President Jack Wilson’s standard email response
Comments(1,096) 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