Volume 34 No.2                                       Arnd Bohm                                        September, 2003

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.


Why It Hurts In Your Pocketbook

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)

age group

<30

30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60+
ENGINEERING & APPLIED SCIENCES
FULL PROFESSOR

-

- 99694 101960 102608 107398 109384 117779
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

-

(1) 83503 84217 86276 92207 96301 99113
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

78635

75710 74040 72901 (1) (1) -
HUMANITIES & RELATED
FULL PROFESSOR

(1)

(1) (1) 81807 87578 93955 102684 107086
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

-

62345 66499 72062 78161 81085 90877 95199
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

50124

54579 57285 59644 61525 64168 68684 77417
MATHEMATICS & PHYSICAL SCIENCES
FULL PROFESSOR

-

(1) 99310 96110 96138 105867 110158 110362
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

(1)

77039 80544 79561 82925 86002 91924 99611
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

65664

65379 68603 66640 73630 60986 (1) (1)
SOCIAL SCIENCES & RELATED
FULL PROFESSOR

-

(1) (1) 101545 102097 106241 108631 112953
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

-

77719 80666 80864 83042 87984 93955 96516
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

74885

71452 70992 69539 69946 70886 75713 77221

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



age group

<30

30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60+
FULL PROFESSOR
CARLETON

-

- (1) 80257 89265 96645 100764 104499
GUELPH

-

- - (1) 95640 98291 99296 101644
MCMASTER

-

- (1) 93246 96264 104164 104429 105538
OTTAWA

-

- (1) 83754 90634 100288 107148 111222
WATERLOO

-

- (1) 94723 95498 106231 108694 112077
YORK

-

- (1) 102056 93287 102976 105425 108277
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
CARLETON

-

(1) 71787 74037 80670 84728 93132 98151
GUELPH

-

- (1) 82945 88466 89129 91852 95585
MCMASTER

-

(1) 78252 76279 79468 85060 91345 93627
OTTAWA

-

(1) 71995 76598 81980 87498 90580 92941
WATERLOO

(1)

69920 76117 80189 85816 90096 97905 103324
YORK

-

(1) 80577 81011 83992 85604 92886 97095
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
CARLETON

(1)

58931 63430 62334 70883 70517 71874 (1)
GUELPH

(1)

61515 67993 71305 75219 76761 (1) (1)
MCMASTER

63846

65838 65593 63736 67558 (1) (1) -
OTTAWA

(1)

59915 61851 62024 66808 65879 70708 (1)
WATERLOO

(1)

59945 70280 68045 71148 (1) (1) (1)
YORK

(1)

68626 71316 66224 69059 68292 78129 88637



(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!