Dear colleague,
After more than a year of delays and evasions, the administration is acting on its promise to honor the provision in our contract stipulating that the central administration would be responsible for unbudgeted salary increases for grant-funded faculty, postdocs, and graduate workers. Now we need to ask the help of faculty Principal Investigators (PIs) and department chairs to make sure the funds are distributed to your unit or department.
The “central funding” provision was one of our most important victories (and a first in higher ed union contracts, as far as we know). We won large salary increases for the lowest-paid people in our unions—but to make sure grant funds weren’t raided to pay these raises for researchers, we won an agreement from the administration to cover the cost of salary increases beyond what may have been already budgeted for in grants (typically 3 percent a year, but some funding institutions don’t allow for this).
Not surprisingly, the administration did everything they could to avoid their contractual obligation. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of grant accounts were improperly raided to pay for salary increases beyond what was budgeted for—and then the administration set up a convoluted and time-consuming process for PIs to try to get their accounts reimbursed.
We want to thank the PIs and all other members who continued to fight the administration to bring us closer to a resolution on this issue. If the administration had gotten away with violating our contract, it would have put the future of research at Rutgers in danger. Some 4,200 grants secured and administered by PIs bring in nearly one in every six dollars that comes into Rutgers—close to $1 billion in all.
While we don’t yet have a final agreement to resolve our grievance, this is great progress if they are fulfilling their commitment. We will ultimately need to see it in writing and then enforce it across all grants.
We’re going to ask PIs to read on—we’ll need your help to make sure the administration actually does what they agree to. But we wanted everyone to know about this further step our unions took in defending our contracts, thanks to the determination and hard work of our members.
In solidarity,
Rutgers AAUP-AFT and AAUP-BHSNJ
Important Message for PIs – Make Sure Your Grant Funds Are Reimbursed
We need your help to understand whether the “central funding” we won in our current contract has been distributed back to you or your department/unit, as the administration has promised. These funds were designed to reimburse PIs for unbudgeted salary increases charged to grants whose budgets were in place or approved by the date the union contract went into effect on May 1, 2023. This typically refers to faculty, postdocs, or graduate workers whose salaries are on grants. Postdocs and GAs won large and necessary raises that likely exceeded what grants budgeted for, putting a strain on PIs to make their budgets balance.
The University did not quickly implement a standard procedure for central funding, so the impacted grants continued to be charged the full cost of salaries, including the raises beyond what was budgeted for. In some cases, grants bore the cost of these unbudgeted increases. In other cases, departments/units provided reimbursement to the PI using existing departmental funds that were not earmarked for this purpose.
Unfortunately, it has been up to impacted faculty and/or chairs to be aware and educated about this issue—to speak up and request reimbursement and to chase the money to make sure they get it. A handful of faculty have successfully followed this path, but until recently, the great majority of impacted PIs have either not requested funds or not yet been reimbursed.
You may be aware that our union, led by several distinguished grant-active faculty members, has been working hard to press the central administration to implement a standardized approach to relieve the need for faculty (typically with the help of their local business office) to do the legwork. Last fall semester, we filed a grievance to resolve this.
The central administration recently informed our union that they had, in March or April of this year, reimbursed the PIs of many of the impacted grants for FY ’23 and FY ’24. We believe the funds were deposited into PI discretionary/research accounts or directly to the grant accounts. But no notice was given to anyone at the time—neither PIs nor business/finance offices. The administration has now agreed to supply our union with a detailed accounting of all reimbursements paid out, but it could be several months before this is provided.
PIs should check their accounts to confirm whether they were reimbursed, and if so, whether the amount is correct. This will require some effort, and most PIs will need to ask their business offices for assistance.
There are two ways to approach this:
- Wait for the central administration to provide the accounting and then do the work needed to check its accuracy.
- Do the work now to check your accounts for deposits in March and/or April and assess if the reimbursements were accurate.
For each impacted salary charged to a grant, you’d need the following information:
- The dollar amount of the salary increase.
- The budgeted amount for salary increases in the grant (if an increase was budgeted, it is typically a flat increase of 3 percent).
- Find the difference between A and B.
- The dollar amount of fringe budgeted for the impacted salary (use the originally budgeted fringe rate).
- If the fringe rate was later reduced or some fringe was reimbursed, deduct that amount from D.
- The reimbursement amount should be C + E for each impacted salary.
NOTE: 1) Most of this email is addressed to PIs, but in cases where departments covered the unbudgeted increases, they can be reimbursed by making a request to the Chancellor. Depending on the unit, such requests would need to go from Chair to Dean, and then from Dean to Chancellor. 2) We have not yet resolved our grievance and are waiting on management to schedule a meeting to further discuss and finalize a comprehensive agreement.