Dear Colleagues,
At Wednesday’s bargaining session, the BOT team proposed what was presented as a final package deal that included all remaining articles, including salary. The BOT’s offer included the $750,000 in Market Equity that the UFF proposed last week, but it did not increase Performance Funding. The UFF team countered, and then the BOT presented a ‘best and final’ offer that was only good until the end of the bargaining session. UFF countered that offer, and the BOT team agreed, thus ending negotiations that saw a couple dozen salary proposals passed back and forth and compromises on both sides. The two teams Tentatively Agreed (TA) to the salary proposal found here that includes implementation dates.
| BOT | UFF | BOT | UFF | |
| Performance (also called across-the-board) | 3% | 4% | 3.5% | 4% |
| Department Merit | 1.50% | 1.25% | 1.25% | 0.75% |
| Dean’s Merit | 0.50% | 0.25% | 0.50% | 0.50% |
| Market Equity | $750,000 | $750,000 | $750,000 | $750,000 |
| Administrative Discretionary Increases (ADI) | 1.00% | 0.8% | 1.00% | 0.80% |
Both the UFF and the administration believe that merit is an important part of any compensation package. Thus, the Performance and Merit components of the UFF-BOT agreement, plus Market Equity increases, should be considered as part of the total salary package. While the initial BOT offer was 2.75% + Promotions + Sustained Performance Increases, the accepted offer is 5.7% + Promotions + Sustained Performance Increases, for an overall faculty compensation package of about 6.7%, not counting ADI. While the UFF believes that faculty merit is best determined by departments and their bylaws, as per President McCullough’s direction, the BOT demanded that a significant amount of faculty raises be determined by the deans. We do hope that our concerns regarding merit allocated based on the whims of deans have been heard and that deans will allocate the money based on fair and transparent criteria.
We’d like to once again thank the nearly 700 faculty members who signed the UFF-FSU petition asking the BOT to provide fair salaries and the dozens of faculty members who attended bargaining in person and via Zoom. Your voices definitely made a difference!
On another note, we were pleased to see President McCullough’s 8/4/22 email announcing staff raises of 5% because our hardworking staff have gone many years without across-the-board raises and are generally lower paid than faculty, as evidenced by the announced increase of annual base pay for full-time, salaried staff employees to $31,320. We hope that the administration will continue to work on providing fair compensation for FSU staff as well.
The two teams also Tentatively Agreed to the other articles in the package deal, including Article 18 (Inventions & Works), Article 22 (Sabbatical and Professional Development Leave), which increases the number of paid one-semester sabbaticals from 1 out of every 30 eligible tenured faculty members to 1 out of every 20 eligible tenured faculty members, a 50% increase, Article 24 (Benefits), which codifies the tuition scholarships for faculty members’ dependent children and spouses, and Article 17 (Leaves), which remains status quo (that is, one paid parental leave). We hope to address the need for paid family leave in future years’ negotiations as such a change would offer a more family-friendly and age-friendly campus.
The next step in the process is ratification of the contract, so please be on the lookout for ratification voting dates, times, and locations. In all, the UFF is proud of the gains we made for faculty during this bargaining session, which you’ll be hearing more about as we near ratification. For example, we significantly increased our sabbatical program, held tight to the four-year contracts for the third rank of Specialized Faculty that the BOT wanted to curtail, mandated safety inspections of FSU buildings at regular intervals, and tightened protections for faculty members to engage in political speech outside of FSU. Even as we made a lot of progress in improving the working lives of faculty, we would still like to hear our members’ ideas about how we might improve things further in future negotiations!
Bargaining updates and the entire CBA can be found under “UFF At Work” at our webpage: https://uff-fsu.org/
The key to a strong Collective Bargaining Agreement is a strong membership base, so if you are not a member, please join! As the negotiations have demonstrated, we can accomplish more when we all stand together. https://uff-fsu.org/wp/join/
All the best,
Scott Hannahs, Research Faculty III, and
Jennifer Proffitt, Professor,
Co-Chief Negotiators, UFF-FSU