After months of back and forth and weeks of negotiations, the University of Oregon and United Academics, the faculty union, have come to an agreement over pay cuts and faculty contracts for the upcoming academic year.
The agreement returns career faculty to 1.0 full-time equivalency, or how many hours an employee works in a week, and sets out a progressive pay reduction plan dependent upon school enrollment for the 2020-2021 academic year.
In April, UO administration proposed employee pay cuts totaling $100 million over four years. The new plan, which both UA and UO agreed on, only cuts $20 million over the course of one year, leaving $80 million unaccounted for.
This original April plan cut career faculty up for promotion down to 0.55 full-time equivalency, dropping them down to nearly part-time.
Eleanor Wakefield, a career instructor in English and member of the UA bargaining team, said the pay under the 0.55 contract would not be much and would not be enough to support a family.
“We were obviously really, really unhappy with that,” Wakefield said. UA has argued in the past that the administration has used career faculty, whose contracts are renewed annually, as budgetary flexibility in a way that undermines their professional careers, according to Wakefield.
But the university was facing “extraordinary budget uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Jamie Moffitt, the university’s Vice President for Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer, wrote in an April newsletter with Provost and Senior Vice President Patrick Phillips. “Approximately 80 percent of our expenses are personnel.”
“The goal of the progressive pay reduction plan is to provide as much stability as possible in the event of a sudden loss of revenue caused by a drop in enrollment or a reduction in state funding,” Missy Matella, the senior director of Employee and Labor Relations in Human Resources, said in a recent email.
This pay reduction plan will only be triggered depending upon student enrollment or state funding cuts for the upcoming year, according to Matella. The plan is not tied to revenue losses that are expected from events such as the Pac-12’s cancellation of fall sports. Additionally, the university is not expecting a significant state budget cut this year, meaning the plan will only be activated if student enrollment significantly decreases.
This plan can only be triggered once and would only be set off if losses exceeded $15 million by November 15, 2020, according to the agreement. If the university decides not to trigger the plan in November 2020, then it can be triggered in summer 2021.
The original April plan outlined much higher cuts for faculty with salaries under $120,000, before capping out at a 16% rate cut for faculty making $200,000 or above.
The new plan, however, cuts less from lower-earning faculty and cuts more from the highest earners.
For those with salaries of $200,000 and up, for instance, this means they can expect to see a pay cut of $36,000 or higher, depending upon how much they make.
“We were definitely willing to go higher at the top,” Wakefield said. “But the administration, they really didn’t want the people at the very top, who are mostly not UA members anymore, to take a higher cut than that.”
According to Matella, higher cuts would have been a difficult burden for the community and would have impacted employees’ ability to meet their monthly expenses, which are likely based on each employee’s normal salary rate.
However, UA’s bargaining team still saw this agreement as a big win for both sides, according to Wakefield and others on the team.
“We’re all actually on the same team and we all want what’s best for UO students and the school in general,” Wakefield said.
According to Chris Sinclair, the president of UA and associate professor in the department of mathematics and the Clark Honors College, the amount cut from faculty would be, in most cases, significantly less than the original deal.
“Every faculty member is better off than they would have been if the university had invoked their plan in April,” Sinclair said during a UA town hall meeting in early August. The agreed-upon plan is more progressive than was proposed in April as well, which was one of the major goals that UA heard from their membership, according to Sinclair.
“I think we’re very happy with where things ended up,” said Wakefield.
Despite UA and UO’s optimism, there are still questions surrounding how the university will cover losses that exceed the faculty budget cuts.In response to this, Matella said the university will continue to assess budgetary shortfalls and review current cost-saving programs in place such as hiring and travel restrictions, restrictions on discretionary pay and spending related to supplies and services. If necessary, they will examine additional employment, structural or programmatic actions with the University’s COVID-19 Task Force.
Bargaining will resume during winter term to address additional problems that were not fully addressed during this session, such as a buyout program for those wishing to retire and a new tenure reduction plan.
