WOUFT Negotiation Blog

Do you wish you could be a part of the WOUFT conversation? You are in luck!

Look to the left sidebar and click on the link labeled "How to Leave a Comment on WOUFT!" for instructions!

What are the main differences between the union and management salary proposals?
Under the union proposal, salary increases for the two year contract period will range from 8% to 14%. Eligible faculty members will receive step increases in 2006 and 2007, as well as step increases missed during the last contract period. In addition the union is asking for cost of living adjustments averaging 3% for each year of the contract and an additional step at the top of the salary schedule.

Under the management proposal, salary increases for the two year contract period will range from 4% to 10%. Eligible faculty will receive scheduled step increases and steps missed during the last contract period but will receive a limited “cost of living adjustment” of only 1% a year. In addition, management is proposing the distribution of “stipends” to faculty at the bottom of the salary schedule. These are one time payments that do not become part of the base salary. Although management had at one time proposed adding two steps to the top of the salary schedule, this is not included in their final offer.

Management is also calling for a radical reduction in faculty development funds, from $364,000 in 2003-05 to only $200,000 in this biennium.

What is meant by “compression” in the salary schedule?
Compression occurs when faculty of the same rank but different years of service end up with the same salary. This structural inequality of the step system is a consequence of the 2003-05 salary freeze.

When salaries were frozen during the 03-05 biennium, the step system was maintained by allowing every one to move up a step each year. However, these steps were not funded, so the salary connected to the higher steps was the same as the salary in the Fall of '03. This created compression because faculty at steps 1, 2 and 3 all made the same salary. When we "decompress" the steps we add 2% to step 2 (and all steps above it) and then add another 2% to step 3 (and all steps above it). For all steps from 3 up, this means a 4% increase in the value of the step. This does not, however do anything for the value of Step 1.

We are committed to “decompressing” the step system through the repayment of missed steps. Practically speaking this will mean a 4% salary adjustment for most members of the faculty.

Does “strike authorization” mean a strike will occur?
No. A vote in support of strike authorization means that the bargaining team will have the authority to set a strike date and will also have the authority to call for a strike. It does not mean a strike is inevitable.

Will the bargaining team continue to negotiate?
Yes. The bargaining team will continue to work for a fair settlement. Two state mediators will be assigned to work with both sides in another mediation session. The bargaining team is eager to negotiate a fair contract and believes that the leverage of a strike authorization will help motivate the administration to prioritize faculty salaries.

Who will make the final decision to strike?
Your bargaining team will have the final call on whether or not to strike. Although consensus is not technically required, your bargaining team has used this principle successfully up to this point and will continue to strive for consensus in all its decisions.

When would the strike occur?
If no progress is made in negotiations AND the bargaining team believes a strike is necessary, a strike would occur on Monday, April 3, the first day of spring term.

How long will a strike last?
This decision is up to the members of the union. Once a strike is called, the bargaining team and the members of the union will be meeting on a daily basis to assess the effectiveness of the strike.

What should I say to students who ask about the possibility of a strike?
It is fair to say that all of us are fundamentally concerned with our students’ academic futures. Indeed, for many of us, a fair contract is about the future of this university and our ability to recruit and retain quality faculty members. We need to make sure students understand our commitment to them. Nevertheless, if a strike does occur, we will be asking students to honor the picket line. If students have administrative questions about course credit, graduation, financial aide, tuition reimbursement, etc., they should be instructed to contact the Provost, the Chancellor and the Governor.

Will public events and extracurricular activities be picketed?
No. Athletic events, concerts, plays and other student-faculty events will not be part of the strike.

Will other unions honor our picket lines?
Oregon law prohibits other public employees from honoring our picket line. However, we can and should get cooperation from private sector unions who service the university or do business on campus.

Will we still receive benefits during a strike?
Yes. Because health benefit contributions are paid in advance, coverage will continue for the entire month of April.

