UNH professors union contract negotiation at impasse

Contract negotiations between the University of New Hampshire and the UNH chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which represents UNH's approximately 630 faculty members, have stalled.

Wednesday morning, UNH officials announced an impasse, meaning that the two sides failed to reach an agreement. The next step will be seeking help from an outside mediator.
UNH's most recent offer was for a one-year contract with a 1.5 percent salary increase: one percent across the board and the other half percent for merit. The proposal was contingent on two factors: the union approving the contract by June 30, 2010, and no change in the state's funding to UNH.

Countering their offer was the AAUP's proposal, which called for a one-year contract with a 3.2 percent salary increase across the board, in addition to a $470 flat salary increase across the board. The proposal also called for the creation of a $180,000 pool that would be distributed to faculty based on merit. These factors combined, the salary raise for faculty would have been approximately 4 percent.

Both proposed contracts would have been effective January 1, 2010 and run until the end of June, so even though they were one-year contracts, the amount actually given out would have been half the raises called for.

Both sides defend their final offer.

"The university believes it is a very fair offer in this economic climate," said Candance Corvey, the chief negotiator for the UNH administration.

Corvey noted that the offer contains a lower raise than recent settlements, as well as a shorter contract period, but attributed both these factors to the current economic climate.
"The university is affected in numerous ways by the poor economy," Corvey said.

Corvey said that the recession has decreased the value of the endowment, which used to support operations and fund financial aid, for which there has been an increased demand because of the effect of the recession on students and their families.

Corvey also said that the cost of providing health benefits to faculty and staff is increasing, and that budgetary problems at the state level threaten the state's level of support to the university, which is current $68 million a year.

In the past year, UNH has gone though staff reductions and implemented a salary freeze for non-union employees making more than $40,000 annually.

Dale Barkey, chief negotiator for the UNH chapter of the AAUP, said that the faculty just wants to have similar contracts to UNH's eight comparator schools. The comparator schools are similarly sized state institutions such as the University of Vermont, and were agreed upon previously by UNH and the AAUP.

"If we were to take the most recent offer from the university, we would definitely fall behind" faculty wages at UNH's comparators, said Barkey.

The most recent settlement at each university has been significantly higher than UNH's latest offer, according to Barkey. Faculty at the University of Delaware received a 4 percent raise in their most recently negotiated contract. Those at the University of Vermont got a 5 percent raise, and at the University of Rhode Island a 3 percent raise.

In a press release, the university stated that seven of UNH's eight comparators have contracts in place for fiscal year 2010, but "most of them were settled before the crash of the economy."

Barkey disagreed.

"The recession started in December 2007," he said. "A lot of these contracts were negotiated a lot more recently than that."

Barkey pointed to the University of Vermont as an example. Vermont's contract gives faculty 5 percent raises annually for three years, and was "certainly negotiated during the recession."

The press release goes on to say that the most recently settled contracts were at the University of Massachusetts (1.5 percent raise) and the University of Connecticut (0 percent).

Barkey said that UNH is not suffering as much financially as these other schools.
"UNH is in relatively good shape," he said.

Barkey said that UNH's tuition and enrollment continue to increase, and that the assets of the University System of New Hampshire (USNH) have steadily increased over the past few years. However, he said the AAUP is open to negotiation.

"We're ready to bargain," he said. "We certainly haven't put a take-it-or-leave-it offer on the table."

The AAUP has already rejected one higher offer. Prior to the final offer, UNH offered a two-year contract with a 2 percent salary increase: 1 percent across the board and 1 percent merit. The association was told that they could accept the offer or it would be taken off the table.

"We can't give in to a threat like that, so we said no," Barkey said.

The next step in the process is to bring in an outside mediator, which could happen as early as December.

"Typically, a mediation session is a day-long event where the mediator moves between the two teams, each situated in nearby rooms, and tries to identify new areas of common ground and opportunities to move the parties closer together and even to settle," Corvey said.

If mediation fails, the two sides will move on to the fact-finding stage, when another outside party analyzes the facts and the two arguments and issues a formal report containing recommendations for a settlement. The report is not binding, but can sometimes produce a breakthrough, according to Corvey.

UNH and the AAUP have been at impasse before, most recently in January of 2008, which was actually the second impasse in that round of contract negotiations.