Q&A: How do I get a raise?

Q (received recently by e-mail): What are the criteria used to determine raises?

A: Raises are determined in two steps: annual evaluation and then salary provisions, both of which are subjects of bargaining between the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees.

The annual evaluation process is described in Article 10 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (or CBA 10). To put it briefly, the procedures and any standards specific to a discipline are decided by vote within one’s department or unit. In many departments, these procedures are described as part of the department’s general governance documents; in other departments, the annual-evaluation procedure is separate. Faculty should receive their department’s governance documents, including annual evaluation procedures and any additional substantive standards, when joining the department.

Salaries are bargained every year between the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees (CBA 23). There are four categories of raises to one’s base salary that have to be renegotiated every year:

  • Across-the-board raises, which recently has been conditioned on performance that is at least satisfactory.
  • Merit raises are tied explicitly to annual evaluations.
  • Compression/inversion raises are intended to address the fact that faculty salaries at USF lag behind national market norms, with a greater lag for those who have worked at USF longer. The 2006-07 salary agreement required that employees receiving compression/inversion raises have an average evaluation for 6 years of at least 4 out of 5 (or an average of “strong” in a system where “outstanding” is the top category).
  • Discretionary raises includes all money that is entirely at the discretion of administrators, including chairs, deans, and Vice Presidents.

In the past few years, the bargaining survey of the unit clearly indicates that faculty prefer across-the-board, merit, and compression/inversion raises in roughly similar amounts in each year and that they prefer all of those over discretionary raises and bonuses. The exact mix is subject to bargaining every year.

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