Thursday, April 27, 2006
It must be hard for KAPE — the GTA union — to try to explain to campus GTAs why they received no salary increases this year and might not next year.
As an open letter on April 25 to the new provost reveals, the KAPE negotiators are not being candid.
The university is not withholding merit raises, and the provost has had no role in the absence of raises. It’s the existing contract, which does not “guarantee yearly raises for all returning GTAs;” it only guaranteed raises through the past academic year, 2004-05. That’s why KU urged KAPE to participate in bargaining sessions during the summer, so a new contract might be resolved by fall 2005 and GTAs could get raises. But KAPE declined to meet during the summer.
A basic tenet of the contract negotiation process is that both parties must agree on all aspects of the proposed agreement before it can be ratified formally. KAPE thinks it can pick what it likes and say no to everything else. That’s not how contract negotiations work here or elsewhere.
The KAPE negotiators are willing to sacrifice a new contract with better wages and benefits because they want GTA positions to expand into something verging on long-term employment.
The fact is, GTAs receive year-to-year contracts, for a maximum of five years. Extending the five-year limit would deny incoming graduate students access to teaching assistantships. KAPE ignores this and dismisses the lecturer positions, research assistantships, and other forms of support that are viable options for those who really want to stay on. The timely completion of graduate work is considered in national evaluations of program quality, but KAPE doesn’t acknowledge that, either. It is simply in KU’s and current and future graduate students’ best interests to ensure that students move through their programs and find full-time work in academe or elsewhere in a timely manner.
KAPE would like to cloud the fact that it has forfeited significantsalary increases for current GTAs. KU offered a lump sum 5.5 percentincrease for current GTAs, payable in May. KAPE declined. KAPE also haswalked away from a minimum $1,000 increase to the base salary for those GTAs who make the current minimum salary of $10,000 (about 20 percent of GTAs) -- a 10 percent increase in wages. For the 80 percent of GTAs who earn more, the dollar amount left on the table is larger. No other employee group at KU has been offered or will receive a similar 10-percent wage increase.
While a formal impasse has been declared, we still have our offer on the table and are willing to conclude the negotiations and end uncertainty for our GTAs now.
Barring this, we will follow the process set out in the state Public Employee Relations Act to bring this matter to an orderly conclusion.
Ola Faucher is director of Human Resources and Equal Opportunity. Don Steeples is a distinguished professor of applied geophysics and vice provost for scholarly support. Both are members of the KU negotiating team.
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