UW reconvenes salaries task force

Work on the 2020 fiscal year budget won’t begin until 2019. Another salary adjustment would require the Board of Trustees to establish another pool of funds.

Board President Dave True told the Laramie Boomerang in an email the board has not yet “had any detailed discussions along those lines.”

“The Board acknowledges this is a very important topic, requiring prudent discussions,” he said.

Jeanne Durr, associate vice president for human resources, told members of Faculty Senate on Monday the task force will work on refining the new system of salary increases to accommodate some of the concerns faculty and staff had with the most recent round pay raises, which went into effect in August.

One of those top concerns was the sentiment that some of the university’s lowest paid employees, like custodians and office associates, still do not receive a liveable wage.

“This is where my heart is,” Durr said.

Several custodians on campus, she said, are eligible for subsidized housing, food stamps and legal aid.

That fact “speaks volumes to me” about the need to increase their pay, Durr said.

Some faculty and staff have expressed disappointment after they assumed everyone would be receiving a 3 percent pay raise, Faculty Senate President Donal O’Toole said. That wasn’t the case.

The task force’s goal had actually been to bring all positions on campus to as close to their market average as possible, Durr said. Those employees receiving salaries above the market average were only eligible for merit-based pay increases.

In reality, the $5.5 million was only able to bring overall employee pay to 87.2 percent of the market average.

“We didn’t have a lot of money,” Durr said.

$2.6 million of the total pool was distributed in market-based raises. The market-based analysis placed employees into certain classifications and then used national databases to compare UW employees to their equivalents across the country.

“Why do we want to be average? That’s a great question,” Durr said. “We don’t but we are so below average that I think a laudable goal would be to bring our faculty up to average with the understanding that the top performers are going to stay at the market average. This is just step one. We had to start somewhere.”

Durr said the task force now has an opportunity to learn from the “unintended consequences” of the raises this summer, and correct those issues for when a new pool of money for salary increases is allocated.

“One of the bad things is that we had so little money to distribute. One of the good things is that we had so little money to distribute, and the decisions we made don’t have deep and long-lasting impacts,” Durr said.

Nichols said it will be important for the task force to reexamine the market data “to be sure we were using the best market data possible for all classifications of employees.”