaining is not the only place where UFF will be discussing compensation during this academic year; there is also the spring legislative session. The most effective way to help is to join today. |
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LOGISTICSThe Chapter Meeting tomorrow, Friday, is cancelled. The next Chapter Meeting is Friday, December 14, at 12 noon, at CDB Restaurant on 51st & Fowler, just east of USF Tampa. Salad, pizza, and drinks will be provided by the Chapter, and all UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. Come and join the movement.Membership: All employees in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out and send in the membership form. NOTE: The USF-UFF Chapter website is http://www.uff.ourusf.org, and our e-mail address is uff@ourusf.org. About this broadcast: This Newsletter was broadcast from uff.ourusf.org, hosted at ICDsoft.com, and is intended for all members of the UFF USF Bargaining unit (USF faculty and professionals at most departments). A (usually identical) version will be broadcast to USF-News and USF-Talk from mccolm@usf.edu. If you do not want to receive the UFF Biweekly, you can unsubscribe below. If you do not receive the Biweekly, but want to, contact the publicity chair. |
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