UMass Amherst Professional Staff Union Blog

The following is from an email being circulated within the negotiation committee.
Regarding merit pay, it should be noted that many management experts
completely discount the value of both merit pay and performance
reviews, some going so far as to say they are counterproductive to
the enterprise. Here are a couple of pieces that may be of interest:

Professor Channels W. Edwards Deming and Writes “Get Rid of the
Annual Review”
Manufacturing Business Technology
October 23, 2008

http://www.mbtmag.com/blog/1240000324/post/1150035315.html

Excerpt: A UCLA professor, Samuel A. Culbert, has written a
monumental commentary in the Wall Street Journal. The subheadline
says it all succinctly: It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts
the bottom line. And that’s just for starters.

Performance without Appraisal
Part I: Pay, Promotion, and Improvement
by Esther Derby
4 Jun 2007

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/50-performance-without-appraisal

Excerpt: W. Edwards Deming identified performance appraisal as one of
the Seven Deadly Diseases of Management. Deming is clear and concise
in stating the negative effects of performance appraisals and merit
ratings: “It nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term
planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and
politics.”

Deming’s Point #12 as Applied to the Insurance Industry
January 2007

http://www.irmi.com/Expert/Articles/2007/Pryor01.aspx

Excerpt: Here is a partial list of such barriers described by Dr.
Deming [Bracketed comments are mine]: [...] Merit rating is a farce.
[Many organizations have abolished performance reviews because such
systems ultimately prove to be counterproductive with negative
outcomes. More on this below.]

The Folly of Merit Pay
By Alfie Kohn
Education Week
September 17, 2003

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm

Mainly discusses teachers, but some good reading in the second half,
under “So why are pay-for-performance plans so reliably unsuccessful,
if not counterproductive?”

If management insists that the University proceed with performance
reviews and merit pay, they are clearly doing so for political, not
practical reasons. Since they are the highest paid people on campus
and represent the University’s face to the world, it stands to reason
that theirs are the most political positions. It therefore makes
sense for us to evaluate them as much as it does for them to evaluate
us. This could be done using some different review techniques,
including 360 degree feedback:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback

http://www.toolpack.com/performance.html

(Note: these remarks were delivered before both bargaining teams and approximately fifty concerned UMass Boston professional staff members.)

These members who are here today come to wish us luck—on both sides—in our attempts to bring this contract in for a landing. Like all of us on both sides of the table, they are concerned about their jobs and the jobs of their colleagues, they’re concerned about making ends meet at home, and they’re concerned about the future of our institution, state, country and beyond.
We’ve been bargaining for 13 months.
When we started, our focus was primarily on stopping the slide in our real wages, on increasing our members’ job security, and on restoring our families’ tuition benefit. Unfortunately, we have failed on the first two counts and had only moderate success on the third. Given the drastic state of the economy, the decline in our real wages has obviously not been at the top of the Governor’s priority list. And the University has shown little interest in any contract language which would in any way improve our job security.
Early last fall, after 8 months of bargaining, we were finally given a meager salary offer, which we accepted. After several more months of economic decline, that offer was rescinded, and another, worse offer made in its place.
That offer would have us take a wage freeze for this year, a 1.5% increase next year, and 3.5 % increases in the following two years—just when many economists are predicting rapidly rising inflation. Yet we understand the economic situation, we are concerned about layoffs of our members, and (with the exception of a small difference around the first year figure), we have not contested those numbers.
So here we are 13 months later, at a point when we could and should be bringing these negotiations to a close. We have a few important issues remaining on the table, but only one of them seems to be an insurmountable roadblock to settlement.
That is management’s dogmatic insistence on reducing the increases in the last two years for a large number of our members by taking the Governor’s across-the-board offer and carving it up with so-called “merit pay.”
Merit pay appeared for the first time ten years ago in our 1998 contract. Our experience with it since then has been overwhelmingly negative. Last year, when we took a one-year contract with a promise of better times to come, many of our members got less than the full 3.5% salary package offered by the Governor:  a little over 30% in Boston, and a little under 40% in Amherst, all getting less than what the Governor intended to be an across-the-board cost-of-living increase for all state workers.
To insist that our members go through this foolish exercise again, while we fear for our jobs and look at a 1.5% increase over the next two years, is simply wrong. To actually propose increasing by a third the proportion of merit over last year’s percentage, and to propose a new distribution system which will punish ever more of our members in order to reward the favored few—that’s simply outrageous. The salary package should be given as the Governor intended.
Our members are well aware that President Wilson’s own ample merit pay was simply rolled into his $467,000 salary because—in the words of one Trustee—merit bonuses “are inappropriate for a university and are indeed hard to measure.”
Yet management claims that they need ways to reward superior performance. The fact is, there are many ways to do that—without taking money out of the pockets of other staff, when there’s so little to go around. We expect to make a proposal today which will give management the tools to reward performance without punishing other staff, and we hope the management team will take that proposal seriously as an alternative to merit pay.
Time is short, and this is not the time to be manipulating the Governor’s salary offer by using it to punish some professional staff who are struggling every day to keep our campuses going. Not now, not this time, not this contract.

