Greetings,
We are writing as representatives of the Executive Council of United Academics of the University of Oregon (UA). UA is the exclusive union representative of faculty at the University of Oregon. As faculty representatives, stewards, and leaders, we work every day to improve our university and the state of higher education in Oregon. We are writing today to update you on the status of our negotiations with the administration for our fourth full Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). While there has been quite a bit of progress on certain articles of the CBA with give and take from both faculty and administration, thus far, the administration has yet to address many of the real-life concerns of the faculty, the biggest of which involve our wages. This issue has generated much tension among our rank-and-file, which we discussed in a recent and important member communication.
A small amount of context is important for understanding the current moment. First, faculty have had recent experiences that have damaged our trust in our administration’s ability to understand the university’s fiscal position. In the spring and summer of 2020, the administration asked the faculty to take up to $100 million of wage cuts over four years in exchange for saving the jobs of 211 teachers and researchers whose contracts were up for renewal. We were told that the situation was dire, and that there were no other options. Faculty voted to accept the deal in order to keep our university functioning in a time of great uncertainty. However, the cuts were ultimately unnecessary: the threats to the livelihoods of our colleagues were not needed, leading many of us to wonder why they were made in the first place. Then, in the run-up to the negotiations for the previous CBA, the administration asked us to take wages off the bargaining table and agree to an advance deal. Again, we were told the fiscal situation looked dire. Again, we were told, there were no other options. We agreed to raises below the expected level of inflation. And, instead of the disaster forecasted by administrators, the university’s fiscal situation has steadily improved.
In addition to damaging the trust between faculty and fiscal managers, these issues have resulted in changes both to faculty livelihoods and the University of Oregon’s competitiveness. Housing prices in Eugene have increased 40% since 2020, meaning that many faculty are being priced out of the apartments they live in, and those saving for down payments have seen their dreams of homeownership dashed. Our standing among our comparators, the public institutions in the Association of American Universities (AAU), has diminished – wages at UO are now far below the average of our peers and are projected to drop even more.
In the spring of this year, we conducted our own analysis of the university’s fiscal position and proposed an economic package that would simply bring us to the average of our peers. That’s all we’ve asked for: to be paid the average. Assuming only business-as-usual changes to tuition and state support, this can be done simply by spending the same share of revenue on faculty that the university did before the pandemic.
That bears repeating. We are not asking for or assuming that the state will bail us out. We are not asking to be paid a premium beyond market rates. We are simply asking to be average. Our analysis shows that our university routinely pays its top administrators the average of their peers within the AAU. If administrators can afford to pay themselves market rates, they can afford to pay us market rates too.
In response, the university has, once again, claimed that the fiscal situation is dire, and that the only raises they can offer are below the expected rate of inflation, thus eroding our livelihoods and our competitiveness still further.
The University of Oregon is the fertilizer of our state’s economy. Oregon prospers when its youth are brought to the forefront of knowledge in the sciences, humanities, and arts. We are dedicated to creating and maintaining the conditions in the state that attract employers, keep our brightest talent local, and help Oregonians thrive. As faculty, we work every day to invest in our students and in the advancement of knowledge for Oregonians. But we can’t properly invest in students and in Oregon’s future if our institution does not properly invest in us.
We ask you to join us in calling for our administrators to deliver a workplace and a compensation system that meets the standards set by our peers in other states. We ask you to hold administrators accountable not for the number of buildings they erect or the number of athletics partnerships they develop, but for the flourishing of their employees. This is, by definition, a problem that administrators and policymakers in other states have solved. It’s time for Oregon to catch up.