As the WMU Admin attacks its own employees by email, a professor responds

A negotiation message from Western Michigan University Prof. Robert White (and former WMU-AAUP negotiation team member)

I wanted to share some thoughts regarding the negotiation environment we find ourselves in this year. I am not presently an officer, representative, or negotiating team member – but as someone who has been behind the scenes in previous negotiations, and who has also recently served in a partial administrative capacity for the Irving S. Gilmore School of Music, and an alum of WMU (Bachelor of Music Education, 1995), I’ve seen a lot at this point. And I have some perspectives on what we’re hearing from our Administration that might be worth taking some time to consider critically. Also, just like all of you, I am a Union member, and that means I’m an active – not passive – participant in the functions of this organization.

Our Negotiating team’s opening compensation proposal, did a marvelous job of justifying what they were asking for on our behalf. In addition to simply listening to the faculty, and the needs we expressed, they have used publicly available data to demonstrate that:

• The University is in a strong position, financially, and has the resources to budget more money into paying faculty.
• WMU has, for a significant amount of time, reduced its investment in faculty, all while increasing its investment in Administrative positions.
• Faculty have lost significant ground to inflation, especially since our pay cut in 2020, and only incremental increases since then. (Look through the link above and/or the slides from Howard Bunsis’ presentation last Spring for the data).

This was a damn strong proposal, and one that I felt heartened to see presented. It was not simply grabbing an impossible number out of thin air, it was a balanced assessment of what WMU has the ability to pay for, and what we need in order to get back on the comparatively solid footing of our economic power in 2016.

In light of this understanding, I am deeply critical of the recent emails from our Administration (8/13 and 8/23), and its attempt to use its power to publicly address the entire WMU community with not only incorrect statements, but what seems like an attempt to frame the facts and context of this negotiation in a self-serving way (although, with a couple of delightful “self-owns” as well, which I’ll get to).

First, consider the assertion that compensation can only be paid for through revenue coming from tuition and state appropriation.This framing is used to make it sound as if WMU is already spending every cent that comes in on our expensive salaries and benefits packages. However, as the University’s own financial statements assert, there is enough money in reserves from these revenues right now at WMU to operate for about 9 months without any revenue at all. So, if the rapture occurred tomorrow and we found that only our students had the sufficiently immaculate souls to pass muster, the rest of us could still get paid our full salaries for the whole academic year before needing to find another job. This includes President Montgomery, Jan Van der Kley, their car allowances and club memberships… all of it. That’s incredibly solid footing, in fact, you might remember Howard Bunsis remarking last Spring that it’s about 3x greater than what’s considered “totally solid” in the public sector.

How much would our negotiation team’s first proposal have cut into that reserve? After all, it’s good to have a reserve right? Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman would be pretty proud to see WMU behaving so responsibly, so we obviously can’t propose a pay package that would exhaust that hard-earned 9 months of cash. And that $31 Million price tag sure sounds high – it must promise to devastate those reserves, right? Good news, it would only cut into it to the tune of a few weeks.

Think about that for a minute. For 7-8% of what it has accumulated, WMU could cover a contract that would suddenly reflect a long-overdue, serious investment in its faculty. I don’t know about you, but my feelings about working for this Administration would undergo quite a change if that took place. (Ok, maybe not that big of a change, but still!).

By the way, you’ll notice that, from the jump, Admin has lumped the entirety of what our team first proposed into not just one dollar amount, but a percentage. One that was then inflated some more to make it a big, scary “15%”. The word for this type of thing that people with PhDs’s use is “prevarication”. 

That might be a moot point, since our team has already made some movement toward the middle, to proposed raises of 8.5 and 8.75%, according to the last email, (remembering that the Admin’s initial offer was raises of 2.75% and 2.5%). So our team’s current proposal would cut into even fewer of those reserves. The Admin’s response has been to move…brace yourself…+0.25% for 1 of the 2 years. Progress, I guess?

But rather than continue negotiating, the Admin now seeks mediation. They are throwing up their hands in frustration because…because we’re actually negotiating? Obviously they are leaning hard on Jim Greene and Dykema Gossett here – creating a narrative that our side is making an unreasonable demand and then refusing to negotiate against it in good faith, even though their absurdly low offer and unwillingness to budge is meant to stand on its own.

Infuriating, isn’t it? To lighten things up a little, I mentioned I’d point out a couple of “self-owns” from the Administrative team’s emails:

• They admit to paying for yet another consulting report (two of them, actually) from Segal, as if that makes anyone think that some sort of objectively fair information has been gleaned. The degree to which they are willing to spend money on these things is something I feel like calling into Dave Ramsey’s show about, to be honest. They might have a problem.
• They compare recent contract settlements from “peer institutions” (though certainly not the list that our Office of Institutional Research maintains…), which show significantly higher raises than anything they’ve offered so far. As someone on the “lower end of the pay scale”, that Northern Michigan deal looks like one I’d like to talk about! (Would have to be both years, though). Wayne State’s deal looks interesting, too. 
• Lastly, they assert, “The union negotiation team’s stated intention is to cover inflation dating back to 2016, but it should be noted that faculty have had negotiated wage increases every year since 2016. Over this same time period, WMU’s general fund budget has declined 25%, adjusted for inflation.” First of all, citing a budget decline is literally saying “We decided to spend less money. Therefore we can’t spend that much. Even though we’ve been bringing in tons.” Second, the assertion that we’ve received raises every year since 2016, besides being another “prevarication” (we do remember that pay cut, don’t we?), ignores the point that the proposed raises from our side is to make up what the meager raises of recent contracts hasn’t covered. A “raise” that is less than inflation is a pay cut – pure and simple.

In my previous career as an orchestral musician, I learned a lot about the labor history of that field. In Chicago, for example, before the world-famous Chicago Symphony fought to form the International Conference of Symphonic and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) in 1962, they would often show up for work in September to see a contract tacked to the bulletin board backstage, signed by the President of the Orchestra’s management, and the President of the Chicago Federation of Musicians. Those two parties would just make a deal, without the input of the actual musicians being represented. It seems as if that might be the type of union relationship our Administration is seeking. Indeed, with the way our COVID pay cut and subsequent agreements were arrived at (one of which I was on hand for), one could see how they may have kind of gotten used to just telling us what we were going to get, and us voting to approve it.

We don’t have to accept that, colleagues. If we uniformly express to our Admin that we are going to move forward this time, that we are going to get a contract that reflects our centrality to this University’s function, we can get it.

But that is only going to happen if everyone shows up. It’s not enough for our great team, active officers, and die-hard crew of supporters who always dependably put in the work, to do it for you. YOU have to show up. 

See you soon,

Bob

Want to get involved? Here are some events planned for this week. Check back often as the situation is quickly evolving.