West Virginia University Staff Claims Poor Pay Practices

President of the Staff Council, Terry Nebel alleges "poor pay practices" on the part of the West Virginia University administration while some staff struggle to make ends meet.

"We've been treating these things as equal when indeed they are not," Nebel said.

He, along with the classified staff representative on the Board of Governors, Paul Martinelli, presented a plan, which the BOG passed over, to bring salaries closer to the legislatively mandated levels.

The 9-4-2 plan, as it was called, would have distributed the pay raise pool as 9 percent for staff, 4 percent for faculty and 2 percent for unclassified workers. The plan the board passed creates an equal 5 percent pay raise pool for all employees.

Disparate Pay

Nebel discovered what he called "disparities" in the pay raise system over a year ago.

"It's almost an embarrassment that nobody caught this before," he said.

The problem, according to Nebel's data which has yet to be refuted and has been public for several months, is that the 2001 pay schedule for staff employees did not adjust for changes in the labor market, cost of living and cost of labor along with the schedules of other WVU employees.

Nebel contends that staff retirement funds have been jeopardized by the pay schedules' basis on unadjusted, and therefore less valuable, "2001 dollars."

Some employees have even been forced to take on second and third jobs as a result of the schedule. Nebel cited one worker in human resources who also tends bar to help pay the bills.

"I don't want to face retirement in fear," Nebel said. "I'd rather go to federal prison where at least I'd get free food and medical care. I'm not living under a bridge."

Staff and faculty pay schedules are mandated by the state legislature. Both are behind, but as Nebel and Martinelli argue, to varying degrees.

The staff are on the 2001 schedule, and the faculty are on track to reach 90 percent of the average faculty pay at other colleges in the Southern Regional Education Board.

"They say the faculty are behind, but how far behind? They don't cite specific figures," Nebel said, speaking of the supporters of the adopted 5 percent Equal Pool plan.

As of now, faculty are at 85 percent of the SREB average, or roughly $22 million behind. The staff, still according to the 2001 unadjusted pay schedule, are roughly $77 million behind. (There are 2,549 faculty and 2,770 classified staff.)

This, according to Nebel and Martinelli, is precisely why their 9-4-2 plan leans so heavily towards staff.

Confusing Numbers

"We're trying to close the gap" Martinelli said.

But closing the gap turns out to be a very difficult task for the two men and the Staff Council. Nebel cites the three weeks Martinelli had to wait before he was given access to data they needed to make their case for the 9-4-2 plan.

"Would they treat any other member of the board this way? Would they treat (BOG Chairman) Steve Goodwin this way?" Nebel said.

At the BOG meeting Friday and even a year before, confusion seemed to be one of the biggest snags the 9-4-2 plan faced.

Faculty Senate Chairman and Board of Governor's Faculty Representative Steven Kite thought that both the 9-4-2 and the 5 percent Equal Pool, cost the same amount of money. In fact, according to Nebel, the 9-4-2 plan is $800,000 more expensive.

When Nebel first met "one on one" with then-president David C. Hardesty last year about the pay raise schedule, he said Hardesty did not fully understand the issue and had several advisors come in to make sense of it. Vice president of Finance, Narvel Weese; Human Resources Vice President Margie Phillips; and then-Executive Chief of Staff, Jennifer Fisher each confirmed Nebel's data. From then until last week's Board of Governor's meeting, to the classified workers' knowledge, no major action was taken by the administration on the matter. "The administration buried their heads in the sand," said Nebel.

Food or bills

In the meantime, many members of the WVU staff have been forced to find other ways to fill the gap between what their pay is and what the schedule says it should be.

Pam Watkins, 49, has been a campus service worker at WVU for four years. For her, the pay doesn't even come close to what she needs it to be. "I live paycheck to paycheck now, paying bi-weekly rent so I don't go broke."

Watkins makes just over $15,500 a year and under the recently adopted 5-5-5 plan, she'll be making $1,500 more each year.

"I barely buy food anymore," said the mother of one. During the winter, Watkins has to rely on an aid program to keep the heat on. "Thank God for them," she said.

Watkins would like to retire at age 70, but she "seriously doubts that will happen."

Other staff wouldn't talk on the record about conditions they said they faced.

"I'll get fried if anyone found out I spoke to you," said a staff member who has worked at WVU for over 15 years. Raising two high school kids on her University job meant constantly making the same decision: "Food or bills."

She was especially concerned for her two high school children, to whom her paycheck meant "yard sales and Goodwill and browsing flea markets." She said that though the University pay wasn't what she would have liked, she couldn't think of anywhere else to work.

"Sometimes I felt bad as a parent, you know, not being able to be like the neighbors and buy Nike for my son," she said. "My son told me once, 'Mama, it's okay, you raised me with love, not money.'"

On top of her own burdens, for the last year, the employee has provided a home for another WVU staff employee who also supports two children.

"If it wasn't for me, she couldn't feed her kids, wouldn't have any place to stay," she said. "She gets like $80 from food stamps and she doesn't use a cent on herself or me, nothing on our table, but her kids get a good meal. It's not fair, but it's better than nothing."

International Competition

Many proponents of the 5 percent plan argue that WVU cannot adopt a plan such as the 9-4-2 because then there simply wouldn't be enough funding to pay the faculty with internationally competitive salaries.

"Our core mission depends on getting good faculty. If we can't recruit and retain good faculty, research and education will suffer," Kite said.

"We are unlikely to be successful in recruiting high-quality faculty if salaries fall far short of our competition," he wrote in yesterday's edition of The Mountaineer Spirit, a faculty newsletter. "Competitive salaries for WVU faculty will require sustained efforts far into the future."

Nebel, Martinelli and their associates plan on proposing a salary study to be conducted by an outside firm. The results of such a report would take several months to be published.

"This year just knocked the wind out of our sails," Martinelli said. "But we can try again next fiscal year."