Dear Colleagues, 

as you may recall, last year’s salary increase parameters included a $500/FTE pool that was to be used for salary adjustments.  The Faculty Federation allocated about a third of these funds to increase the stipend minima for part-time lecturers by the same 4% + 4% that full-time members received (this also increased the additional compensation amount for overload teaching and OCE courses), with the remaining funds ($160,682) to to distributed “as agreed ” by the Federation and Administration.

A labor-management committee was formed in March of this year (with Assistant Teaching Professor Jennifer Pierce from Management & Marketing, Associate Teaching Professor Nate Rubien from Med. Lab. Science, and Associate Professor Jennifer Viveiros from Adult Nursing representing the Faculty Federation) to determine how these funds should be distributed. This labor-management committee met multiple times during April and May, agreeing that  these salary adjustment funds should go mostly to teaching and clinical faculty, and that it should be a progressive distribution. The exact details of how the funds should be distributed did take some time to reach agreement on with a final MOA between the Federation and the Administration being signed in June (please see the attached document).  In summary, the remaining funds in the salary adjustment pool are to be distributed in the following manner:

• ensure that no full-time member of the bargaining unit has a base salary of less than $70,000

• the funds are to be allocated pro rata  to each college based on the number of members eligible to receive a salary adjustment

• within each college, the funds shall be awarded to the eligible members in a progressive manner

Some small part of the funds were used to adjust the salary for those tenure-track faculty whose base salary is less than the average base salary of the teaching and clinical faculty in the college.

HR has informed the Federation that the UMass President’s Office has approved this agreement, and campus HR has processed these salary increases which will appear in this week’s (Friday July 5th) payroll.

This agreement would not have been possible without the efforts of  the faculty representatives on the committee, Jen Pierce, Nate Rubien and Jen Viveiros, who argued strongly that these funds should be directed to the teaching and clinical faculty, and who developed the progressive distribution model being used for this.