Punishment or fair contract?

The University of Maine trustees want employees to work for less next year than they did last year. Again. After two years of working for less than we actually earned the previous year (2003-04 and 2004-05), efforts to negotiate a contract assisted by a professional mediator failed because the Trustees refuse to bargain in good faith.

The recent supplemental appropriation of $5.9 million from the Legislature that was intended to pay for increased employee compensation? Disappeared without a trace into the black hole of the UMS central office. No significant increase in compensation was offered to employees after that appropriation was enacted. It’s like it never happened.

The most recent offer to faculty for a two year period was for basically the same sum offered in September 2005. Even the dates in the proposal indicate it was written to be offered in Fall 2005. And several items in the latest UMS proposal were designed to punish faculty for refusing to accept unfair contract offers earlier in 36 bargaining sessions during the past 18 months.

Although the UMS offer is complicated and tentative agreements were reached on some matters, the central unresolved issues concern salary and health insurance. The most recent UMS proposal of May 26, 2006 appears at first glance to offer faculty 3 percent increases in both academic years 2005-06 and 2006-07. But what was offered was both deceptive and punitive.

The 3 percent increase for academic year 2005-06 just finished, during which faculty worked for an entire year without a contract, would be paid for only six months starting January 1, 2006, effectively reducing it to a 1.5 percent increase. For the first six months of that year, July 1-December 31, an additional one-time lump sum payment of 1 percent was proposed. But it would not be added to base salary or included in calculations of future salary increases for 2006-07 or later. Holding that portion out of the base is punishment for faculty not accepting an unfair contract.

Another 0.5 percent was deducted by UMS from the phony 3 percent offer to reimburse UMS for unspecified costs incurred during 2005-06 it will not recover, according to the UMS negotiator. UMS never recovers its costs from faculty. This was either an attempt to force faculty to pay the UMS costs of negotiations while UMS stalled to avoid settlement, or other administrative costs UMS would have incurred anyway if there had been a contract. That’s more punishment. It’s also an unfair bargaining practice.

Thus, UMS effectively proposed a 2.5 percent increase for a period in which there was 3.5 percent inflation, offering faculty a 1 percent loss in real income for the academic year 2005-06 just finished. That’s several hundred dollars per person.

For comparison, the average UMS faculty salary increase over the past 23 years was 3.8 percent per year. But in the two years covered by the most recent contract, faculty suffered a net loss to inflation of about 3.1 percent of salary. Should we do that again?

It gets worse. The language of the UMS proposal for a one-time 1 percent payment excludes all faculty who actually worked during 2005-2006 but who left or will leave employment through retirement or resignation before the effective date of the Agreement, a date not yet determined. This is punishment for people who already provided their labor in good faith. Retired people.

The latest UMS offer was just a gimmick to minimize UMS budget commitments to faculty by minimizing the increase in base salaries during the first year of the contract.

Is this the oldest trick in the book? Stall negotiations a year and then ask employees to bargain away any increase for that period by excluding part of it from base salary? Shameful.

If faculty agreed to this offer, it would reward an obvious UMS bargaining strategy of stalling negotiations and encourage its recurrence. No AFUM contract since 1987 has been completed before the previous contract expired.

They don’t need encouragement for this unfair practice.

The AFUM Negotiating Team is negotiating from a principle of “not going backwards,” and believes UMS can afford a better contract. The team vote rejecting this punitive offer was unanimous.

When negotiations failed last week, the mediator said AFUM and UMS were about 1 percent apart on salary. That’s about $700,000 per year, not much to UMS, but a lot to individual faculty. We know where the money is. If the Trustees can’t find it, a special audit of UMS accounts by the Legislature can find it. AFUM will be glad to show them where to look.

Michael S. Hamilton is professor of political science and a member of Faculty Senate at the University of Southern Maine, and is a member of the AFUM negotiating team.