The BOT and UFF bargaining teams met on July 26 to continue negotiations on the Salaries article. As noted in the last Update, the previous week the teams had signed a Memorandum of Agreement insuring that regardless of what happens in the remainder of bargaining, Promotion raises will go into effect with the first paycheck of the academic year.
Bargaining Update 7/20/17
The administration and UFF bargaining teams met on July 17 to resume negotiating the Salaries article (Article 23). While we continue to see progress toward agreement, that progress is extremely slow. We were gratified that approximately 45 of our colleagues across the university elected to join us. Filling the room sent a clear message that your UFF bargaining team represents a large and diverse faculty and that we collectively reject the administration’s claims that we are well compensated compared to faculty at peer universities and that FSU lacks funds to offer more than meager raises. (You can see our written refutation of the Administration’s claims here.)
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Bargaining Update 7/8/17
The BOT and UFF bargaining teams met on July 5 after a BOT-imposed three-week break in negotiations. The discussion was solely about the Salaries article. As has been the case for several weeks, the unresolved categories are Performance Increases, Departmental Merit Increases, Deans’ Merit Increases, Market Equity Increases, Administrative Discretionary Increases, and the UFF’s proposed Administrative Commensurate Compensation Increases. As has been the case all along, neither team is proposing changes to Promotion Increases or to Sustained Performance Increases.
The session began with a UFF presentation contesting the claims of a BOT PowerPoint presentation at the last session purporting to show that funding for faculty salaries is limited by legislatively-imposed criteria and that FSU faculty are already well-compensated compared to other public institutions.
UFF-FSU response to the Administration’s claim that funding for faculty salary increases is limited and that FSU salaries are competitive
The UFF-FSU bargaining team has considered the PowerPoint presentation from June 14’s bargaining session and has concluded that it does not justify the Administration’s claim that faculty salaries need little upward adjusting. The presentation centered on two sets of data, one seeking to show that FSU’s 2017-2018 increase funds are restricted to categories that largely exclude faculty increases and the other seeking to show that FSU faculty are well compensated. We address each in turn.
Regarding the source of funding, on the one hand the UFF does not want to itemize the various pots of money it believes are available for raises, since the UFF role in bargaining entails negotiating the amount—not the source—of raises. But on the other hand, because the PowerPoint presentation sought to bolster the claim that funding for increases was quite limited, we briefly respond with some suggestions about funding sources.
Bargaining Update 6/23/17
The BOT and UFF bargaining teams met on June 14 to continue negotiation of the Salaries article. The unresolved categories are Performance Increases, Departmental Merit Increases, Deans’ Merit Increases, Market Equity Increases, Administrative Discretionary Increases, and the UFF’s proposed Administrative Commensurate Compensation Increases. (The teams are not proposing changes to Promotion Increases or to Sustained Performance Increases.)
The session began with a BOT presentation purportedly showing that funding for faculty salaries is limited by legislatively-imposed criteria and that FSU faculty are already well-compensated compared to other public institutions. As a result of these restrictions and comparisons, the BOT team explained that their goals and priorities are not faculty compensation but instead are hiring, student retention and graduation, student support, and graduate student funding. The BOT concluded that FSU salaries were “competitive” and that they were “comfortable with faculty salaries.”