A bargaining team representing the Iowa Board of Regents met with United Faculty union members Friday to exchange first bargaining proposals. (Photo by Brooklyn Draisey/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
University of Northern Iowa faculty union members met with the Iowa Board of Regents’ bargaining team Friday to present initial proposals for the union’s 2025-2027 contract, hoping to come to an agreement which would see salaries and base wages increase for faculty.
United Faculty President Christopher Martin said after the meeting the Board of Regents’ proposal would not get current faculty base wages and salaries to “catch up” to where they should be in order to be competitive and allow employees to weather higher prices.
“We’re really concerned about the state of salaries at UNI, and how far we’ve fallen behind in terms of cost of living, but also in comparison to our peer universities,” Martin said.
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The union’s first proposal included a 9.89% increase in salaries and base wages, Martin said, split in half over the two years the contract would be in effect. According to information included in the initial proposal, faculty salaries combined across all ranks at UNI come to only 87.3% of its peer institutions’ average salaries and 89.2% of the average salary of all 165 IIA schools.
Martin said pay is the top issue among faculty, and nearly all of the faculty members in the bargaining session knew of someone who had decided to leave the university because they weren’t making enough money.
The proposal would also raise promotional salary increases, which the union stated hasn’t been changed since 2014.
The changes would help increase recruitment and retention of faculty, Martin said. More than half of respondents to the 2023 UNI Campus Climate Survey who said they’d considered leaving the university put down low pay as the reason they’d thought about quitting.
Iowa Board of Regents spokesperson Josh Lehman confirmed in an email the bargaining team’s counterproposal to United Faculty listed a 3% increase in base wages and salaries. It wasn’t what the union was looking for, Martin said, and it would not be enough to get faculty pay where it needs to be with continuously increasing costs of living.
According to United Faculty’s proposal, the university’s “compounded shortfall from 2014 to 2024 is 9.89% — the rate at which UNI faculty salaries have not kept up with inflation.”
Martin said the union would send a formal response to the board of regents in the near future. Once a tentative agreement has been reached, the proposed contract will go before the board of regents at a public meeting.
“The Board of Regents greatly appreciates the work of the faculty at UNI,” Lehman said in his email. “They provide outstanding teaching, research and service and continue to provide an excellent educational experience for our students. The offer shows the value that we have for the faculty, while balancing the fiscal needs of the university.”
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