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After more than seven months, the University of Maine System’s part-time faculty union, known as PATFA, is awaiting word from the administration on the continued negotiations of next year’s contract, which is currently stuck in limbo.
PATFA began negotiations in May, and progress was steady on a few minor clarifications to the contract, but even after it expired June 31 a new agreement has yet to emerge between the administration and the part-time faculty. The contract was not extended, as the full-time faculty’s was until Dec. 31, but instead will remain in place until both parties agree on a new one.
Terry Crouch, a UMaine English lecturer and the Orono PATFA representative, said the negotiations have been “really stonewalling.” He said the administration wants to reduce the retirement benefits for part-time faculty members who qualify and provide no cost-of-living increase to the pay of all part-timers.
Richard Burke, professor at the University of Maine at Farmington and the president of PATFA, said the system administration should take more advantage of part-time faculty members, who cost less than full-time professors and often shoulder a large portion of universities’ academics.
“They actually get paid less on a per-course basis, but full-time faculty do have other obligations like committee work and research and things like that,” Burke said. “So even after you adjust for that, even after you take out that portion of their pay that you might find to that kind of work, and you’re just comparing pay in the classroom per credit between a full-timer and a part-timer — a lot of part-timers are getting paid around 50 percent of what the full-time person’s getting paid.”
Tracy Bigney, the chief human resources and organizational development officer at the system office, said comparisons between full-time and part-time faculty are difficult because of the difference in their responsibilities.
“It’s just a very different situation for a full-time faculty member,” Bigney said.
Part-time faculty are hired as a one of three categories of lecturers: lecturers I, II or III. Currently, a part-time lecturer II at the University of Maine System makes at least $1,029 per credit hour. A part-time lecturer II hired to teach three classes a semester would make a minimum of $18,522 per year. That same teacher — if eligible for health insurance — would also pay, on average, 40 percent of his or her premium, which depends on what kind of plan they have. Crouch estimated a typical part-time faculty member would make about $15,000 each year without benefits.
The minimum salary of a full-time assistant professor is currently $43,602 per year and $49,716 for associate professors, both of whom pay about 12 percent of their health insurance premium.
“We are in a very difficult financial time. It’s not a time when we can talk about improving pay,” Bigney said. “Part-time faculty play a really valuable role, many of them teach one course or perhaps two courses … but that’s not uniformly the case.”
Crouch said he teaches three classes each semester and his salary is about half of a full-time faculty member’s. He said a professor teaching seven classes each year would have a comparable academic workload to him and still cost the universities more, despite the extra non-academic workload he wouldn’t share. He thinks the administration should capitalize on the lesser pay of part-time teachers to keep academic staffs at universities full and save money.
Bigney disagreed and said money isn’t the sole issue. The universities have to consider such issues as which classes students need and class size.
“It’s not just an economic issue whether we should hire more or less part-timers,” Bigney said.
The university system currently employs 780 part-time faculty this semester. Almost twice as many are employed on a sporadic basis each year.
“We’re arguing for increased pay for our members, but lurking beneath that is this fact that there’s a gross inequity in how people are compensated for similar work,” Burke said. “After all these years, the system doesn’t want to recognize that there are equity issues.”
Burke said the most obvious roadblock of negotiations is money.
“They spend a lot of time with full-time faculty and they sort of let part-time faculty issues slide,” Burke said. “It’s not like the people involved with labor relations or the system head in general are particularly hostile, they just haven’t wanted to deal with these things.”
“It’s certainly a fact that they have tough money problems — to some degree, brought on by themselves — but that doesn’t change the fact that they’ve never wanted to address” the pay difference between part-time and full-time faculty, Burke said.
Burke explained the reason he felt the system brought its financial problems on itself is because of its size. He said the size and population of Maine make a seven-campus system financially impractical.
“I don’t blame people for avoiding dealing with it, but that’s where we are,” Burke said.
Neither Burke, Crouch nor Bigney know the exact date when negotiations will continue. The union is waiting to hear back from the administration on a proposal to amend benefit eligibility and costs, which Bigney said the system will be ready to return to “in the near future.”
In an e-mail, Crouch stated he felt the part-time faculty are “invisible.” Professor Judy Kuhns-Hastings, president of UMaine’s Faculty Senate, said she was unaware part-time faculty even had their own union.
“PATFA is not asking for outrageous concessions, just the most basic protections. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask from an enlightened university,” Crouch said.
Crouch said he has taught as a part-time faculty member for about 20 years and can’t afford to retire. He said PATFA is “in solidarity” with the administration and wants to work with it to find ways to make the system work more efficiently.
