September 27, 2000
An article in last week's Express (September 20-26), "MUN Facing Massive Faculty Retirement in Near Future," leads with the sentence "Almost half the professors at Memorial University will retire in the next seven years." If this estimate refers to faculty reaching the normal retirement age of 65, then it is misleading and inaccurate.
It seems likely that the current round of negotiations will result in a three year Collective Agreement retroactive to September 1999. The number of normal faculty retirements during the presumed life of this new agreement, i.e., in 2001 and 2002, is 20. If the next Collective Agreement is also for a term of three years, then there will be an additional 67 retirements. Thus, over the next five years there will be 87 normal faculty retirements. As there are more than 700 faculty members at Memorial, the impact of retirements in the near future is small compared to what the Express suggests, and cannot be characterized by any stretch of the imagination as "massive."
In contrast to the 87 normal retirements that will occur in the five years from 2001 to 2005, there will be 202 normal faculty retirements in the six years from 2006 to 2011. A substantial proportion of these 202 professors will have to be replaced in what is likely to be a sellers' market; Memorial will have great difficulty recruiting the necessary number of faculty at that time.
As for faculty renewal, if half of the professoriat were in fact about to retire, then there would be no need for an early retirement package. If, however, there are relatively few normal retirements over the next few years, followed by a marked concentration of retirements, the university would benefit greatly from an early retirement package now. The second scenario is indeed the case.
It is clearly to the benefit of the University -- faculty and students alike -- to implement an early retirement package now, and as part of the Collective Agreement. If the administration is serious about faculty renewal, this is the time to stimulate early retirement and use the money saved from the salaries of early retirees to hire younger faculty and to help raise the salaries of academic staff members.
Let us cite some hypothetical numbers. Assume that 50 senior faculty take the early retirement package which is not funded through the university's operating budget. If the average salary of these 50 faculty is $76,000, the annual salary savings will be $3,800,000. If half of this money is used to hire new faculty, then almost two million dollars is available to increase salaries. While this amount alone would not cover the salary increases sought by MUNFA in this round of negotiations, it would certainly help.
MUNFA Negotiating Committee:
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