Not only is there strike talk at Laurentian, but there is also a strike in the air at Windsor (a one-day strike was held last week, but a full strike is promised for October 1st if no deal is reached). Bargaining there began earlier this year, but for whatever reason, no progress was made in negotiations over the spring. After a conciliator was unable to nudge the two sides closer together, the university was in the legal position to impose its offer on the faculty, which it did in early July. This was a canny piece of timing: by doing this in the summer, the university deprived the union of an immediate strike threat (because who cares if profs go on strike in summer?).
This was a rare case of a university playing hardball on timing; and though this may have wrong-footed the union, they’ve responded by making great rhetorical hay out of having a contract imposed on them. Now, the strike is no longer about petty monetary demands, it’s about the right to collective bargaining. Yay, righteousness! And that’s a big bonus for the union, because if the strike was just about financial proposals, their position would be almost indefensible.
The union position is that the university’s offer – 0%, 0%, and 3% over three years – is inadequate because staff can’t be expected to accept wage increases below inflation. While that’s one way of framing the institution’s offer, it glosses over the stonking amount of money the university is offering faculty through its Progression Through the Ranks (PTR) system (for a refresher course on PTR, see here). Under the university’s offer, every single professor (other than those with over 30 years experience) gets an annual pay rise of $2,550. This isn’t based on merit or anything, the way it is at Alberta or UBC or Waterloo, it’s just for sticking around another year. On top of that, they get 0%, 0%, 3%.
Now that doesn’t translate easily into a percentage figure because $2,550 represents a different percentage for each professor, depending on their current pay. But let’s take a stab at it based on known average pay by rank. Current pay figures are unavailable (thanks for cutting the UCASS faculty salary survey, StatsCan!), but I do have them from 4 years ago – they’ve probably gone up slightly since then, but for giggles let’s use them to take a look at what the university offer means if the PTR is included.
On top of that, there’s something called the “Windsor Salary Scale” – a Windsor-only deal, in place for decades, which means that the Windsor salary scale always rises at the Ontario median. Based on the past few years’ deals, this would mean average pay rises of another 4% or so (15.4% now for assistant profs, if you’re counting) – though it’s hard to predict exactly, since we don’t know what future salary settlements across Ontario will look like. On the other hand, professors will also be asked to pay more into their pensions, what with returns being so meagre in our low-interest rate environment. So let’s call these two a wash and stick with the figures in the table above.
To summarize, this deal – which, recall, had to be imposed – will see nearly all faculty salaries rise by rates well above inflation (in the case of assistant professors, by a factor of two). The only ones who will not see a rise equal to inflation are that tiny minority (the 30+ years crew) already at the top of the pay grid, and who in most circumstances will be earning over $150,000.
Remember, this is at a university in a region where first-year enrolment fell by 10% this year, and where the regional youth cohort (Windsor-Essex-Chatham-Kent) is set to shrink by 15% or so over the next six years – meaning the institution will receive even fewer tuition dollars, and will receive a declining share of total government grants budget, which, if we’re lucky, will decline by only 3% in real terms over the next three years.
And still the union said no.
Tweet this post
As long as universities insist on referring to faculty as employees, one should expect them to view their relationship with the institution in strictly monetary terms.
what should they call them instead?
“Doctor.” What does the ministry of justice call the judges it pays?
Both judges and professors are paid salaries, but that doesn’t make them employees, at least not in any normal sense of the term. Or rather, it shouldn’t.
Not only does the practice of treating faculty as employees threaten control over their intellectual lives by those who are not qualified to judge them, but, on the other hand, it casts them in the role of other employees, whose relationships to their employers consist in trying to obtain the maximum pay for the minimum effort. It’s what we should expect out of steelworkers or coal miners.
In addition to some factual errors in this piece … E.g. Mediator not concilatior… This piece simply parrots the Administration’s position with inflated rhetoric. The Administration’s offer is only available to the public because of their hostile imposition of working conditions. There are many other considerations to be made, and you’ve just stacked the deck with those numbers that make the union look unreasonable. First, that’s bad math. If you must comment, at least own your bias. You pay no attention to the figures previously publicly available that the faculty association references on its webpage. WUFA.ca. Second, your comments are unjust. Please respect the faculty’s democratic right to have representatives negotiate an agreement, a right that the UW administration is trying to undermine.
