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UFF Biweekly
United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter
26 May 2016
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Chapter Meeting Tomorrow on Tampa

The UFF USF Chapter will meet tomorrow, Friday, at 12 noon in Temple Terrace, just east of USF Tampa, at CDB Restaurant (5104 E. Fowler Ave., at 51st & E. Fowler). Everyone is invited to the Chapter Meeting. There will be pizza, salad, and drinks. We will continue to plan for the fall semester.

We will continue to meet this summer, on alternate Fridays, at noon, at CDB Restaurant, on June 10 & 24, and July 14. The Biweekly will continue during the summer, coming out on June 9 & 23, and July 13 & 27.

Grant Workshops this Summer

The USF Tampa CAS Grant Workshops will continue this summer, with workshops on Nuts and Bolts: Proposal Pieces and Budgets (tomorrow), Writing, and Re-Writing - Internal Review (on June 8), How and Why to Revise/ Resubmit (June 17), and Awarded, now what? Getting it done! (June 22). For more information, see the USF Grant Writing Workshops webpage.

Join UFF Today!

Download, fill in, and mail the membership form. Benefits of membership include the right to run and vote in UFF chapter and statewide elections; representation in grievances (UFF cannot represent a non-member in a grievance or litigation); special deals in insurance, travel, legal advice, and other packages provided by our affiliates; free insurance coverage for job-related liability; and the knowledge you are supporting education in Florida. Come and join the movement.

Grievances

If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, you have thirty days from the time you knew or should have known of the violation to file a grievance. If you are, and at the time of the violation were, a dues-paying member of the United Faculty of Florida, you have the right to union representation. To contact the UFF USF Grievance Committee, go to the online contact form. For more information, see our web-page on grievances; see also the main article (left).

Visit Us on Facebook

Visit the United Faculty of Florida at USF Facebook page. This page is a place where UFF members can exchange thoughts and ideas. The page is "public", but only dues-paying UFF members are eligible to post items on the page. If you are a UFF member, ask to join on the page, or contact the Communications Committee. The Committee will invite every UFF member that asks to join. So check us out. UFF members are welcome to join, and non-members are welcome to look.

IN THIS ISSUE

"... it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass

We are in the thirteenth month of bargaining, and we look at one of the contentious issues: salary. As mentioned in the March 15 Letter from the Bargaining Committee, the UFF has asked for a 4 % across-the-board raise plus some other stuff while the Administration has offered a 1.5 % merit raise (to be computed in a new way) plus some discretionary raises. In this issue and the next, we look at salaries.

  • Salary Basics. Where do raises (and bonuses) come from, what kinds are they, how do they work, and what are we bargaining? For details, see below or click here.
  • Salaries and the Red Queen, Part I. We look at the buying power of salaries over the past seven years. This issue, we look at salaries of full and associate professors. In the next issue, we look at salaries of instructors and non-instructional professionals. For more, see below or click here.
But first, thanks to everyone who participated in the Twenty-fourth annual National Association of Letter Carriers' Food Drive. The NALC is still tabulating the results, but looks like this year's beat last year's 71 billion pounds of food (worth $ 150 million). For more on this year's drive, see the NALC's follow-up account.

Salary Basics

At USF, there are several kinds of raises, including:

  • Across-the-Board. Everyone who meets a minimum criterion gets the same percentage raise.
  • Discretion (ADI). The Administration grants raises as they see fit.
  • Market Equity (Compression / Inversion). The payroll is reviewed to find employees whose salary is especially low compared to the market rate, and their salaries are adjusted upwards (somewhat).
  • Merit. This is a raise based on your annual evaluation.
Historically, both employees and the union tend to prefer merit and across-the-board raises (with market equity raises to fix egregiously low salaries) while the Administration prefers to hand out discretionary raises - which tend to go to a small pool of employees.

And that's it. The contract does not fix a schedule when raises will be distributed, and it does not provide for cost-of-living raises. The only raises are those provided by the contract, and that means that the union has to fight for every raise we get. In theory, the union and the Administration meet each year to "reopen" the contract and bargain a few articles (always including Article 23 on Salaries); once the "reopener" is "tentatively agreed" to and ratified by the employees and the Board of Trustees, the machinery to produce the new raises start turning.

With a payroll of $ 143 million (for the Bargaining Unit), UFF's request for a 4 % across-the-board raise would cost under six million dollars, about a fourth of the performance funding USF received last year.

Salaries and the Red Queen, Part I

In the presence of even a low inflation rate, sporadic and inadequate raises will result in an erosion of one's buying power: even if the dollar amount went up, the buying power may go down. In this article and in the next Biweekly, we take a brief glance at salary erosion at USF. This is just a snapshot, not a study. We compare salary increment over seven years with the inflation rate and see what happened to the buying power of those salaries over those seven years. Specifically, we look at the March, 2009 salaries and the February, 2016 salaries and compare the increase (for most - but not all - it was an increase in dollars) with inflation over those seven years (11.52 % according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator) to get the increase or decrease in buying power over those seven years.

(For those interested in such computations, here it is. Divide the 2016 salary by the 2009 salary, divide that quotient by 111.52 % = 100 % + 11.52 %, subtract 100 %, and that's the increase or decrease in buying power.)

We start with professors. Here are the complications: we looked at professors who had been here in 2009, and to simplify things (and eliminate statistical noise) we looked only at those who were full-time, on nine-month contracts, on active pay status with no (major) administrative assignments. There were only 124 such professors (out of 336 - but only 176 of these had been full professors in early 2009). Full professor is a terminal position for employees who have proven themselves, so ideally there would not be too much erosion. But that's not what we found:

This is over seven years. The median was a decline of 1.07 % in buying power, which comes to a loss of 0.15 % a year. That may not sound like much, but it accumulates: over thirty years that would come to a loss of 4.5 % - enough to influence retirement planning. And a sixth went down 3 % over seven years, and at that rate, over three decades, that's a decline of over 12 % in buying power.

A few saw the buying power of their salaries go up a lot. That shouldn't be a surprise since we have some high performers at USF. Of course, this analysis neglects additional income from summer pay, year-round contracts, administration, etc., but it is reasonable to suggest that around half of USF's full professors are suffering from non-trivial pay erosion, with all that implies for faculty morale and retention.

Associate professors are more complicated. They can be promoted to full professor, so a collection of associate professors in 2009 who are still associate professors in 2016 is not entirely representative. Still, we can get an idea of buying power with a similar computation, this time on the 98 fulltime nine-month associate professors of active pay status and no administrative assignments. Interestingly, just over a third saw their buying power go down while 52 % saw their buying power increase:


In the next issue, we will look at instructors and non-instructional professionals.

In the absence of cost-of-living increase raises, keeping salaries up for all employees is like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, running to keep in place. Across-the-board raises probably are the second best thing to cost-of-living increase raises. For employees whose salaries have fallen egregiously behind, there are more heroic measures (like Market Equity raises), but these would not be necessary if USF had a compensation system that kept salaries from drifting off.

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting Friday, May 27, in Temple Terrace, at CDB Restaurant, 5104 E. Fowler Ave.

There will be pizza, salad, and drinks. All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. Come and join the movement.

Membership: Everyone 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, e-mail a message to gmccolm@tampabay.rr.com.