Board comment.......
My name is Sean Rule. I know a few of you, some pretty well. To those who don’t know me, I taught at COCC for 22 years in the math department. I adore my College, and I’m proud and thankful for the work that I did there for those decades.
I’m writing today because of the current state of faculty contract negotiations. And I know that you’ve been inundated with information and data carefully prepared from the current Faculty Negotiations Team. Rather than repeat that, I’d like to give you some backstory of how we got here from my own experience.
I served on three(ish) Faculty Negotiations Teams over a span of about ten years. It’s “ish” because, at first, I was just helping the official teams with spreadsheet coding. The second stint was a reopener, and the third was when I was a proper member. I learned a bit during all three, and that’s what I want to share with you all here, as I feel the current situation we’re in was almost inevitable in the rear view.
I’ll present my memories as a bulleted list from each of the three experiences.
Note: this won’t be short, as I have many episodic memories from this time period. As such, I don’t expect these to be read aloud at the board meeting on the 9th, nor do I want them to be trimmed down to fit into the Gong Show theme of public comment that’s currently being used.
1) As I went through my first negotiations experience, I was completely removed from the formal process, focusing only on helping the team build out salary spreadsheets.
- Takeaway: As a math person, I was taken aback at the then-linear system in the faculty year-over-year pay. Here’s the 2010-2013 addendum (the earliest I could find in my files):
You might notice that the “steps” (that is, the difference between successive year’s pay) is linear (for example, in Assistant 1, the year-over-year increase is $1580. For the next three ranks, it’s $1660, $1840, and $1920).
This took me aback, over a decade and a half ago, because I know that inflation is measured in percentages, which are exponential. And, in the long term, exponential growth generally outperforms linear growth. What that means is that, even early on, I was seeing how COCC faculty pay was falling behind inflation. More on that to come.
2) My next stint was on a reopener committee. If I recall correctly, we were mainly discussing adjunct pay increases (which we’re still talking about now, since they’re tied to FT Faculty pay).
- Takeaway 1: This was when I first heard the phrase “COCC doesn’t spend short-term revenues on long-term expenses.” When I was poring over spreadsheets related to COCC expenditures with then-CFO Kevin Kemble, I asked where a large sum of line-item income ($6 million, raised as post-2008-recession tuition income gotten when our FTE increased by 50%) had gone between one year and the next. Kevin pointed across the street at the new student center. I then asked, “Wait - I thought we couldn’t use short-term funds to pay for long-term liabilities.” He quickly changed the subject, and I decided, then and there, to pay closer attention to any financial decisions made by the school.
- Takeaway 2: This was also the first time I heard the phrase “We all get the same raise.” I know we’re not using that phrase anymore, but this was told to me by Ron Paradis to explain that whatever percentage is negotiated, all employee groups get that same percentage. I gently explained that “the same percent” isn’t “the same raise[1]”, but I understood - kind of - what he meant: if, say, the faculty negotiated a 4% raise, then that same raise was also the raise administrators and classified got…but there was a problem with that logic:
o Administrators then (and, I believe now) actually got 4% more each year than their previous salary (that’s exponential growth, from above).
o If you recall, faculty received linear steps. So, where’s that percentage? Well, here’s how thatsausage was made: the 4% (or whatever it was that cycle) was the total amount of dollars the school paid to all faculty. We then had to figure out how to develop the salary schedule (like the above-referenced one) within that limitation. When I asked, “Why don’t the faculty just get percentage increases, too?” I was never given a satisfactory answer (note: now, it seems as though they are now, but the damage has already been done, historically. Again, we’ll get to that).
3) My final (and most eye-opening) stint was on the last Faculty Team that had to go to mediation. This was a highly contentious one, as we were starting to see enrollments drop back to what they were before the recession[2]. My job, again, was mainly “spreadsheet guy”, and a lot of my fears were coming to fruition by this point.
- Takeaway 1: Remember the “linear versus exponential” difference in steps between faculty and admin? Even though more recent Faculty Negotiation Teams have rectified that, the earnings over time that were lost cannot be recouped with the agreements that have been accepted. Let’s take a look at what would have actually happened if the linear behavior continued for a decade after that initial salary schedule, assuming a 4% raise:
See the gap between the two curves? That’s money lost to time. And, sure…each three years the faculty renegotiate a new schedule. But
1) in the intervening years, money is still lost, and
2) when the faculty are starting from a diminished place, financially, the adjustments made aren’t enough (I’ll let the current team’s data explain why).
This is also the problem with constantly posting “comparative raise” charts like these on the school’s website:
The percent without the corresponding dollar amount is meaningless; the reader is led to believe that both groups start from the same place, which is not necessarily true (as in this case). Simple to read? Yes...but not meaningful.
- Takeaway 2: Perhaps the most nefarious thing I learned during this cycle follows. After doing many cost-of-living adjustments (similar to the ones I’m sure you’re seeing right now), we proposed an, admittedly, large salary proposal to the admin team, who then were to bring it to the Board. At the next week’s meeting, they came back and said, “That offer really wasn’t realistic, so we didn’t bring it to them.”
Unacceptable, for at least two reasons:
1) The obvious one: the admin team isn’t the Board. They don’t get to decide what’s appropriate and what’s not; that’s the Board’s job. It says right in our contract:
In fact, the mediator we met over a decade ago seemed genuinely surprised there was never a Director in the room with us for negotiations meetings, to prevent exactly this kind of “telephone game” thing from happening.
2) Now, 1) was terrible…but it also shed light on a larger issue: it appeared that there was a “top percent” that the “Board will agree to” and “won’t go above” (paraphrased). Well, then…that’s no longer a “negotiation”, now is it? That’s a line in the sand that one side can see, the other can’t, and a whole lot of time is wasted playing that game.
I also learned that, timing-wise, the COCC budget is finalized before Faculty salaries are finalized. That sure explains the last point…and it sounds suspiciously like the budget is being balanced on the backs of the Faculty.
After that mediation cycle, I vowed to never serve on negotiations again (and I didn’t even tell you about when Matt McCoy shut my laptop in a meeting). But those memories are burned into me.
I’ve helped teams since with data crunching when I can…but then this email popped up from Laurie a couple years back:
I was furious.
There was a never a “similar” study done for faculty (I can’t speak for classified here). The school never paid an outside contractor to look at faculty salaries; any cost-of-living work was done by faculty, after scraping the web for publicly available datasets.
I asked her to delete the email and rephrase it more truthfully, and she declined to do so. That stung.
Folks, we don’t get into teaching to get rich. We just ask for fair compensation. Unfortunately, negotiations over the past two decades have allowed this wage gap to grow to a point that the only way to correct it is, now, a large adjustment.
If management was being underpaid, then I’m glad you corrected that.
Now, please do it for the faculty.
Thanks for reading.