Not an Editorial: ONE FACULTY MEMBER AFTER FIVE YEARS OF EMPLOYMENT

(We received the following candid report of one member's experiences. It was signed, but we are respecting a request for confidentiality, and because the circumstances presented are all too typical).

MY STATS: Five years of employment, received tenure summer 2003, rank of Assistant Professor. Marital status: single.

FINANCIAL INFO: Starting salary (1998): $40,500. Current salary: $54,000. Average starting salary in FASS in 02-03 was $60,086. i.e., after five years of employment, I still make $6,000 below the average starting salary in my faculty. My take-home pay when I began at $40,500 was about $2000 per month. It has risen to $3000 per month.

LIVING IN OTTAWA AND OTHER DEBT INFO:

When I began working here I was in debt $25,000 because of student loans. I lived for three months in Ottawa without any salary, because my grad stipend ended in April, and my first paycheque at Carleton wasn't until the end of July. This put me much further into debt, as during that time I moved to Ottawa, paid first and last months rent, and bought a few pieces of furniture. I still owe the balance of this debt, after five years. Three years ago I sold my car to save money on repairs and insurance.

In December 2001 I bought a cheap house in a good area, for $186,000. Since then the value of my house has risen approximately $100,000. This means my property taxes are much higher than I expected. I would not have been able to afford this house were I on the market today. I live with three roommates to cover the mortgage and other associated costs with a house. My salary alone, when I was looking for a house, would have allowed me a maximum of $120,000 mortgage. Multiple roommates are a necessity for me.

My monthly total of mortgage, property taxes, and utilities is $2000, half of which is covered by my tenants. My monthly debt-servicing is $1000. This is partly the sizeable remainder of my student loan and my relocation costs, the rest is my monthly payment on the costs associated with my house (closing costs, re-wiring, re-plumbing, furnace repair, new refrigerator, some furniture, etc.). So of my $3000 monthly take-home pay, $1000 is left. Out of that $1000 comes everything else: food, unexpected costs, travel home to see my family every summer, the shortfall between conference costs and what Carleton gives you to attend, and a small bit of going out and enjoying myself. I expect this situation to continue as it is for at least five more years.

I was lucky to find a house that I could buy. But I compare my situation with that of my older sister, who is also a professional (pharmacist), whose starting salary in 1998 in Ottawa was $60,000, and who has recently gotten a raise to $80,000, in order to keep up with the current pharmacists' starting salary.

COMMENT:

What has happened is that my CDI increments, which are supposed to yield an increasing standard of living as I gain seniority, have barely kept me above inflation. This is not how our salary scheme is supposed to work.

In a year when the cost of living has increased 5%, management's initial offer was 1.5%.

If the membership sticks together, we will get a good salary settlement. We are in a very strong bargaining position because of the double cohort. Other issues can wait until the next contract negotiations. This time it is about salary.

Sound familiar? Does your salary not seem to buy as much as it did a few years ago? Do colleagues at other universities appear to be doing better than you are? Is there a hole in your pocketbook?

Such impressions are borne out by the available data on salaries at Carleton. For the information of new faculty members and as a refresher for those who received earlier bargaining briefs, here are some of the hard facts that confirm everyone's sense that we have fallen more and more behind financially.

Academic salaries have steadily been reduced over the last decade as a percentage of Carleton's total operating budget. However, the decreases have hardly been parcelled out equally, as Tables 1 and 2 show.

Although the official slogan is now that Carleton is the "Capital University," our salaries don't reflect that status, since we lag considerably behind others in the Ontario system (Tables 3 and 4).

Table 1

Using the data listed on the Ministry of Finance web site under Public Sector Salary Disclosure at http://www.gov.on.ca/FIN/english/psecteng.htm we can compare increases provided to a CUASA member whose salary would have appeared on the Ministry's Salary Disclosure list of those earning $100,000 or more against members of Carleton's management. The period covered is 1997 to 2001.

If you had been one of the few above the CDI ceiling earning $100,000 in 1997, you would have received the following increases:

1997 0%

1998 0.5%

1999 1.5%

2000 2.0%

2001 2.7%

By 2001 your 1997 salary would have increased to $106,856, a total increase of: 6.86%.

Table 2

Contrast this 6.86% with the increases from 1997 to 2001 provided to management:

Adam 25.5%

ApSimon 19.0%

Van Loon 18.8%

Watt 21.7%

Salary Comparisons - 2001-2002 data

by John Callahan

Table 3 displays average salaries in the Ontario system by age group, rank and area of specialization for 2001-2002. The table can be used in at least two ways:

1. To compare salaries across age group, rank and area of specialization.

� For example, in 2001-2002 the average full professor in Ontario aged between 50 and 54 in engineering earned $13,443 more than the corresponding full professor in humanities ($107,398 minus $93,955).

2. To place yourself relative to the averages for Ontario.

� For example, an associate professor of mathematics aged 47 and currently making $85,000 per year would have been 46 and making $80,810 last year in the 2001-2002 period. This compares with the age group average of $82,925 for the Ontario system.

Table 4 compares Carleton salaries across age groups and rank with those at other closely comparable Ontario universities for 2001-2002. The data in this table shows a number of things relevant to our upcoming collective bargaining:

� Associate Professors aged 40-44 had salaries lower on average than their colleagues in all of the other comparison universities. This held true for Full Professors aged 50-54 as well.

� Even our Assistant Professors aged 30-34 (that is, relatively new hires) had lower salaries on average than their colleagues in the comparison universities.

TABLE 1: AVERAGE SALARY OF ONTARIO UNIVERSITY FACULTY

BY AGE GROUP, RANK, AND AREA OF S PECIALIZATION (2001-2002)

TABLE 2: AVERAGE SALARY OF FACULTY BY AGE GROUP (2001-2002)

(1)- data suppressed to maintain confidentiality

Our scale increases have not been doing the job of keeping our salaries competitive with comparable universities in Ontario. Consider also that Carleton endured only 2 years of zero scale during Ontario's Social Contract and the rest of the system experienced 3 such years. It's time to catch up!