Salary Study

Professional Salary Equity

The University and UMPSA recognized back in the mid 1980's that the salaries of represented professional employees within the University of Maine System were inconsistant, inequitable, and well below the compensation paid to other professionals within Maine, New England, and the nation. There was no systematic procedure or policy in place to set the salary of new positions and no consistant procedure for determining an appropriate salary for current employees.

The starting salary for a position was often set based only upon

how much money the department could scrape together out of unused graduate student stipends, equipment budgets, and operating budgets,
how much support was available from upper administration which depended in part on the nature of the relationship between the department and the upper administration, and
the minimum salary required to get at least one minimally-qualified applicant or to convince the applicant that the salary could be corrected within the next year or two if only they would accept the job at the offered salary.

The result was widespread chaos and inequity among professional salaries and a real potential for gender equity lawsuits against the University System. It is interesting to note that many administrators have postponed action on addressing salary equity issues since 1985 by suggesting that the current "study" would take care of the inequity when the result of the study was finally implemented. In essence, these studies have simply provided an excuse to hold these issues at bay for a decade and a half.

Background 1985-1989

The background of the efforts of joint UMS/UMPSA committees to study salary equity issues within the represented professional unit and to find a way to equitably set represented professional salaries within the University of Maine System is discussed in the 1996 final report of the 1990-1996 Joint UMS/UMPSA Salary Study Committee.

The 1990-1996 Joint UMPSA/UMS Salary Study

The 1996 final report of the Joint UMS/UMPSA Salary Study Committee and the executive summary are both available online.

The 1996-1998 UMPSA/UMS Salary Study Project

The text of the project announcement is available online. Members of the project oversight committee are listed here.

The text of the April 18, 1997 project update and the May, 1998 final report are also available.

May 1998 Newsletter and Salary Study Update

The May 1998 UMPSA Salary Study Update issue of the UMPSA Advocate is available in both HTML and PDF formats. It includes a history of the study, the results of the data collection, integration, and validation project performed over the previous year, and a discussion of the future of professional salary equity efforts.

What Now?

UMPSA is continuing the fight on its own. If the University will not cooperate in this effort, we will bargain for a solution. The bargaining issues survey distributed in March told us that you continue to be very concerned about the equity issue. We will continue to fight for fair and equitable professional salaries.

UMPSA has hired a compensation consultant of our own to advise us on our options. We are collecting salary data and job descriptions for a number of represented professional positions to compare against the latest CUPA survey. We are in negotiations for a new Agreement and are proposing a number of ways to start fixing the problem. The UMPSA negotiating team has issued a position statement on professional salaries and read it to the University's negotiating team. We are exploring ways to inform members of the Maine Legislature about the history and seriousness of the problem and suggesting possible solutions.

The latest salary study did give us some data to help in this fight. The study also developed the core of a set of administrative guidelines for determining professional salaries. With the demise of the WYCOMP project changes will have to be made to the guidelines, but a basic structure is there.

We are not giving up! We are continuing the fight. At some time in the near future, you may be asked to help in this effort. Stay tuned to this web site for the latest information.