Becoming an FA Member
About the
CMU Faculty Association
What are the Advantages of Joining the
Faculty Association
What if You
Don't Join?
Negotiating Your Initial Salary
Benefits and
their Costs
Pension
Hospital, Surgical and
Prescription Drug Coverage
Dental Insurance
Other Insurance Benefits
Leaves
Tuition Waiver
Student Activity Center
The following discussions are placed here to offer some bearing, direction, and help to candidates as they go through the very rigorous process of competing for and deciding about employment at Central Michigan University. No short few pages could ever supply all the information and guidance that a new person needs in the arduous process of seeking a position. Still, we would like to be of service as much as we can and are very willing to talk to any candidate who wants to contact us. You can find the phone numbers and email addresses of all of the members of the Faculty Association Executive Board at the link above, “Officers and Executive Board Members”.
Three different pieces of information and advice that might be helpful to you: some background about the CMU Faculty Association, some advice on the negotiation of one’s initial salary, and a discussion of benefits and costs at CMU.
About the CMU Faculty Association
The Faculty Association (FA) is the sole representative of the faculty when it comes to working conditions for CMU faculty. Affiliated with the Michigan Education Association and the National Education Association, the FA was organized in 1969 and is the oldest faculty union at a 4-year institution in the United States. Since that time, the bargaining teams of the FA and the CMU Administration have conducted formal negotiations in order to decide the various and ever more complex conditions of faculty employment at CMU. The current contract is the 2008-2011 contract, effective until June 30, 2011.
The FA serves faculty in a variety of ways above and beyond formal bargaining. Representatives of the FA and the administration meet monthly to discuss contract issues and faculty concerns. The FA president occupies a “bully pulpit” from which she or he comments on various activities taking place on the campus. Representatives of the FA sit on many different budgetary, research and policy-making committees across the campus.
The FA also pursues formal grievances to protect the interests of various individual faculty and groups of faculty that may have been harmed in some way by CMU Administration decisions and activities. Some of these situations are resolved with a conversation between the administration and FA. Others may take much longer periods of time through the process provided for in the contract to protect the rights of bargaining unit members.
If you do come to work at CMU, you will be asked to decide to join the FA or to become what is known as a “fee payer.” The dues for belonging to the FA at CMU vary, although most members pay $808 for 2008-9. Fee payers pay about 80% of this total, which amounts to that part of union expenses related to collective bargaining, grievance processing, and contract administration, and excludes expenses that support ideological causes and political activities. At CMU, over 95% of the faculty belong to the Faculty Association, and the rest are fee payers.
What are the advantages of joining the CMU Faculty Association?
- You get a much greater voice in the operations of the organization that represents bargaining unit members.
- As members of the NEA and MEA, members of the Faculty Association automatically receive $1,000,000 in professional liability insurance through NEA. They are also eligible for group rates on auto insurance and life insurance, as well as a number of other financial services. (See http://www.mea.org and http://www.nea.org for details. )
- Members can have the dues deducted from their salaries over the year; fee payers must pay in a lump sum.
- Members are eligible to vote in FA elections and referenda, and are eligible to serve as officers, board members, and members of FA committees.
What if You Do Not Join?
Currently, about 95% of regular faculty members belong to the Association. Nevertheless, you are not required to joint. If you do not join, the law in Michigan requires you to pay a "service fee" for the benefits you receive, including full rights to have your interests represented by the FA and its parent associations in bargaining, grievances, and investigations or disciplinary hearings. Non-members, called "fee payers," pay an amount determined each year by a court-established process. In recent years, this amount has been approximately 80% of regular FA dues. The exact amount owed is determined in part by responses to a questionnaire contained in a "Hudson packet" sent annually to fee-payers in December.
Negotiating Your Initial Salary
The most important thing you need to know as you negotiate your initial salary at CMU is that this negotiation will generally determine how you will fare financially at CMU. This is because subsequent salary increases are almost totally dependent on negotiation between the FA and the Administration. These negotiations determine the minimum salary for a particular rank, the yearly percentage increases for everybody, and the base salary increases for promotions. All of these values can be found in the contract, available through http://www.fps.cmich.edu/documents/contract.pdf
This means that it is unlikely you will receive any increase in salary other than what is bargained for in the contract for all of the faculty. Although, on rare occasions, departments or colleges have agreed to give an individual faculty member a salary adjustment outside of the contract, this is very, very rare.
Faculty do receive increases in salary when they are promoted as outlined in the contract. CMU has an additional level of promotion not available at all universities, called the ‘professor salary adjustment’, and affectionately called the ‘super prof’ pay increase. After a faculty member becomes a full professor, the faculty member is able to go up for additional salary increases by complying with department bylaws for that pay increase. You should talk to your department about the requirements for promotion and professor salary adjustment.
