I’ve had a
number of faculty ask me what can/does the MSU union do? I just wanted to spend a little bit of time
highlighting one answer to that question from events that have occurred on
campus over the past six months related to the mid-year raise just approved by
the board and announced by President Smart in his Clif’s Notes.
As a faculty
member, I have served on the President’s Executive Budget Committee for the
past year. You may, or may not, recall
that last year employees also got a mid-year raise, which was supported by
faculty representation on the Executive Budget Committee. For the current year, a regular pay increase
was originally proposed approximately a year ago. That is, a 2 percent across the board pay
increase was originally scheduled to be given in the summer of 2012. The proposal made by the President was to
reallocate money to allow for the pay increase even with an expected budget cut
from the state of 7 to 8 percent of state funds. However, early in 2012 Governor Nixon
announced a 12.5 cut to higher education funding, and this scheduled pay
increase was cancelled. I believe it
fair to say that everyone on the Executive Budget Committee understood that
such steep budget cuts would not allow for employee raises during the summer of
2012.
However,
under political pressure Governor Nixon lowered his recommended cut to higher
education down to 7.78 percent. Then,
the state legislature passed a budget with no cuts to higher education. In Missouri, the Governor has the power to
withhold money from the budget if he/she does not think the legislative budget
will be balanced. Hence, the issue of
withholdings by Governor Nixon remained an active issue at the end of the last
academic year. The President’s proposal
at this time was to not give employees a raise and, in fact, employee
raises were a very low priority at that time.
I asked in
the meeting why, if we were at worst contemplating an 8 percent cut in state
funding to MSU and when that had previously been the case we had agreed to a 2
percent across the board pay increase, we were not now simply going back to
that same pay increase? That remains an
open question. At the time, the best
that I could encourage the President to agree to was that we would readdress
the issue of raises in the fall of 2012 when we knew the level of Governor’s
Nixon’s actual withholding from our budget.
Let me note that the above details are for the most part present in the
minutes of the Executive Budget Committee and in a number of past issues of Clif’s Notes.
When the
Committee again met in September, a salary increase proposal was presented by
the President and the CFO that constituted either a 2 percent or a 1.5 percent
across the board increase. Why, might
you ask, would any faculty member on the Committee vote for the lower
raise? The President/CFO presented the
medical plan as being in dire straits with low reserves and a number of large
claims in the past 9 months. Hence, the 0.5
percent reduction in the proposed salary increase would go into the health care
plan on an annual basis. The 2 percent
raise was presented as being done in the “hope” that health care costs would go
down.
No specific
numbers were given regarding the medical plan just the assertion that the raise
could not be given because of problems.
I was skeptical both because we had previously discussed the Health Care
Plan in May 2012 (see those Executive Budget Committee minutes) and noted that
the plan had performed well recently, the spikes in costs were likely random
and the health care plan was currently out for bid, with the implication being
that significant savings could be realized.
I also asked
about the level of University reserves, which had been increasing substantially
over the past 5 years while we were in the midst of an on-going financial
crisis. Here are those reserves over the
past 5 years:
|
Missouri
State University
General
Operating Fund
Carry Forward
Fiscal Year
End
|
|||
|
$ Millions
|
|||
|
2012
|
$ 61.4
|
||
|
2011
|
$ 59.8
|
||
|
2010
|
$ 53.2
|
||
|
2009
|
$ 47.7
|
||
|
2008
|
$ 46.1
|
||
Notice
that MSU’s reserves have increased by a total of $15.3 Million over the past 4
years of our financial crisis or a 33 percent increase. I, and other faculty on the Executive Budget
Committee, have complained about budgeting in such a way that reserves go up
during a financial crisis. The committee
had agreed in 2011, after an investigation by the CFO, that $40 to $45 Million
in reserves was sufficient.
Hence, we had
$15 Million in extra reserves that we could use to improve the salary increase
and I proposed a third option for a salary increase, a 2 percent raise with any
extra $ needed for the health care plan taken out of reserves, of which we had
more than sufficient. We had a vote,
with my third option included and the majority of the faculty and staff on the
committee voted for the 1.5 percent salary increase. A minority, including several prominent
administrators, voted for the other two options, both of which were variations
on the 2 percent salary increase.
Here is the
point of this blog post: Effective
faculty representation requires both a willingness to challenge
authority and an understanding of what are often complex issues, especially
with respect to the budget as in this case.
President Smart noted just before having the vote that I had been rather
aggressive in supporting a 2 percent raise.
To be an effective representative of faculty interests often requires a
willingness to challenge authority, sometimes aggressively.
Why did other
faculty on the Committee vote as they did?
I have talked to several but certainly not to everyone. Nor, let me hurry to add, do I intend in this
post to “blame” people for how they voted.
But there is a tendency by many people to defer to authority especially
in the case where your vote is public, as it always is in these meetings. That deference often comes down to, as one
member told me later, believing what authority tells you – in this case the
false premise that the University couldn’t afford a 2 percent raise. At the time, the chance that this premise was
true was essentially zero. As is
evidenced by the fact that the annual savings to the health care plan announced
in the most recent Clif’s Notes were
5 times the approximately $500,000 needed for a .5 percent extra raise. Those
numbers, in fact, suggest that a 3 to 4 percent increase would have been a more
reasonable raise given MSU’s actual budget situation.
As I noted in
my previous blog post, President Smart neither understands nor particularly
values the academic mission of MSU. At
best, he views academics as one of 2 dozen “priorities” and as he made clear at
his open forum academics lies at the lower end of this priority scale. Without effective faculty representation,
this priority will never change.
Effective faculty representation is the best argument for a union that
represents the faculty with the ability to negotiate salary increases and
academic priorities.
