Negotiations over the 2019-2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement are underway. The faculty bargaining team has been busy. There are forty-one provisions in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Twenty-nine of the forty-one have been opened. There have been tentative agreements (TAs) on the ground rules, definitions, and articles 2, 3, 4, 14, 20, 21, 22, 25, and 31, so much work remains.
The Chapter put forth its initial compensation proposal (article 10). The proposal contains across the board increases greater than the cost of living. This is very reasonable considering the significant increase in UC’s student enrollment and a steady economy. The Chapter’s proposal also includes benchmark increases to better attract and retain quality faculty. Finally, the proposal also seeks increases in regional campus salaries, as UCBA and Clermont continue to lag behind other Ohio regional colleges in salaries.
All of the Chapter’s compensation proposals (the total compensation package) will be designed to complement President Pinto’s proposed Strategic Sizing Initiative, which seeks to align UC with peer institutions such as Michigan, OSU, and Pitt.
AAUP-UC has also proposed a change to article 15. (Article 15 provides that the administration can provide salary or benefit increases to match a bona fide offer, to correct inequities, for retention efforts, or to reward outstanding professional contributions.) The proposal would make it clear in the CBA that article 15 increases could be funded by either the individual colleges’ budgets or the provost’s budget. This is important because colleges have different capacities to absorb these increases potentially leading to inequities between the colleges. Further, all the colleges have been under financial pressure and this could provide some budget relief. Note that there is nothing that currently prohibits article 15 increases from coming out of the provost’s budget, but it is hoped that including this in the CBA would make this clearer to the faculty and the deans.