Will we lose salary during a strike?
Before the union returns to work the terms of its return are negotiated. This includes loss of pay, make-up classes, immunity for strikers, and all other related issues. For example, in a faculty strike in Hawaii, there was no loss of pay or benefits even though the strike lasted three weeks. The university needed the hours to be taught for purposes of accreditation, and made arrangements for the faculty to make up missed classes.

What can the administration do to retaliate against the union for going on strike?
According to labor law, the employer has the option to “lock out” workers. This would lead to having to replace the entire faculty and is highly unlikely. Similarly, the university may limit access to our offices and block e-mail accounts.

Doesn’t hypocrisy make you angry? Doesn’t it just steam your veggies when someone tells you to do your best and then stands in your way, all the while asking why you aren’t doing your best? This is how I feel when I watch the administration of WOU ask the faculty to build competitive programs but then refuse to fund them sufficiently to actually hire and retain faculty.

I have watched as three different departments have struggled with new hires and the low salaries they are offered, and I am sure that other departments have had similar issues. In particular, I am talking about the Business, Computer Science and Composition/Rhetoric departments. The major issue all three of these departments have is that there is a shortage of qualified people needed to fill teaching positions. If there are more positions than people, then the people have the option of choosing their positions carefully. Most of them will take the positions with the best salary. This usually isn’t Western.

In the particular cases of Business and Computer Science, the problem is compounded by the fact that anyone who is qualified to teach at Western in Business or Computer Science (that is with a Ph.D.) can easily make double or triple their starting WOU salary in industry. Although we cannot hope to compete with industry in pay, we cannot even attract those people good-hearted enough to be willing to take a pay cut to teach because the salaries are so low. Every little bit of compensation would help attract and keep these people.

The most surprising of these three cases is the Composition/Rhetoric discipline…they are just writing teachers, right? How is it that we can’t keep them? (joke about serving fries omitted...deemed objectionable and devicive, and we don't want that!) Once again, it is supply and demand. Writing centers and writing programs are in demand now because the “market” says that universities need to produce strong writers. Not many people who major in English want to focus on writing and rhetoric, so there aren’t that many Ph.D.s running around looking for jobs. Those that are out there command about 20-40% more money than the starting salary at WOU. The English department has tried to fill four positions in Rhet/Comp in the last few years, and has succeeded so far in securing two faculty members. Two others left for better jobs, and at least three others refused the position because of pay issues.

So, to get back to the hypocrisy. The administration wants WOU to be distinguished in its fields, but doesn’t want to fund faculty salaries in a way that we can be competitive or even so that searches in highly competitive fields don’t fail over and over again.

Here’s the thing: if we can’t afford to pay for faculty for these fields, then perhaps WOU shouldn’t have these fields. Perhaps WOU should go back to the good old days when we were “the teaching college” and forget all of this liberal arts crap. Let’s forget about keeping up with the cutting edge in technology, understanding the business world, and, oh yeah, helping students learn to write thoughtfully.

Of what value are these things to the overall quality of a college, anyway? Does it affect someone’s opinion of this school if he discovers he has hired a sub-standard computer scientist from WOU? How about if he reads a cover letter from a WOU student that doesn’t follow a thought through a paragraph? What does it matter if manager discovers his employee, a former WOU business student, doesn’t understand accounting?

Of course it matters! Half-assing our way through things doesn’t help the school’s image, and it ultimately hurts its bottom line (which seems to be the only line the administration is concerned about, anyway). Paying for quality faculty and keeping them should be a priority for this school. Faculty trained in cutting-edge fields, be they technical, scientific, or even writing, should be paid what they are worth, and they are worth what the market offers them. Yes, we have people in these departments, working like Trojans to make up for the fact that their departments are under-staffed because they are under-funded (and they are all working on their sainthoods, by the way), but they shouldn’t have to. I mean, for Grover Cleveland’s sake, our English Writing faculty is being head-hunted away from us!

