UVM Faculty Advance with a New Contract

After more than 15 months of negotiations, members of United Academics AFT-AAUP ratified a new contract for the University of Vermont’s full-time faculty. The agreement maintains current benefits, staves off objectionable intellectual property language, and makes some advances in promotion increases, faculty development funds and workload language.

It also provides an 8.5 percent salary increase over the three years of the contract — 2.5 percent above the administration’s proposed 6 percent. An external “fact finder,” enlisted when negotiations and mediation failed to produce an agreement, sided with the union in citing a “continuing need to increase the bargaining unit’s salaries to be more in line with their comparable peers.”

The union’s pushback against the administration’s sub-inflation salary proposal also ensures that, in the face of rising health-care premiums, faculty don’t see their take-home pay decrease.

The downside of this contract is that salary increases are only retroactive to January 2018 not July 2017, when the last contract expired. The fact finder cited declining tuition revenue as justification for this decision. Lack of full retroactivity both cuts into the salary increase and sets a worrying precedent in giving the administration an incentive to stall negotiations in the future.

Read more: https://socialistworker.org/2018/06/19/uvm-faculty-advance-with-a-new-contract