September 21, 2000
Early retirement packages are an important way of addressing faculty renewal.
(1) Institutional needs are well served by making early retirement packages available, a point made often at the University Forum. By offering retirement inducements, the institution would be able to save the money it would have had to have paid in salary to higher paid senior colleagues.
(2) In so doing, it opens up places for new hires. The argument that those who go cannot be replaced is flattering but not entirely true. In any case, in the absence of packages, senior colleagues will stay on to regular retirement, and then they will have to be replaced. The only difference between a regular retirement and an early retirement is that the early retirement allows the institution to renew itself at an earlier stage. The problem with replacement hiring at Memorial is not that replacements do not exist, but that they do not want to come here at the salaries currently offered. By offering inducements to an expensive cohort of senior faculty, the money saved can be used both for new hires and to raise salaries.
(3) An early retirement plan will help avoid situations like that which will otherwise occur in a few years, when a large cohort of academic staff members retire within a short period of time and must be replaced all at once. Adopting early retirement incentives now will spread out the next round of hiring over a greater number of years.
(4) There is a significant number of faculty and librarians, aged 55 or just below, who are interested in having the option of taking up an early retirement package. Some will take it, others will not. The advantage of having a package within the Collective Agreement, whether or not it is taken up by an individual academic staff member, is that it is subject to meaningful negotiation between the parties (at least in the textbook sense of negotiations, a sense not often seen, it is true, in our current round of negotiations). Then, should there be problems with implementation, these matters are subject to grievance and arbitration procedures. A negotiated package prevents "cherry picking" and sweetheart deals. It is, in short, a way to ensure fairness. It has been suggested that packages might be the subject of "talks" between administration and MUNFA. However, unspecified talks outside of formal negotiations -- talks, moreover, that in all likelihood will not lead to conclusions any time soon -- are not in the interests of either the institution or the potential retirees.
(5) Severance pay is included in many collective agreements to recognize years of service and to provide a financial bridge to retirement. Our current Collective Agreement has no such provision; MUNFA's proposals would remedy this omission.
MUNFA Negotiating Committee:
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