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.