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The University of Maine System and its faculty have been deadlocked for more than a year trying to negotiate a salary increase for 2005-06.
On Jan. 20, the Associated Faculty of UMaine, the faculty union for the UMS, declared the negotiations a failure and have rejected the Board of Trustees’ offers.
The faculty’s contract expired on June 30.
James McClymer is the vice president of AFUM and the president of the union’s UMaine chapter.
According to McClymer, the average UMaine professor’s salary of $61,000 is about $10,000 less than the national average for comparable public, four-year universities with doctoral programs.
In 2003 and 2004, faculty received 1.5 percent raises. The Board of Trustees’ current offer of a 5 percent raise could catch up to cost-of-living increases over those two years, but McClymer said that offer would still leave faculty far behind those at other universities.
“They made a commitment over 10 years ago to raise our salaries to national levels,” said McClymer of the UMS. “Each year they make no progress. Each year they tell us how important we are and each year they do nothing about it.”
John Diamond, external affairs director for the UMS, blames the state’s poor funding of the system.
Diamond said state funding has shrunk, and that tuition and fees, which accounted for 25 percent of the university’s funding in 1989, now account for about 45 percent.
“Because of this, the University System has struggled with providing fair compensation- salaries, wages and benefits- to employees while at the same time trying to keep tuition and fees as affordable as possible,” said Diamond.
McClymer, an associate professor of physics, said the reason for UMaine faculty’s comparatively low pay was simple.
“The faculty have never been a real priority, no matter what they say,” said McClymer.
“They’ll spend money everywhere else, but not on employees-faculty or others.”
Diamond admitted that UMaine salaries are comparatively low, but said a lack of funding was the culprit and that the system’s strategic plan ,currently in the works, intends to correct that.
“The University System’s plan specifically calls for reaching salary levels that are more competitive in the labor market,” Diamond said.
“According to the plan, the estimated annual cost of that objective is roughly $10 million per year,” he said.
There is also a change in faculty co-pay for health care, which McClymer called a shift of burden from the university to the faculty in covering health insurance.
McClymer said faculty would face a 30-percent increase in their co-pay, which would bite into their raise.
According to Diamond, the UMS health care plan is comparatively good for the state, where employees often pay 20 percent or more of their coverage.
University employees currently pay 10 percent coverage for themselves and 12 percent for dependents.
Under the new plan, Diamond said, that would increase to 13 and 15 percent, respectively.
“We believe that health care is a joint responsibility between the employee and the employer,” Diamond said. “This relationship extends beyond insurance coverage and involves wellness programs and a partnership in which both labor and management realize a joint stake in the outcome.”
McClymer said other people on campus like secretaries, police and facilities management “have it even worse than the faculty.”
According to a statement by AFUM President Ron Mosley, service and maintenance workers represented by the Teamsters are reaching an agreement.
The Teamsters are reportedly planning to approve the Board of Trustees’ change in the employee health care plan, according to Mosley.
The AFUM is concerned that the Teamsters’ acceptance of the new health care plan will make it more difficult for the faculty to negotiate a better plan.
State law forbids a faculty strike, but McClymer said the faculty wouldn’t strike anyway.
“Most faculty would not be willing to disrupt students’ life even if we could,” McClymer said.
A collective bargaining law is on the books for situations where striking is not an option. The current deadlock is called an impasse. The legal process that follows will include fact-finding and arbitration stages, which will include an independent arbitrator or a panel of arbitrators.
According to Diamond, the arbitrator’s decisions with respect to salaries, insurance and pensions are binding.
Professor Michael Palmer of the political science department said that while the pay scale in some colleges, such as Engineering and Natural Sciences Forestry and Agriculture, is “more reasonable,” the faculty salaries in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, especially of those in the traditional liberal arts departments, are “scandalous.”
“Many faculty in these departments have been teaching at UMaine for 20 to 30 years, have published world-class scholarships in their fields, including widely-respected books, and are reaching retirement age making less than $65,000 gross salary per annum,” said Palmer.
A Ph.D., he said, requires “more education than it takes to become a lawyer, accountant, or even an M.D.”
“The University of Maine,” he added, “has a much better liberal arts faculty than it deserves, almost exclusively because of national economic and academic trends for which the University of Maine System can take no credit whatsoever.”
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