Faculty Senate approves plan to allocate possible salary increase funds
The University of Idaho Faculty Senate endorsed a plan Tuesday outlining how a potential salary increase would be allocated to university employees.
The plan recommended allocating funds based on merit, as well as using the funds to address salary compression and inversion at UI. The plan, described in a report by the University Budget and Finance Committee, also recommended an across-the-board salary increase.
“We thought it was important to make a statement that everybody would be entitled to the increase,” said Elizabeth Brandt, a member of the committee and a member of Faculty Senate.
UI President Chuck Staben has made an increase in UI employee salaries his top legislative priority this year. He requested a 3 percent increase in state funding from the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee to raise salaries for faculty and staff.
Marty Ytreberg
Although senators showed support for the plan, Faculty Senate Chair Marty Ytreberg said the final decision of fund allocation would be left to upper administrators, including Staben. He said Staben has shown interest in looking at the plan before making his final decision.
Ytreberg said Faculty Senate would work to clean up some of the language in the report before formally sending it to upper administration officials.
Faculty Senate requested the report from the committee last year so the university would have a plan to disperse funds if a salary increase was approved, Ytreberg said.
Norman Pendegraft, chair of the University Budget and Finance committee, said the topic spurred a “spirited” debate among committee members and a variety of ideas were discussed.
Brandt said the committee began the process by brainstorming factors that should play a role in deciding salary increases.
“At one point in time, we had a list of 15 different kinds of ways you could look at (Change in Employee Compensation),” she said.
The committee ultimately decided on three main factors: merit, inversion and compression and low pay.
Salary compression happens when an employee with years of experience in their position makes only slightly more than a newer employee with less experience. Inversion is caused when newer employees are paid more than long-term employees, such as an assistant professor who makes more than a full professor. The report concluded both compression and inversion are a problem for UI faculty and staff members.
The committee spent months working on the report, Brandt said, meeting every other week to come up with a plan to disperse a salary increase.
While UI employees won’t know if they receive a salary increase until later this year, the plan outlines different allocation methods based on the level of salary increase: 1 percent, 2 percent or a 2.5 percent increase or greater.
If UI receives a 1 percent salary increase, there would be an across-the-board increase for all UI employees who meet job expectations.
Given a 2 percent salary increase, 1 percent would be used for an across-the-board increase while the other 1 percent would go toward merit pay, as well as addressing inversion and compression, according to the report.
If UI were to receive a 2.5 percent increase or greater, 1 percent would be used for an across-the-board increase, 1 percent would go toward merit/inversion/compression pay and approximately $140,000 would go toward increasing the salaries of the lowest paid UI employees.
According to the report, approximately $140,000 would bring the lowest paid employees at UI up to a minimum annual salary of $25,000.
Ytreberg said college deans — and the equivalent of deans for staff members — would be in charge of giving merit increases as well as addressing inversion and compression within their own departments.
Brandt said this allows college deans to be more effective in dealing with salary compression, as each college faces different challenges.
“The problems of inversion and compression in that are local, so to speak,” she said. “They are very different from college to college and from division to division.”
The merit increases would be based on evaluations in annual performance reviews, according to the report.
Pendegraft said faculty members stated concerns about the consistency of the performance reviews between departments. He said while the consistency of performance reviews is an important topic at UI, the committee was not the right group to address the issue.
Brandt also stated concerns about using a performance review system and said including qualitative analysis in deciding merit raises might produce better results.
Ryan Tarinelli can be reached at [email protected]