You wanna talk salaries? Let's talk about salaries

 Monday night, as a last move before the strike, the university administration (hereinafter to be known as the Dark Side) sent out a message which was a transparent attempt to undermine people’s faith in UMFA and the job action we were then about to embark on. Or at least I thought it was transparent. The result was quite a number of people choosing to break the strike and a (presumably overlapping) setoff people forcing a vote on that proposal.

 First of all, proposals on both sides are typically withdrawn upon the end of mediation and the beginning of strike action.  Second of all, these people are (presumably) scholars, who make their living reading critically, questioning and evaluating claims, and considering sources.

 If the issue were salaries, which I admit are part of it, what are the odds, that if the administration were really offering everyone what amounts to an astronomical increase in salary that our bargaining committee would have rejected the offer out of hand?

 All information is propaganda, spun so that people will believe what we want them to believe. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it is obviously a disingenuous ploy.  It isn’t always easy to tell the difference, true. But, as I say, these people should be practiced, if not good, at it.

 

This by the way is the value of the university. Practice and critical reading, critical writing, and perhaps most importantly, critical thinking. But I digress.

According to the Dark Side’s announcement, the last-minute offer was for a 9.5% salary increase. (To quote a random commenter on the CBC news website, “when was the last time you were offered a 9.5% raise?”  Which is precisely why this should have been seen for what it is. In the words of my union president, it’s “smoke and mirrors”. Or more charitably, it’s creative use of cherry picking and statistics. 

 Again, I point out that all information is propaganda.  I have no reason to believe our information is any less cherry-picked or ‘spun’ than the Dark Side’s.  I hope, however, that our information is at least more complete, and less disingenuously deployed.  We shall have to see about that.

 What the Dark Side actually offered, according to UMFA, is a 2.8% increase over two years.  Which is not to be sneezed at. The remaining 6.7% or so is in fact money that the Dark Side is already obligated to pay. In every contract there are built-in ‘increments’, small increases to your salary (called your ‘base pay’, if I have understood the explanation) given to all employees.  Increments differ depend on length of service, which salary grid you’re on (currently professorial staff, full-time librarians, and full-time instructors are all paid on different grids), what level you are on each grid (an Instructor I in her first year gets a different increment than a full Professor in her 30^th year), and other factors.  There are also ‘merit increases’ which can be added on top of these, again depending on a) whether the appropriate Dark Side minion™ things you deserve it, and b) where you are on which grid, and so on.  As I understand it, that 6.7% is composed of the entire fund required to meet existing obligations.  So as you see, these are distributed unequally across the salary grids, and effect only base pay.

 Instead, what we want, and what we’re striking about, is not base pay.  The issue is the salary grids.  What we’d like is a “reasonable” increase, to all grids, and all levels, equally. This would also include an increase in salary minima and threshholds.

 While obligated to increase yearly salaries (base pay) to all existing employees, the Dark Side is not obligated to offer incoming employees (remember, the ones we’re trying to recruit) more than the minimum base pay (at the relevant grid-level, very typically Assistant Professor or Instructor or Librarian I), because the bottom of each grid-level won’t change, just the amount of each individual’s base pay form year to year. Since the Dark Side can offer the minimum (at the appropriate grid-level).  Sometimes they offer more than that, if they are particularly interested in recruiting someone,  but this introduces intrinsic inequities  between individuals doing, presumably, the same job. And results in greater inequities experienced by women and visible minorities compared to white men which persist (surprisingly to some of us) even to this day.  But that’s a different rant.

What UMFA wants, as I say, is for all intents and purposes, a bump to the entire grid system (and the shuffling of Instructors onto the same grid as Librarians, which effectively raise their pay considerably). 

 This is one of the many issues involved in this negotiation. It is almost certainly the one that involves the greatest capital investment. But the Dark Side’s proposal addresses only salary, and does so inequitably across the grid-levels. UMFA’s priority is a structural change to the grids.

 According to the Bank of Canada, the current rate of inflation is 4.4%. The Dark Side’s proposal would see a ‘raise’ of 2.4% over two years, over and above scheduled obligatory increments.  I have been at the University of Manitoba for 20 years.  My first UMFA strike was in 2001, where I learned that in something like the previous 30 years, increments and increases hadn’t ever kept up with inflation.  (In 2001, inflation was somewhere around 2.3%.  Since then, I think we had one year, maybe two, where increments and increases have come anywhere close to the rate of inflation.  Over a career, that is a very real loss of buying power, of pay-off-the-mortgage money, of send-the-kids-to-school money. Add to that the overall economic reality, with young people stuck in lower-paying jobs, unable to rent or buy their own homes, and boomeranging home.  Add to that the increasing reality of many of my colleagues taking care of dependent parents and others.  And we haven’t start to talk about perks, like our parking subsidies, our prescription and other healthcare insurance coverage, and on and on.

 There are also non-monetary issues on the table, like what kind of information can and cannot be used in what kinds of personnel decisions (there may not have been a ‘permanent record’ in school, but there is definitely one for university employees). Whether we can be forced (absent a public emergency) to teach by remotely, or conversely in person, and who owns material we develop for our courses.  And countless other things that I know even less about.

 And this is the strength of having a union, collectively bargaining for us, in good faith. Individually, we don’t have to worry about these things, or ensuring that gains made are equitable. The union also sees to the enforcement of our rights and provides assistance when there is need to protect or enforce our rights.

 We are absolutely cognizant (or at least I am) that we are, generally speaking, well-paid compared to most workers in our city and province, where university education is not the expected norm, and thus the public at large may not understand the value of the university quite the way we’d like.

 But I would prefer not to work at a university whose quality comes down, even just a little, year after year, while student fees increase, even just a little, year after year. Where the ability to offer competitive salaries to incoming colleagues erodes little by little, year after year. Where we continue to lose colleagues to institutions that can offer more money and lower costs of living (here, I obviously exclude cities like Toronto and Vancouver, where costs of living really are unsustainable). Where quality of life, in addition to buying power, continues to decline.*

 *It must be said, that there is a lot about Winnipeg that I have come to love. But especially to new colleagues, the fact that it costs about $300-500 more to get anywhere from here (owing to having to fly through a ‘real city’™ to get anywhere, or a 4-hour drive only gets you to a city the size of Fargo, and only if you cross an international borde.And don’tget me started on the winters, although we do not have it worse, perhaps we even have it better, than most of Canada, if not most of our competing cities. But again, that’s a different rant.