It was great to see so many academic professionals attend our bargaining session. Having members in the room shows the administration that our bargaining unit cares about the issues on the table, and it also helps keep our own bargaining team energized and informed. Being able to talk with members helps us have a better understanding of the specific issues our members face and inspires us to push harder to find solutions that will improve people’s working conditions.
Unfortunately, the first part of the bargaining session was taken-up with a communication issue that emerged at Thursday’s Board of Trustees’ meeting. Trust and communication are essential to making the Interest-Based Bargaining process a success. When miscommunications or a breach of trust occurs, it is important to discuss and resolve these issues before moving on with bargaining. The joint bargaining update scheduled for Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting was canceled as a result of the student occupation. The Board left the room and resumed their meeting remotely, while PSU AAUP remained behind with the students. When the meeting resumed, a brief update was given by a member of the administrative team. This was problematic for our team, because given the limited access we’ve had to the board, we believe that the update should have been cancelled until both parties were present. After a conversation, we agreed that in the future, joint bargaining updates will only proceed if both parties are present.
We then resumed our discussions about the lack of promotional opportunities and relatively flat salary schedules faced by our academic professionals. We returned to the discussion by first reviewing some of the data our team prepared about the average salary rates for APs by length of service in various job families (i.e. Advisor/Counselor I, Program Manager II). While each job family has a minimum and maximum salary assigned to it, most of our members are concentrated at the lower end of that range, and many APs who’ve been at Portland State longer make on average, less than their newly hired counterparts. Reexamining this data sparked a discussion about how to define salary compression and inversion and prompted a more detailed examination of some of the discrepancies within each job family, which are defined broadly and capture a number of diverse job titles.
The option that is currently on the table to resolve these issues involves hiring a consultant to reengineer the job families to provide more clarity about AP job duties, create promotional ladders within various job titles and design a salary structure that rewards experience and expertise. However, given the time it will take to complete the reclassification study and the pressing need for an immediate fix to our AP salary structure, we have also proposed a longevity adjustment as short-term fix. The longevity adjustment would create graduated minimum salary rates for APs based upon their years of experience. For example, an AP who has worked at PSU for five years would have a higher minimum salary than someone who has been here only three years. No academic professional would receive a reduction in pay as a result of switching to this graduated pay structure. The minimums would increase annually, and APs would have an opportunity to move-up the pay structure. The pay structure would be incorporated into the reclassification effort or would be replaced by a more detailed structure that rewards APs for their length of service.
At this point, the longevity adjustment/reclassification study are simply an option, however, there seemed to be an emerging consensus around this idea. PSU AAUP has agreed to bring examples of what a longevity-based pay scale could look like to our next session. There are many details that would need to be worked out, such as what the length of service intervals would be for particular job families. Salary minimums would have to be negotiated as part of our overall economic package. Please join us next week as we continue to discuss AP issues. We will bargain on Wednesday, December 16th from 10-4 in ASRC 650 and on Friday, December 18th from 10-4 in ASRC 620.