To put it bluntly, if you do not get a good salary when you start, then you will probably never arrive at a good salary sometime in the future. We have dozens of stories of people who thought they were doing a favor by not seeking higher initial salaries, and they almost always regret that decision. Even a difference of $1000 when one starts could mean more than a $50,000 difference in accumulation over a 20-year period.
Consider some of the following as you negotiate your initial salary:
- One of your strongest bargaining chips is a good offer somewhere else. If that offer is for a job you want, then you can certainly ask the CMU department chair you are negotiating with to match or beat that other alternative.
- Another strength you may have is if the job you seek at CMU is designated as a “market impacted” position. This is a label attached to some faculty in some departments that gives the chair and the dean the ability to go much higher in salary offers, even above salaries that currently exist in the department. The reasoning is that the university needs to be more competitive to attract people where there is a limited number of qualified applicants in the pool. You need to ask your prospective department chair whether your position carries a market designation or not and how you might go about proving the demand for people in your discipline if you are not in a market designation.
- It is a very good idea to know what the salaries in your field are, even if you do not have another offer in hand and/or you are not in a market discipline. This will stop you from saying yes to just any offer without first explaining whether you would be at a par with your colleagues in other universities. You should assume there is room for negotiation above the initial amount offered by the department chair. Those negotiations will go better, however, if the chair has compelling reasons and data she can carry back to her dean.
You might query the chair as to how she determined the amount offered to you. There are formulas on the books that account for education, years teaching, etc. Perhaps, when you run through the calculations with your prospective chair, you will discover that some aspect of your past experience was not included. Of course, nothing stops you from asking for more even if you agree with and understand the calculations that were used.
You could also ask to know the current salaries of all members of your department and the initial salaries that people have received over the last five years. There are even faculty in other departments that you might compare to, so ask how you find out their salaries, too. At this point, you might at least be able to discover that someone with your qualifications was offered more in the past than you are being offered now. More than likely, this is because that other person asked for more, or did her homework coming in, just as you are doing now.
Avoid thoughts of shame or selfishness about asking for something for yourself. Remember, after this initial amount is set, no one will ever remember that you helped the university out when it was a “little short of money.” Somehow, CMU always finds more money when it needs to. If your income will be used to support family and loved ones, then you aren’t negotiating for yourself, anyway. You are really negotiating for school clothes, better housing, college tuition and the ability to make your parents comfortable in their declining years.
We hope this information will help, even if it makes only a $1000, $2000 or $3000 difference, though it might make a $10,000 difference. Remember, these differences, regardless of how petty they might appear, will make huge improvements in your financial future at CMU.
Benefits and Their Costs
Like most universities, CMU offers faculty an array of benefits. You should have been briefed on these in your interview but it does not hurt to go over them again. The contract discusses benefits in greater depth than will be presented here. For current information on benefits, visit Faculty Personnel at their website at http://www.fps.cmich.edu/benefits.asp.
Pension. CMU contributes 10% to your retirement account, usually TIAA-CREF. None of this comes out of your salary. All of it is tax deferred. You can also contribute part of your own salary on a tax-deferred basis to a Supplemental Retirement Annuity with the amount based on IRS regulations.
Hospital, Surgical and Prescription Drug Coverage. Two hospital, surgical and prescription drug plans are available to faculty. Both are associated with an arm of the Michigan Education Association known by the acronym ‘MESSA.’ The administration contributes a contracted amount and the faculty member makes up the rest. Benefits are available for other eligible dependents, such as same sex and opposite sex partners, but unmarried.
Dental Insurance. Currently faculty are on one of two dental plans. The university, again, contributes a contracted amount. Details about the benefits under each plan are available at the faculty personnel website. Benefits are available for other eligible dependents, such as same sex and opposite sex partners, but unmarried.
Other Insurance Benefits. This other insurance benefits category covers life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short term disability insurance and long term disability insurance. CMU does contribute contracted amounts here, amounts that completely cover some of the options. The faculty member’s contribution is quite small compared to the contributions for hospital, surgical, prescription drug and dental insurance.
Leaves. The university provides for a variety of leaves including sabbatical leave, sick leave, military leave, court-required service leave, funeral leave, necessity leave, and family and medical leave. There are conditions that apply in terms of length of leave, whether the leave is paid or unpaid, and what benefits are still in force during the leave. It would be impossible to explain all of that here, so you need to check the contract for exact wording.
Tuition Waiver. Each year, a faculty is eligible to receive tuition credit (fee remission) of up to 24 credit hours of CMU classes. These can be for the self, spouse and/or dependent. For a full-time bargaining unit member herself/himself, no more than 6 credit hours can be used in a Spring semester, and no more than 6 credit hours can be used in a Fall semester.
Student Activity Center. This is a marvelous athletic facility. Faculty and their families may join the SAC and pay the fee through payroll deduction.
Again, welcome to CMU. Again, if we can help do not be afraid to contact anyone on the board. All of these addresses can be located at www.cmufa.org.
Updated: 11/19/2008
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