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UFF Biweekly
United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter
9 June 2016
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Chapter Meeting Tomorrow in 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 24 and July 14. The Biweekly will continue during the summer, coming out on June 9 & 23, and July 13 & 27.

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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

Salary Erosion, Continued

In this issue, we take another look at the buying power of salaries over the past seven years. Since we are bargaining right now, and salaries are one of the bones of contentions, this is a particularly topical topic. But first, a reminder:

  • Base Salary. A lot of this analysis depends on the cumulative effect of raises and inflation over the years. For a refresher on this bit of financial math, see below or click here.
Recall that the previous article concerned salaries of full and associate professors.
  • Salaries and the Red Queen, Part II. We take another look at the buying power of salaries over the past seven years. In this issue, we look at salaries of instructors and professionals. For more, see below or click here.
But first, the latest entertainment news. Governor Scott held a Jobs to Degrees summit on May 25 & 26 "to better connect Florida students with meaningful jobs when they graduate." The announced list of speakers consisted of twelve politicians and senior officials, twenty-one "business leaders" (including three trustees), twenty-three "education leaders" (including five trustees and the chair of the Board of Governors), and three football coaches.

UFF grumped that there were no faculty there: "... if Governor Scott is serious about improving higher education, then he would have a real summit that includes our faculty members ... Without meaningful faculty participation, this summit does little to move Florida’s higher education system to the next level of excellence." The Tampa Bay Times reported the retort from Scott's office: "...our higher education system must be solely focused on preparing grads to get jobs in high-demand fields when they graduate," a sentiment shared by many social climbing dictatorships. And, to be fair, he did invite three football coaches.

If you are interested, some of the summit sessions were posted online.

Base Salary

Here is a little financial math for those who have forgotten those compound interest word problems from high school.

If you had a $ 50,000 salary and got a 10 % raise, your salary would then be (100 % + 10 %) × $ 50,000 = $ 55,000. (In your pocket calculator, that's 1.10 × $ 50,000 = $ 55,000.) If you got a 5 % raise the next year, your salary would go up to (100 % + 5 %) × $ 55,000 = $ 57,750; notice that each time you get a raise, you multiply your current salary by 100 % + percentage raise (or, in your pocket calculator, by 1 + proportional raise, where the proportional raise is the percentage raise divided by 100.). The successive raises compound, just like interest on investments. For example, if you got a single 30 % raise over ten years, your salary would go from $ 50,000 to $ 65,000. But if you got ten 3 % raises, the result would be (100 % + 3 %) × ... × (100 % + 3 %) × $ 50,000 = $ 67,196. (In your pocket calculator, you would enter 1.03 for 100 % + 3 % and compute 1.03 × ... × 1.03 × 50000 to get 67196 (rounded off to the nearest dollar).)

Inflation has a similar but corrosive effect. Suppose that you got a 2 % raise one year, but during that year inflation was 1 %, i.e., $ 100 of goods last year cost $ 101 this year. The buying power of your salary becomes (100 % + 2 %) / (100 % + 1 %) = 100 % + 0.99 %, or in your pocket calculator, 1.02/1.01 = 1.0099 rounded off. That means that your 2 % raise and 1 % inflation together produced a net 0.99 % increase in your buying power.

Notice that when you look at successive raises, you multiply successive factors (100 % + raise %), and when you look at effect of inflation you divide by (100 % + inflation %). This is similar to those old word problems: if you put $ 10,000 in an investment that returns 5 % each year, and reinvest the income, then after thirty years, you have 1.05 × 1.05 × ... × 1.05 × $ 10,000 = $ 43,219.

Shameless Advertisement

One consequence of the above financial math, in looking at salaries as products, is that a single raise can pay your union membership for as long as you are employed at USF. Here is how it works.

Union dues are 1 % of salary, which means that after dues deduction, you have 99 % left, which means that you have left 0.99 × salary. Now suppose that you are an instructor who got a 6 % promotional raise because the union fought for it. If you then joined, the raise and dues together would be produce a factor of 1.06 × 0.99 = 1.0494, or a net increase of 4.94 %. That's 4.94 % you wouldn't have without the union. And all factors from subsequent raises are the same: in essence, some of that one raise is paying your dues from then on.

The ability of the union to win raises at the bargaining table depends substantially on its membership, both in active support of members and in clout from dues-paying members. And employees in unionized companies and institutions tend to get higher salaries (when lots of employees are members). So paying dues pays off in the long run.

Just a thought.

Salaries and the Red Queen, Part II

This week, we look at instructor and professional salaries over the past seven years. Recall that we are looking at the change in the buying power of the salary: salaries go up, but so does inflation, so we divide the increased salary (salary now divided by salary then) divided by the increase cost of living (100 % + 11.52 % inflation over the last seven years as computed by the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator) and we get the change in buying power of the salaries over the past seven years.

For instructor and professional salaries, this turns out to be more complicated than for full and associate professor salaries.

We start with instructors, and we immediately have a complication. When looking at professor salaries, we looked at full-time active 9-month regular faculty with no administrative duties who had been in the same position now as then. But there are only ten such instructors, which is too small a sample size. It turns out that instructors at USF are taking advantage of the promotion tracks that UFF bargained for instructors (see the Shameless Advertisement above), and most instructors who were at USF in 2009 are now at level II or level III.

So we look at the 45 full-time active regular instructors with no administrative duties who are on the same contract (9-month or 12-month) now and in 2009, and who were promoted to Instructor II since 2009. Since these instructors were promoted, and got the 6 % promotion raise UFF bargained, we would expect that instructors would have at least a 6 % increase in their buying power. It turns out that while all these instructors enjoyed an increase in their salary's buying power - and some enjoyed large increases in their salary's buying power - a quarter of the instructors had an increase of 6 % or less, and so would have had no increase - or even endured a decline - in their salary's buying power if they had not received a promotional raise. Here is the graph: the horizontal axis is the increase in salary buying power while the vertical axis is the percentage of the 45 faculty enjoying that increase.


Non-faculty professionals are even more complicated. There are four types of librarians, there are coordinators and directors, associates and assistants in departments, scientists, counselors, instructional specialists, psychologists and psychiatrists and physicians, and more. Most, but not all, are on 12-month contracts. Since this is just a look and not a study, we will cut through the Gordian knot of statistical complexities and just look at the 62 full time professionals who had the same position, payroll and administrative status, and administrative title, that they have now.

Here they are. Again, the horizontal axis is the decrease or increase in buying power over the last seven years, and the vertical axis is the percentage of the 62 professionals who enjoyed or endured that change in buying power of their salaries.


Nearly a third endured a decline in the buying power of their salaries over the past seven years - over a third saw no increase. Once again, many enjoyed quite large increases in buying power.

Among all four groups, full and associate professors, instructors and professionals, there was a substantial group that was falling behind and another substantial group that was getting ahead, and many scattered in between. Instructors do not seem to have fallen behind, but that was because of promotional raises: the tracks currently provide for two promotional raises (like professors) and once instructors reach level III, there aren't any more.

Alert readers may have noticed that the samples consist of fractions of the current employees. This is because some employees shifted from one position to another or assumed administrative duties or left. Faculty retention is one of the declared priorities of the Administration, and one question is the part that erosion of salary buying power plays in employees leaving.

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting Friday, June 10, 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.

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