October 2, 2000
ADMINISTRATION TABLES SALARY OFFER AS CONCILIATION RESUMES
On Friday, the administration at last tabled a financial offer. The MUNFA Negotiating Committee is now assessing this offer in detail. We note the following:
If the administration's figures are accurate, their proposal attempts to close the 20% gap between average salaries at MUN and those at comparable Canadian universities. The offer includes no early retirement inducements, and the administration continues to refuse to discuss this topic. The administration also continues to refuse to negotiate a MUNFA proposal for pension plan reform.
Scale increases of 2% would occur on each September 1 from 1999 to 2001, with an additional 1% increase on May 1, 2002. Step increases would continue as at present, with the steps gradually increasing in size. By the end of the Collective Agreement the steps would reach $1365.
On September 1, 2001, there would be a 4-step increase for faculty members with a doctorate. This increase would not apply to librarians. Nor would it apply to faculty members without a doctorate in fields where the doctorate is not the usual terminal degree (for example, Fine Arts).
All floors are increased by four to six steps and caps are increased by two to four steps, except that the caps for the Librarian III and Librarian IV ranks would remain unchanged. We note that when floors increase, only academic staff members with salaries below the new floor, and new hires, will benefit.
MUNFA's salary proposal included a mechanism to lessen the serious problem of compression and inversion. As we pointed out in Negotiating News #5, this problem occurs when the salaries of relatively new hires approach (compression), or even exceed (inversion), those of more experienced faculty members and librarians. Not only would the MUN proposal not help solve the compression/inversion problem, it would actually make it worse.
Per-course stipends would remain unchanged at the 1989 level of $3519. Distance education courses could be assigned as part of normal teaching loads. For those academic staff members teaching by distance education as overload, reimbursement would be lowered from $106 per student to a sliding scale starting at $200 per student for the first six students, falling rapidly to $50 per student for 51 to 100 students, and falling further to $25 for each student over 100. There would be no financial compensation for distance education courses taught from St. John's to the Corner Brook campus or vice versa. These courses, taught over a distance of 800 kilometres, would not be considered distance education.
The administration has made it clear that its salary offer is contingent on MUNFA's agreement that bargaining unit protections will not be extended to more of our sessional and contractual colleagues, and that their working conditions need not be improved. MUNFA has proposed that all term appointees, including those not in the bargaining unit, be given reasonable working conditions including office facilities and RRSP benefits, and, for long-term contractuals, a fast track to appointments as tenured faculty. All of this has been rejected by the administration.
The administration wishes to freeze the proportion of its benefits costs as a percentage of gross salaries at 1999-2000 levels, and adjust coverage downward if premiums increase, as it can be expected they will.
Overall, the proposal shows a regrettable lack of vision about the future of the University. The proposal actually has financial incentives for older faculty to stay at Memorial for another six years. Thus, in addition to a rash of normal age-65 retirements from the middle to the end of this decade, it may be expected that dozens of faculty now in their mid-50s will then be taking early retirement. Combining this fact with the low salaries the administration proposes to pay sessionals, we wonder whether by 2010, Memorial University will be largely staffed by low-paid, non-unionized, short-term appointees. This is hardly what is required for a university dedicated to excellence, and is contrary to the administration's assertions that their salary proposal is designed to keep MUN a first-rate university.
Given these shortcomings of their long-awaited salary proposal, we are awaiting with interest administration responses on 10 other articles.
MUNFA Negotiating Committee:
All issues of Negotiating News are accessible at http://www.mun.ca/munfa/negnews.html