Please do something about this. Pay us all what we are worth.

Simply put, decompression is removing compression from the salary scale. Compression occurs when faculty with varying levels of experience are paid the same amount; a "new" faculty member making the same as someone who has been working for a number of years is an example of compression. A more extreme problem would be inversion where a person with less experience makes more than someone with more experience. Eliminating compression is one of the prime purposes of the salary step system.

(Just to be clear: there are some cases when a "“new"” person makes more than a person who has been here for a while, but it does not qualify as compression. For example, someone who has five years of experience at another institution arrives at Western, s/he would make more than someone who started straight out of graduate school the year before.)

In our current step scale, there is a glaring case of compression. Steps 1, 2, and 3 are all paid the same: $38,124. In other words, someone who started in Fall 2005 makes the same as someone who started back in Fall 2003. This is a result of the salary freeze that the union was forced to accept in the last biennium.

Our step system has 2% between each step, so step 2 should be 2% higher than step 1, and step 3 should be 2% higher than step 2. In the context of our negotiations, decompression refers to restoring the differences between these steps.

For someone at step 1, decompression does nothing for his salary. For someone at step 2, she would receive a 2% increase as a result of decompression. For anyone at step 3 or above, decompression would increase the salary by (just a bit over) 4%.

The fact that this increase applies to everyone at or above step 2 makes this a very expensive proposition for the administration. However, the compression and the need to remove it is a direct result of administrative actions in the past -– i.e. the two-year salary freeze.

One important thing to note is that currently decompression is scheduled to happen in May 2006 in both the administration's and (reluctantly) the union's offers. This means that the administration is getting something akin to a 2.9 year salary freeze. In an ideal world, this decompression would take effect September 2005. This was a significant compromise by the union but one for which the administration did not have to make any compromises.

If one listens to right-wing talk radio, one gets the impression that teachers and faculty members are nothing but a bunch or over-paid, under-worked cry-babbies. The administration doesn't agree with the the wing-nuts, do they?

When they speak, they certainly claim to value the faculty. They use phrases like the faculty is the "heart of the university," and some administrators claim to be embarassed by signing offer letters at $38,124.

However, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words: Step 1 still less than $40,000, slashing faculty development funds, delaying back step increases and pay raises until the last month of a school year.

Do these sound like the actions of people who value faculty, or do they sound more like the actions of Lars Larsen fans?

Back loading is a way of structuring an offer that has been used by both the administration and the union bargaining team. It's not inherently good or bad, but people should be aware when it's happening and what the implications are.

The basic idea is that a pay raise takes effect later in the contract. For example, to make the math easy, suppose you get paid $100 a month for 10 months - i.e., annual salary is $1,000. Suppose you are offered a 100% increase in your salary, but it becomes effective only on the last pay period of the contract. In this case, you would receive $200 in that last pay period, but only $100 for the rest of them - i.e., your annual salary would only be $1,100. For the current year, you only see a 10% increase not the 100% increase that was advertised. Of course, next year you're make $200 per month or $2,000 per year.

The union has suggested to the administration that the implementation of some proposals could be back loaded. For example, our original goal was $42,000 per year for step one, and we wanted that in September 2005. In the spirit of negotiation, we suggested that the effective date was subject to bargaining.

However, the administration rejected this. The administration claimed repeatedly that higher-ups (the OUS board and/or the governor) have expressly prohibited back loading. We have insisted that this is an issue of political will (to change that "rule") not an issue of money in the current contract period.

OK, fine - this means the administration is going to front load everything, right? Let's get all of the pay raises as soon as possible. Wrong! If you look at the most recent proposal from the administration, it is indeed back loaded. The last raise is granted in the last full pay period of the contract. What happened to no back loading?

This is total hypocrisy on the part of the administration. When it serves the administration's interest, back loading is OK. When the faculty proposes it to help the administration, it's not acceptable. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised - they always have money for their projects but always plead poverty when it comes time to pay the faculty.

