After the last contract was filled with tense negotiations, the new contracts negotiated between the University and the faculty resulted in terms that pleased both sides and addressed faculty pay.
The contract, if ratified by the Board of Trustees, will go into effect July 1.
Bill Balzer was the chief negotiator for the University, who helped coordinate negotiations with Steve Demuth, who was the chief negotiator for the faculty association. The two met before the process of negotiations started to put together a plan of how the negotiations would go.
Instead of traditional bargaining, the two groups used interest-based bargaining, which is a more “collegial, much more of a problem solving approach,” Balzer said.
Balzer said both parties wanted to make sure the contract was fair to both the faculty and to the University in terms of “teaching and scholarship activity.”
One of the biggest parts of the contract was addressing the pay that the faculty received, which was much lower than the national and state averages.
David Jackson, the president of the faculty association and a political science professor at the University, said the pay inequality has been noticed for some time now and was even known before there was a faculty union.
“The faculty senate would do, through their committee, research into the differences between BGSU salaries and peer institution salaries,” Jackson said. “So it’s been identified as an issue for quite a while and the current administration agrees that the current goal is to get us at least up to the median of our peer institutions. That’s what the last contract and this contract are designed to do.”
Jackson said that the staff wasn’t happy about getting paid less and one of their goals was to get collective bargaining in place for future contracts. He says there’s now a system in place when it comes to negotiating the contracts.
“We looked at benchmarking data against who we agreed are our peers to identify where we were in terms of compensation,” Balzer said. “Using these benchmarking institutions … and looking at our assistant professors and instructors and so forth being paid relative to their peers at those institutions, it provided a good foundation for deciding what should be the right compensation for our faculty in this contract.”
Steve Demuth, the chief negotiator for the faculty association, said that not only is this contract going to be in effect for the University, but will also be the contract that the faculty at the Firelands campus will use as well.
“It’s one faculty across both campuses. There weren’t any Firelands representatives on the negotiating team but this past summer as a sort of preparations for negotiations, we had a bargaining council and there’s a faculty member over at Firelands … who chaired the bargaining council,” Demuth said.
There were also other members of the faculty from Firelands who helped with the bargaining council from last summer and faculty members were also involved in some subcommittee work. The Dean of Firelands was also brought in for the University’s side.
And while the first contract that was negotiated was filled with tension, this upcoming contract was markedly different for both sides.
“I think both parties would agree it was a very successful process for this second contract,” Balzer said. “We developed better communication and a deeper understanding of what the other party’s concerns were. I think both parties feel it’s a very fair contract.”
Demuth agreed, saying this round of negotiations had more trust on both sides and that “fairness is what’s really important” in terms of the contract and said he’s only heard positive things about the new contract from the faculty.
The negotiations started at the beginning of the fall 2015 semester and finished on Friday, March 25. This is the second contract that the faculty and the University negotiated, with the first contract being negotiated in the traditional bargaining sense.