I have seen the faculty;s webpage. It does indeed show slightly different numbers, especially on PTR, which it claims is zero for first two years. I have asked them to explain the difference on a couple of occasions and have received no reply. Do you understand why? Can you explain it? Instead of just telling me I have “bad math”?
You draw a distinction between PTR and merit systems. But my experience at uWaterloo has taught me that there’s really very little difference. The average merit increase is substantial and likely rivals or surpasses most PTRs. Many administrators and faculty members prefer the merit system because it rewards performance, serves as a motivator, etc. Others dislike it: compiling the information annually is seen as a lot of time for little gain, and many chafe under the constant need to justify one’s work and worth. But, as I said, monetarily it functions much like the PTR since the merit awarded tends to be generous.
Perhaps the most significant omission amounting to an error in this analysis is it’s final claim that the union said “no.” That is simply false: the union provided a counter-offer that the administration refused to consider. To this day the administration has not even looked at the proposal from July. Instead they took to bargaining in the media by imposing working conditions. It is very sad that the administration poisons our working environment this way, so wholly unnecessarily.
Hi Catherine. Thanks for writing.
How is a counter-offer not “no”?
Alex Usher has done a marvellous job of skirting around the central point here: the U of W administration has unilaterally done away with collective bargaining. That’s why we’ll be going on strike in less than a week. Why have unions at all? Let’s just have “employers” impose whatever they see as fair. As for your numbers, it is absurdly simplistic to call pension payment increases and the Windsor Salary Standard “a wash.” We were forced to double our pension contributions in the last contract, and I have not received ANY benefit from the WSS for a number of years. Now, how about cutting off PTR for profs above the 30 year mark: What is this other than pressure to push us to retire? Do you really take the ageist position that we do not continue to teach new classes, improve our current classes, and offer the benefit of our experience to our students and younger colleagues? My union informs me that as a result of slashing PTR, my pension will be reduced by 5-8 percent. How fair does that sound?
Hi James. Thanks for writing.
As I understand the WSS, it kicks in to keep salaries at provincial median when scale increases do not do so. Perhaps the reason you haven’t been receiveing WSS lately is because your scale increases are high? Conversely, if your scale increases are low, WSS would kick in. Past performance is not an indicator of future returns, and all that.
Second, on PTR – virtually every faculty CBA I’ve seen in Canada (which admittedly is not a very complete sample) has a top to the scale at each rank – also, in general the increases tend to be larger at the bottom of the scale than at the top). So to my knowledge, Windsor would just be joining other universities in having a top of scale. I could be wrong about this, obviously. perhaps the faculty union could provide its members with a summary of how many universities provide unlimited PTR regardless of years of service.
But in any case, lack of PTR certainly doesn’t seem like an incentive to retire to me. I don;t know the exact figures but it seems to me that if you’ve got 30 years experience as a prof at Windsor, it;s unlikely you’d be making $145K. Even without PTR, that would be a reason to get out of bed and go to work for most people.
Having read this and the post on PTRs, I still always come back to what is, I think, a deceptively simple question underlying this case and that of all cases of collective bargaining: what *ought* professors (or welders, or McDonald’s employees or glaziers) be paid? How do you decide what is fair? Arbitrary numbers/ assumptions are still at their root normative claims. The alternative of “market rates” is a non-starter, because there are entirely too many variables to even say that such a thing exists. On the other hand, I am always struck by how oblivious unionized workers seem to be to how bloody entitled they come off as compared to others. For all the outrage about “rights of workers” that accompany pro-collective bargaining arguments, I rarely see unionized workers standing in solidarity with the contingent workers alongside them who are often doing the same work for less money and with no job security (here, the growing army of sessionals in post-sec). I’m not necessarily against collective bargaining, but find that the basic question of what is *fair* is rarely considered seriously.