Quit playing games. Just give us a straight-forward contract with a decent wage.

One of the many things that has been very frustrating during this process is that the administration has put forth a number of proposals, but fundamentally they have all involved exactly the same amount of money. Whereas the union has made a number of concessions in an effort to meet the administration somewhere in the middle, the administration has stuck with essentially the same offer since the summer.

The administration has fixed an amount, roughly $1.4 million, and all of its offers have been variations on the same theme, $1.4 million. For example, it has attempted to throw out the existing step system with a really confusing substitute: total monies, $1.4 million. It has attempted to raid faculty development to put more into salaries: total monies, $1.4 million. It has generously offered to greatly reduce the pay rate for summer school: total monies, $1.4 million. As you see, no matter what it proposes, the administration's budget is still $1.4 million.

In other words, the administration keeps taking the same $1.4 million pig and putting different dresses on it. Each time the administration claims that it is trying to negotiate with us and that the pig is something new. Granted, some of those dresses were uglier than others, but fundamentally it's always that same pig.

We'd really like to see a new, better pig.

Let us consider a simple decision tree representing the possible paths that negotiations or a strike could take. At the beginning (where we are now) , there are two options: a positive strike authorization or a negative strike authorization. If there is a positive strike authorization, there are two more options: to actually strike or not. Beyond that, there are numerous options about what form a strike might take. Throughout the entire process, there is the option of settling with the administration, and there is also the option that the administration will bring more money to the table in the form of a better offer.

It's clear from the administration's actions and words that if we stay where we are (no positive strike authorization) there will be no more money. We have been negotiating since the summer, and all proposals from the administration have involved basically the same, fixed amount of money (see "Same Old Pig"). No amount of additional negotiation or compromise on the part of the union is going to change that.

Suppose there was a positive strike authorization. Would that bring more money to the table? It might or it might not. Only the administration knows, and they might not even know yet. Given their lack of planning throughout this entire process, it wouldn't be surprising if they have not planned for this contingency yet.

Suppose we went on strike. Would there be more money on the table? Again, maybe yes, maybe no.

So, we are at the first fork in the road. If we choose to reject a strike authorization, we can be very certain that there will be no more money. If we approve a strike authorization and continue down the other path, there might be more money or there might not. However, we know there's no additional money without a positive strike authorization.

Some people would say that WOUFT is trying to get ten gallons from a five bucket, which defies the laws of space, time and mathematics. The administration only has a fixed amount of money and that cannot be changed.

The administration certainly seems to view the amount of money they have to work with as a fixed constant, like the speed of light. Even if that is true, one should ask the question: why is there only five gallons in the bucket?

The fact of the matter is that the actions of the administration have constrained income and mis-spent what income there was on priorities other than the faculty. WOU is the only campus that is prohibited from raising its tuition. Why? Because administrators on this campus (including, but not limited to former President Conn) and administrators "beyond this campus" (including OUS and the governor) created a situation (the excessive fund balance) that they deemed unacceptable. That is further compounded by issues of recruiting and retention. Note: administrators created the situation, administrators decided it was unacceptable, and administrators imposed the penalty. Can you say "judge, jury, and executioner?" I knew you could.

On the expense side, they've gone on a binge hiring new administrators while blocking all faculty hiring. They also squandered literally millions of dollars on various one-time projects, the new sidewalks being the most visible example.

So, if you buy the argument that there's only five gallons in the bucket, then you have to understand that the underlying causes of that are purely the result of administrative actions. The administration created this situation, and now they expect the faculty to live with wage increases below the rate of inflation to make up for their mistakes.

The purpose of this blog is for some informal discussions about WOUFT's (Western Oregon University Federation of Teachers) ongoing negotiations with the WOU administration. This blog should not be considered as an official source of information from the union. It's just a place for faculty to discuss their own personal views of the ongoing negotiations.