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This one may be largely invisible to many, but to those of us who bump up against it repeatedly, it’s a major issue.
I’ve been working at community colleges with collective bargaining agreements since 2003. I don’t think the issue is unique to collective bargaining settings, but I’m convinced that it’s harder to solve in a unionized environment.
Full-time faculty and staff salaries are regulated pretty closely by rank, with ranges established in the relevant collective bargaining agreements. The idea behind that is the need for equity (and solidarity) within ranks. For faculty, the route to raises beyond negotiated, across-the-board increases is through promotion; a promotion from associate professor to full professor comes with a raise of x percent, or to the “floor” of the higher rank, whichever is greater. For a professor who starts as an instructor -- our entry-level position -- it’s possible to earn three promotions over time: to assistant, to associate and to full professor. While each promotion brings with it expectations for greater campus-level leadership, most of the tasks remain the same at each level. (For example, the default teaching load for a full professor is the same as for an instructor or an assistant professor: 15 credits per semester.)
Some faculty also take on administrative responsibilities, whether as program coordinators, department chairs or even as deans. Those bring compensation, but they also bring fundamentally different tasks, and they’re not mandatory. I have known many a full professor who wanted nothing to do with chairing, let alone deaning. And that’s okay; they don’t have to.
For staff, as Lee Skallerup Bessette notes in The Chronicle, opportunities for promotion within the same job tend to be fewer, if they exist at all. Frequently, the only way to make an increase above the across-the-board kind is to move into a supervisory role, which is a fundamentally different job. And even those sometimes top out pretty quickly.
Skallerup Bessette’s piece does a good job of outlining the impact on many full-time staff. In the spirit of “yes, and …” I’ll bring up the impact on faculty hiring in certain fields.
Contracts set the terms for internal salary adjustments. But they only apply internally; the rest of the world doesn’t give a hoot about our salary schedule. In fields like computer science and nursing, we often have to compete with private employers who can pay whatever the market will bear. We can only pay what the contract will bear.
That means that while we can expect deep and broad pools of applicants in fields like history and English, sometimes searches fail in certain occupational areas for lack of qualified candidates. The folks who could do the job can earn so much more working elsewhere that we struggle to attract them.
You can imagine the arguments we use to try to entice people. For example, they can do per diem or consulting work in the summers for extra pay, with the added benefit of staying current in their fields. But it’s hard for many prospective candidates to get past the hit to the baseline.
One way around that, of course, would be to try to negotiate entirely separate salary scales. But unions don’t generally go for that sort of thing; they see it as divisive. In a way, it is. But going without employees in key areas isn’t really a solution.
An underacknowledged corollary to this argument is that if we were to shift focus and go to mostly or entirely vocational programming, we’d need much more money. I’ll just leave that there.
This is a tough dilemma, because there’s truth on many sides. Yes, it would be divisive to have different salary scales according to market demand for various disciplines. On the other hand, that’s what most industries do as a matter of course, and leaving roles unfilled in the name of equity is a pretty severe sacrifice to ask students to make. Internal fairness conflicts with external demand. We can try to manage that conflict in various ways, but I have yet to see a college fully resolve it.
Wise and worldly readers who work in collective bargaining settings: have you seen a reasonably elegant and sustainable resolution to the dilemma of internal salary schedules failing to keep up with external markets? If you have, I’d love to hear it! I can be reached on Twitter (@deandad) or via email (deandad at gmail dot com).
