Salary Compression

Some of our members have been teaching, researching, instructing, and working in other capacities as NTT’s for a very long time. Yet, they’re making only a little bit more now than when they first started in their positions, five, ten, or even twenty years ago. Inflation makes this problem more complicated. It means that, sometimes, new hires come in starting at pay grades that it took older hires years to achieve. This has the effect of compressing their pay relative to their experience, and it makes these faculty members feel less valued and respected by the administration even though they have given so much of their lives to this university.

We were excited to have the opportunity to negotiate over issues of salary compression in our second contract. In establishing minimum salaries in the first contract, we were conscious of the fact we’d need to build on it to ensure that it didn’t contribute to issues of salary compression. So, we negotiated language that provides for monetary recognition of long-term service to the university. Now, those who have been employed by the university since the beginning of the 2014 AY and make between $45,000 and $64,999 annually receive compression raises equivalent to $125 for each year they have been at the university in a position covered by our agreement. For example, someone who makes $48,000 a year and has been here for 7 years should have received a 7 x $125 salary raise this year ($875). So, if you’ve been here more than five years and make between the amounts above, you should check your paycheck this fall! Make sure that you’re getting the raises you deserve for your long-term service.

In part 3 of our series All About Wages, we’ll be looking more at the new, minimum salary increases that each NTT should receive yearly. Missed part 1? Read it here.

Since NTFC won our first contract in the spring of 2016, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate at which average salaries have risen, as shown in the timeline above.

While most of us are happy to see our paychecks increase no matter the reason, it’s also important to understand why and how these increases occur. In this first post of three, we take a look at Minimums in Article VIII of our contract–the part that’s all about wages.

Salary Minimums

Before NTFC won our first contract in 2016, there was no set minimum salary for full-time, non-tenure track faculty (NTT’s). Some non-tenure track faculty made as little as $30,000 a year, a salary on which it was nearly impossible to support a family, manage student debt, or take-on mortgages and car payments, much less support their professional development needs like traveling to conferences or buying new books for research. Furthermore, most NTT’s knew that at other universities nearby, like the University of Illinois at Chicago, unionized NTT’s were guaranteed minimum salaries that were already much higher than $30,000 a year.

When our union formed in 2014, this salary security was something our members cared deeply about. We fought hard in our first round of contract negotiations to ensure that NTT’s would be guaranteed a minimum salary that showed the value of their work and allowed them a decent living. Our 2016 strike victory gave us our first contract, and this gave us legally binding guarantees that our members would be paid at least a certain amount per year, even if the university was in financial hardship. This is part of the reason that, in the above graph, average salaries increased so dramatically from 2016 to 2017–we as a union helped to make this happen! As long as we have our union, we will have the opportunity to renegotiate what this minimum value is from contract to contract, and who it effects.

In our current contract, the minimum salary is $45,000 a year from August 16th, 2019 to August 15th, 2023. Effective August 16th, 2023, this value will go up to $47,500 a year. This means that, if you are a 100% full-time NTT at this university, the administration must be paying you at least $45,000 a year at the time of this post. If you’re not getting at least this amount, you should contact us immediately.

More On Wages Soon!

We’ve been able to address a lot of the issues relating to wages that our members face in the past few years. This has been a part of the reason why our average salaries have gone up so much–together, we’ve made it happen! Salary minimums, raises, compression funds, and more. Stay tuned to our website for part two of our All About Wages series, in which we’ll explain our contract’s language about compression adjustments to salaries.