“It’s time for meaningful increases”: the WMU-AAUP employee compensation proposal

A negotiation update from WMU-AAUP president, Dr. Cathryn Bailey

Later this morning, the WMU-AAUP negotiation team will present our proposal regarding faculty compensation to the WMU Administration. As our team presents our collective demand for a fair compensation package—including meaningful raises that will actually make a difference to you and your family—I want to make sure you are clear about some of its key aims, especially since you will need to participate to achieve them. As you consider the numbers below, you’ll see that this proposal takes seriously the devastation to employee purchasing power resulting from sharp cost of living increases. Indeed, and as is consistent with input from members, we believe it is our responsibility to advocate for robust raises. This point is underscored by the objective fact of WMU’s consistently vigorous financial health—despite its ongoing cries of poverty—and the years of financial sacrifices employees have been expected to absorb. At the same time, the Administration has spent money with abandon on corporate consultants, Division I football, union-busting attorneys, and, of course, its own jawdropping salaries and bonuses.

The proposal’s key elements:

• Raises of 11.25% across-the-board in both 2024 and 2025, reflecting the decline in salary relative to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) since 2015, and a further projected CPI-U increase of 2.4% per year. While these numbers are visibly larger than those of our past collective bargaining agreements with Western—and you can be confident the Administration will accuse the faculty of being greedy—this 22.5% raise would still only return our purchasing power in 2026 to its 2015 levels.

• “Research supplements” of 3% in 2024 and 2025, to be based on the median salary within each rank. These additional increases reflect some acknowledgements of faculty contributions to Western’s core mission.

• An increase of $9000 to salary minima at each rank, thereby significantly raising the bar for the lowest paid faculty members.

• An increase of $75 per credit hour to overload rates.

• A promotion/step increase of $1000 for Full Professor and Master Faculty Specialist, and $850 for Associate and Assistant Professors. 

• A $1000 increase to each of the faculty recognition awards (teaching, research, and service)

The WMU Administration’s ongoing demands for “belt-tightening,” rationing, and other expressions of manufactured austerity, are especially hollow given their own exorbitant compensation and their apparently endless willingness to subsidize Division I football. (Note that this Administration actually expresses at the negotiation table its implicit expectation that WMU employees agree to the ongoing prioritization of football over academics.) We are, then, especially proud to propose compensation increases for faculty that represent a meaningful increase after years of being starved of resources and compensation.

Indeed, it is disappointing that, at a diverse public university, one built on the backs of working-class students and their families, the Administration would remain unwilling to properly compensate the workers who actually make the institution function. And this has been despite our continued reminders that “our working conditions are student learning conditions.” When the Administration lowballs and starves the faculty, when it treats us like a liability to be whittled away rather than a resource to be nourished, it is Western Michigan University students who ultimately suffer most. We faculty should keep in mind too that the salary increases we negotiate for ourselves have historically been used to benchmark those provided to other key employee groups. When the Administration successfully lowballs the WMU-AAUP, they tend to use this as an additional rationalization to undercut other employees as well.

As negotiations proceed, then, expect this Administration—some of whom have become millionaires for serving as figureheads, managers, and bureaucrats—to shame frontline workers who are advocating for better pay for themselves and their families. The degree to which this WMU leadership has grown out of touch can, I think, be tracked in part, by its now compulsive inclination to hack away at our university’s core academic mission and functions, as if teaching and learning were somehow incidental to why our students and their families choose Western. And that President Montgomery and Provost Vasquez Heilig have, yet again, empowered a notoriously aggressive, union-busting law firm to speak for them at the negotiation table speaks volumes. This is, by the way, the same corporate law firm now aggressively arguing the Administration’s case that it has no obligation to fund your professional research travel, further eroding your income and ability to succeed in your career and serve students.

Again, keep in mind that Western has the funds to properly compensate employees. Indeed, WMU currently has triple the amount of financial reserves that academic financial analyst Howard Bunsis regards as ‘solid.’ Further, since 2019, WMU has posted impressive positive cash flows of between 8.8 and 11.7%. To be clear, this includes some of the worst years of the pandemic, the very same time the Administration fired many employees. The Administration then demanded that remaining employees take on additional work (and even donate part of our salaries), a situation that has never been rectified. Again, WMU’s cash flows represent profit for the institution, money that Western could, instead, easily choose to reinvest in the people that fulfill the core mission.

Although the WMU-AAUP negotiation team will fight for our proposal at the table, it is only through your participation in strategic collective actions that we will win them. In short, if you are expecting a meaningful compensation increase—and to maintain your healthcare as is—then, you need to do your part by standing ready for targeted, escalated action. If you’re reluctant to step up now, please consider the stakes: How much longer can Western afford to be bled dry by the weird priorities of career administrators who always find some new reason for starving the core academic mission? Not only is this Administration compromising faculty and students, it is stealing from WMU’s future.