From an article published widely around PA today, attributed to the Associated Press:
Chancellor John Cavanaugh told a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in downtown Harrisburg that university administrators hadn’t had a raise in two-and-a-half years. The average 3 percent merit raise went into effect Jan. 1 at a cost of about $6 million a year out of a $1.4 billion system budget, a system spokesman said.
To borrow a phrase from everybody’s favorite President, Ronald Reagan: Here we go again…
It’s become common, during negotiations years, for management to claim that they’ve forgone raises for years while those greedy faculty take huge raises at every opportunity. Chancellor Cavanaugh didn’t miss his opportunity to point this out:
Asked if he would return his raise or ask other administrators to do so, Cavanaugh said the system board of governors sets compensation levels. He also noted that the system’s unionized work force of about 12,000 received raises last year.
Of course, as he says this, he leaves out a handful of salient points:
1. I won’t speak for AFSCME (They’ve spoken for themselves here) or the other unions because I haven’t done the research, but I do know that APSCUF raises haven’t kept up with the pace of inflation for many, many years.
2. Probably more important, the reason we got raises last year and the years before that is that HIS SIDE AGREED TO THEM TOO. PASSHE had to sign the collective bargaining AGREEMENT just the same as we did. For the Chancellor then to assert, no matter how tacitly, that we’d somehow have gamed the system if we got raises and they didn’t is absurd.
3. Along similar lines: we (all the unions) negotiate our raises with management. But we get nothing to say about management raises! If they’ve chosen not to give themselves raises, then fine–but to make us complicit in that is misleading at best.
There’s a lot more to say about this, and I’m sure the Office of the Chancellor will provide opportunities to say it.
REMINDER: Rally for Public Education! April 27, 7 pm, Chester County Courthouse!
APSCUF-WCU 