Come salary negotiation time, every faculty union wants to be paid based on what “comparable” universities are getting.  It was a huge point in the UNB strike, it continues to be one in the Mount Allison strike, and presumably it will be one at U Winnipeg as well (the strike deadline is February 24).

There are three problems with the notion of “comparability”.  The first is obvious: finding genuinely comparable institutions.  On what, exactly, do you compare?  Size? Mission?  Teaching loads?  Research output?  There are number of plausible metrics here, but when choosing “comparable” schools the metric for comparability is never entirely transparent.  And the problem is that in the absence of rigorous metrics, faculty unions might simply try to find official “comparators” that are significantly more prestigious (and better-paid) than themselves, because then they’ll look worse by comparison, and hence be deserving of a larger raise.  Cue round after round of salary gains.

There is, of course, a simple way to stop this kind of gaming: institute a rule that if one institution is going to be considered a comparator to another, both sets of faculty unions must agree.  That is, for the faculty association of (for instance) UNB to be permitted to claim that Queen’s and Waterloo are “comparable” institutions for the purpose of salary, the faculty associations at Queen’s and Waterloo would: a) have to agree that UNB is a comparable institution; and, b) include UNB as a salary comparator in their negotiations.  This form of gaming would stop PDQ.

The second solution is slightly wonkish, and has to do with seniority and salary grids.  Let’s say two institutions are genuinely indistinguishable from one another and have identical pay grids, but at one the staff tends to be older and have more years of employment, and hence are paid better due to seniority. Could the university with the more junior staff claim the need for a raise because of “comparability”?  Real-life example: average pay at every single rank at UNB is about $10K behind the equivalent at Dalhousie, but because UNB staff are on average much more likely to be full profs on higher salaries, the average salary of all profs across each institution looks about the same.  Leaving aside the institutional comparability issue for a second, UNB profs have a legitimate argument about being underpaid.  But if they get a raise, then the administration has a legitimate concern about overpaying in total for professorial services.  See?  Trickier than it looks.

But say these two technical problems are solved: say you’ve found genuinely comparable universities and you can get over the problem of staff heterogeneity. There’s still going to be the problem of affordability.  A Mexican or Costa Rican university might declare itself comparable to a Canadian one, but that doesn’t mean it can afford to pay its staff on a similar basis.  Similarly, within Canada, not every institution is equally well-funded.  McGill and Alberta are comparable institutions in many respects, but one’s in Alberta and one’s in Quebec.  No prizes for guessing which one’s profs make 10% more than the other, on average.  And striking about it, even if that were something McGill profs ever did, wouldn’t change that one bit.