Thank you for your email concerning the ongoing collective bargaining
under chapter 150e.  I share your concerns for fair and competitive
salaries and benefits for faculty and staff and have been an ardent
advocate for you and for those issues to the legislature and now to two
governors.  One of the things of which I ! am most proud is that we were
all able to work together in my first year as President to end a sad
period in which faculty and staff contracts had been vetoed and no
raises had been seen in three years.  Together we got approval of an
immediate 15% raise to make up for the missed 5/5/5 yearly raises and
eventually restored most of the retroactive funding for these contracts.
That experience definitely proved to me that working together is the
most effective way to advocate for the faculty, staff, and indeed
students of the University of Massachusetts.  In order to get any raises
funded under Chapter 150e, we need to gain the approval of the
Governor’s Office through the Secretary of Administration and Finance
and then gain the approval of the Legislature and the signature of the
Governor.

I can tell you that in my 40 years as a faculty member and administrator
in four states, with the last seven years here in Massachus! etts, I have
never had the pleasure of working with a more supportive Governor and
Legislature than we are working with right now.  I speak with them
regularly and was with both the Governor and leaders of the legislature
several times in the past few days.    I have been speaking with the
Secretary of Education on nearly a daily basis.

We also know that our country and our state are facing the devastating
consequences of the chaos in the financial industry.  We are all feeling
that pain through rising unemployment figures, catastrophic drops in our
retirement funds, and countless other ways.  The state is no different
in that regard.  The tax revenues coming in are lower than expectations,
and the state government constitutionally must balance the budget of the
state. Every state agency has been told to prepare for 9C budget cuts
-in which our budget is reduced retroactively from that which passed
last summer.  Press reports indicate, and we expect, that fun! ds may be
removed from our budget in October.  Each Chancellor is preparing plans
for coping with that eventuality, just as each Chancellor and I continue
to advocate with the administration to argue that we should be exempt
from that process.  We are further sobered by the potential chaos that
will ensue if Ballot Question 1 is enacted and the income tax abolished.
We hope that you will advocate with us on these issues.

We have many things to work on together.  We will win some and we will
lose some, but I will always be a strong advocate for the entire
university, the faculty, the staff, and the students.

Sincerely yours,

Jack M. Wilson

PSU MEMBERS:

WE ALL RECOGNIZE THE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS FINANCES ARE VERY PRECARIOUS.

WE ARE FURTHER CONCERNED ABOUT THE UNIVERSITIES PROPOSED 3% CUT TO STATE BASE FUNDS.

A  SALARY PROPOSAL TO EMPLOYEES OF HIGHER ED THAT IS FAR BELOW CPI IS UNACCEPTABLE. WHEN COMPARED TO  PRESIDENT WILSON’S 2007-2008 15% RAISE** (MORE THAN 10% ABOVE CPI!) IT’S INSULTING.

WE WANT OUR EMPLOYER, THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, TO FIND WAYS TO FUND A FAIR CONTRACT.

GET ON THE BUS TO THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING ON SEPTEMBER 26. WE WILL BE LEAVING AMHERST @5:30 AM. Email psu@external.umass.edu if you’re coming!

**The Herald states that Wilson’s salary is $425,000.

- The PSUMTA Bargaining Team

My name is JoAnne Martone, and I am the co-chair of the Amherst chapter of the Professional Staff Union of MTA. I have come to read a brief statement on behalf of our members.
Thank you for this opportunity to express our views. As you know, we believe that the Search Committee has a huge gap in representative stakeholders by including only faculty and students, and no staff, and so we truly appreciate this opportunity to give input.
We believe it is important that our next Chancellor has demonstrated a history of respect and equity for all workers on campus. This attitude can be demonstrated with the following requirements.
She or he should have direct experience with collective bargaining, and a clear and obvious respect for the process and for the contracts bargained.
She or he should support equity for all campus workers.
She or he should have a passion and support for the tenets of PHENOM:
Fund public higher education so it can serve the Commonwealth
Make higher education affordable
Make higher education accessible to all
Hire more teachers, researchers, and staff
Honor and expand democratic institutions of governance for public higher education
She or he should must show a true commitment and willingness to champion diversity and work toward the elimination of classism on campus.
She or he needs to proactively engage in a dialogue with Union Leadership, and be responsive to the needs of Staff, Faculty and Students.
Again, we thank you for this opportunity to express our needs.

That’s a mouthful. But hey, we’re a handful.