Faculty at a Madison area college may choose voluntary pay cuts in an effort to avoid massive layoffs following a vote to amend a previously-negotiated contract for take-home pay increases and pensions.
Madison Area Technical College’s part-time faculty approved a new contract Monday freezing pay at the 2008-09 faculty levels for the next three years in order to maintain union certification under Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.
Similarly, MATC full-time faculty and support staff began voting Tuesday to amend a contract valid through 2013. The amendments include drastic changes to pay increases, pensions and class-size limitations, MATC spokesperson Bill Bassette said. The results are expected to be counted on Thursday.
MATC Vice President for Learner Success Terry Webb said although the proposed amendments would cut take-home pay, they are designed to prevent potential layoffs caused by the budgetary hole created by Walker’s repair bill.
“The college is slated to lose about $10.3 million in both state aid and property tax payments next year due to Gov. Walker’s proposed budget bill,” Webb said. “Around 80 percent of our budget is spent on jobs, benefits and pensions. There’s no other way for us to do this.”
Webb said the negotiations with both of the faculty and staff unions have been extremely cooperative. He said everyone’s common goal is to determine how to minimize the impact of the amendments on the students, especially in lifting limits on class sizes.
Webb said MATC plans to try out several different strategies, such as placing as many offerings as the school can afford at the most popular times of the day in order to accommodate everyone.
Previously, the contract had allotted full-time faculty a 2 to 2 and a half-percent raise per year throughout the next three years. One of the amendments proposed in the contracts currently being voted on eliminates pay increases in the first two years and cuts the third year pay increase to a projected 1.4 percent.
The amended contract also calls for staff contributing 5.8 percent of their take-home pay to their own pensions and lifts limits on class sizes so MATC can continue serving the same number of students for a lesser cost.
Bassette said if the results of the vote are in favor of ratifying the proposed contract amendments, the proposal would be passed along to the District Board for ratification on Thursday evening along with the new contract already voted on by the part-time faculty union.
“If the proposal passes, there will be huge changes to faculty workloads and contributions to their pensions,” Webb said. “But the sum of these amendments amounts to somewhere around $5 million in savings for the college per year.”
If the amendments are approved, there will still be a $5.3 million deficit in the budget. Webb said the college is in the process of creating the strategies necessary to get the budget “where it needs to be.”
“We will not be able to fill some vacant positions where people have retired or resigned, but our main goal is to keep current faculty employed,” said Webb.
Bassette said the results of the vote should be available Thursday morning and after deliberation by the Board of Education.
