Re: “Manitoba faculty salaries fall below average” (March 17, page 4)

Some poor wording has perhaps given people the wrong impression that the recent negotiations at the University of Winnipeg will result in faculty receiving salaries comparable to other Manitoba universities. 

The problematic wording expressed in various releases and repeated in The Uniter is that “faculty at the U of W will earn similar salary scales to other Manitoba universities.”

In fact, salary scales at U of W do not generally correspond with faculty earnings because scales can be increased without individual faculty members having their salaries raised to the new scale. 

This means that actual faculty salaries (i.e. earnings) can be substantially less than what faculty should earn given their position on the salary scale.

This disconnect between salaries and scale also means that faculty who have been working at U of W for many years can be making little more than far junior faculty who are being paid according to the latest scale—hardly an equitable salary structure.

Finally, the failure of the recent settlement to deal with this major source of salary inequities at U of W and in the province does not augur well for the next round of negotiations.

Jim Clark
Professor of Psychology
University of Winnipeg

– Jim Clark, Professor of Psychology, University of Winnipeg

Published in Volume 65, Number 24 of The Uniter (March 24, 2011)