Typically, when you think about retirement, you think about the costs for yourself--that is, whether you can afford to retire. But there is another cost your retirement creates--the cost to the institution and to the union when large numbers of senior faculty and staff retire within a short time period and the institution and state look to replace those faculty with lower-paid adjunct faculty. In the University of Massachusetts system, a recently instituted early retirement program is inflating those costs.

In late 2001, the Massachusetts Legislature quickly passed an early retirement plan for state employees that included faculty and staff in the University of Massachusetts system. According to Daniel Georgianna, president of the University of Massachusetts Faculty Federation (UMFF), this plan was set up in direct response to the state's fiscal crisis--a budgetary situation that state officials are leaning on as a rationale for cutting budgets.

The plan increases retirement benefits and gives five years credit to faculty and staff who are considering retirement, but they must retire by June 15, 2002.

However, the state's plan takes the cost-savings rationale behind early retirement plans to a dangerous extreme. Rather than just replacing senior faculty and staff with newer, lower-paid full-time faculty, this plan requires that institutions hire only one person for every five who leave.

In short, the early retirement system is structured to replace full-time, tenured faculty with new faculty who are part-time, non-tenured and, most important for the state, lower-paid faculty.

The potential ramifications are staggering. Georgianna predicts that 10 percent of the 3,000 faculty in the UMass system will leave, and some are now saying that this might be the largest mass retirement of faculty from a state system ever. "My counterparts at other institutions in the state are saying that they believe some departments, and perhaps the whole system, will never recover from this exodus," Georgianna says. The impact also will be felt by the union, as leaders and long time activists retire.

UMFF is taking several approaches to address this issue. First, the union is helping those faculty and staff members who will benefit from this plan. At the same time, UMFF is helping some faculty understand that if they stay another two or three years, in many cases they can retire in the same circumstances and the replacement program attached to the early retirement program will not apply. And ultimately, there is major work to be accomplished in the Legislature. The early retirement plan and the state budget process are not connected, according to Georgianna. "Consequently, we will argue that the students are still here, in fact, more of them are here, and we need the budget to hire qualified faculty and staff to meet those needs."

The situation is one of many where AFT locals are working to address state responses to the current economic situation. Higher education is always in a vulnerable position, which makes the work of higher education unions--both in terms of protecting our members and in terms of working for higher education funding in general--even more important.

To read more about the current budgetary situation in Massachusetts, see the March 2001 issue of AFT On Campus. (posted 3/18/02)