With more than 250 protesters chanting “Open the doors! Open the books!” outside Winants Hall on the College Avenue campus, Rutgers U’s Board of Governors met Wednesday for their annual reorganizational meeting.
Protesters representing the University’s three major labor unions rallied against the recent decision to cancel pay raises and freeze the salaries of their 13,000 system-wide employees.
Lucye Millerand, Union of Rutgers Administrators–American Federation of Teachers president, said the wage freeze breaks an agreement brokered last year for more than 10,000 unionized staff and faculty who agreed to defer their 2009 contract raises.
“I don’t think that this is really about the money,” Millerand said. “I think this is Old Queens [wanting] to maximize their freedom to treat employees as they see fit and to just instill fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I don’t think that’s an effective way to motivate people.”
Philip J. Furmanski, executive vice president for Academic Affairs, said the salary freezes were necessary given the “budget difficulty” the school faces and will help avoid more extreme measures like layoffs, class cuts, major reductions in business and technology services, or a potential hiring freeze.
“This University is going to face perhaps the most difficult budget year it ever has,” University President Richard L. McCormick said in his address to the Board of Governors.
Combined with the proposed $46 million cut in state aid and a proposed 4 percent cap on tuition increases, the salary raises would have left the University with a $96 million budget hole — an “unsupportable amount,” McCormick said.
The University received budget cut models from nearly all the units that take into account the slash in state aid and contractually obligated salary increases, he said.
“They are awful,” McCormick said. “They are scary. They are dire.”
Deferring salary increases will free up $30 million that can be used to help make up the expected 15 percent reduction in state aid to the University under Gov. Chris Christie’s current budget proposal, Furmanski wrote in a June 10 e-mail to the University community.
Although the University has been lobbying Trenton to obtain some financial relief, McCormick said he is fearful that little — if any — money will be restored by the state’s June 30 budget deadline, prompting the decision to defer raises.
“We seek an opportunity to get at the negotiating table with our union leaders — the 14 of them who represent Rutgers faculty and staff — to discuss [the freeze],” he said.
But Millerand said while conversations will continue with the University, she is not sure how productive they will be.
“It would be meaningless to talk to them when we can’t believe what they say,” Millerand said. “The trust is just broken so badly.”
The Rutgers Labor Coalition, a working group of unions including Rutgers American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers, URA-AFT and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1761/888, are working on a joint legal strategy to reinstate their raises.
Nat Bender, URA-AFT vice president, said the University’s figure of $30 million for the salary increases is inflated, stating they are likely less than $20 million.
Bender also called upon the University to increase its transparency in the budget and during its upcoming hearings, noting that several requests to speak on the issue were denied.
Catherine Lugg, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education, said she was angrier with the breech of her contract than she was with the salary freeze itself.
“Contracts are legally binding,” she said. “The administration signed a contract with the constituent unions and decided after not working with the unions all year to abrogate the contract, and that’s a problem.”
Joseph Gerver, a mathematics professor at Rutgers-Camden, said he did not expect a raise this year. But when the agreement was made last year to defer payment, the University agreed to meet with union leaders, put all the numbers on the table and involve the union if the same had to happen.
“They haven’t done that,” Gerver said. “I understand they don’t have the money, but let’s let the union and the administration look at the budget and see what we can do.”
Several students like Jordan Bucey, a School of Arts and Sciences junior, joined the protest, arguing that the University broke a contract with thousands of its employees.
“Education is [a] right for everyone, and what comes with education is paying the teachers and paying the people who actually run the University,” Bucey said. “What comes first is respecting people, their jobs and their livelihoods. There are people in this room who don’t know how they are going to feed their kids if they don’t get this raise.”
One of the protesters, who works with University Housing but wished to withhold his name, said it has been two years since he has received a raise and is not working a second job in addition to his full-time work with the University to afford his mortgage and make ends meet.
“I just want fair wages — that’s all,” he said. “I work hard. Pay me for it.”