March 19, 2025
Mediation began at 9:00 am with Admin presenting its latest compensation counter proposal. As we also have, they have total salary increase pool percentages for each year and then break each down into across-the-board increases (ATB) and merit increases. For ATB raises, each eligible person receives the same percentage increase. For merit raises in their proposal, each eligible person receives between 0% and 3%. Here’s what they are proposing:
Year 1, effective beginning of month after ratification: 1.5% ATB and and a 1.5% pool for merit raises
Years 2, 3, and 4, effective January 1, 2026, 2027, and 2028 respectively, 1.5% ATB and a 1.25% pool for merit raises
They made a couple changes here, bumping the total Year 1 pool from 2.75% to 3%. The pools for Years 2 through 4 remained at 2.75%, but with the ATB/merit balance in Year 2 changing a bit. Note that even though our Union was recognized in January 2024 and we have been bargaining since February 2024, Admin is offering no retroactive pay. And they are offering sub-inflationary raises.
They made some movement on floors by rank, increasing each of their prior numbers by about a quarter of a percentage point. And they agreed with our intent to include different rates by rank for overload, summer, and winter pay, though their numbers are lower than ours. They continue to reject our proposals for an increased raise for promotion from Assistant to Associate, as well as our proposal for guaranteed support for conference travel and professional development. They seem unmoved by our reasoning that other employees do not typically pay for their own business travel. We wonder: How many administrators have had to pay much of their business travel expenses out of pocket
Admin continued to reject our longevity raise proposal and hold on their Professor Merit raise pool. They explained limiting their 5-year merit pool to full professors by indicating that associate professors have not contributed enough to be rewarded for their ongoing commitment to our institution. Their proposal requires full Professors to compile a dossier every five years post-tenure in hopes of getting a bump that year. If they don’t get it, they can try again in another five years.
The most significant movement in their proposal was on Parental Leave. After rejecting without a counter for nearly 13 months, they finally gave us something to respond to. They propose, effective July 1, 2027, that employees who qualify for the university’s current unpaid Parental Leave will get the first four of eight weeks paid without utilizing other leave benefits. However, they restrict this to continuous leave, though many new parents benefit from intermittent or reduced load leave currently allowed by the policy.
We were happy to finally see a counter on Parental Leave, but we believe ISU can and should do better.
After talking through Admin’s compensation proposal, we went into caucus for almost four hours. During that time, our co-lead negotiators Drs. Ashley Farmer and Tice Sirmans, along with other members of our negotiating team, had multiple long sidebars with Admin to talk through possible paths to agreement on Assignment of Duties and Workload. We also worked on counters for those areas, only presented as “supposals” at this point with the intent to be put on record next session. And we put together a compensation counter.
After the long caucus, we presented our economic counter. We made smart movement in multiple areas, demonstrating our desire to get to an agreement but still respecting faculty’s value to ISU. Our movement included decreasing paid parental leave from 15 weeks to 8 weeks, and our movement on effective dates for ATB raises further lowered the cost of our proposal.
Tice walked Admin through the proposal and drew from her expertise in financial analysis to explain our cost out procedures to them. There was a tense exchange as Tice spoke from her area of scholarship and reminded Admin that money is fungible, what is restricted and unrestricted is not static and is at least in part determined by Admin, that they have not been transparent about their budget, and that they have a significant amount of cash on hand and can pay us fairly. Comments from the Admin team that suggested they were out of touch with the wage erosion we have been experiencing were met with an impassioned response from bargaining team member Dr. Julien Corven, explaining in real terms what our members are experiencing.
The rest of the day was spent in caucus, sidebars, and briefly when the skies got particularly ominous, an interior room. We ended the day walking through another supposal on workload. The supposals and sidebars of the day brought us much closer on this critical article. We left mediation close to 8:30pm, and we'll be back at it on Monday morning.
