Friday, March 09, 2007

Why The California State University Faculty Are Considering Striking: See below

Executive Compensation - Sacramento-Style

Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. gave Chief Executive Gary Pruitt a $950,000 bonus for the 2006 fiscal year, maintaining the same bonus level as the previous year.

The company, which completed the $4.5 billion acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. last summer and sold off 12 newspapers after that deal was announced, disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday that the company's compensation commitee on Jan. 23 awarded Pruitt the bonus. For this year, Pruitt's bonus will be set based on the company's cash flow and "achievement of non-financial goals," the SEC filing said. This year, Pruitt is to earn base pay of $1.1 million, up from $1.05 million last year.

Source: AP

Meantime, across town, CSUS professors are walking the picket line. CSU system officials say they've made an "excellent" offer for raising faculty pay over the next four years, amounting to 27 percent in some cases. Union leaders say that too much of the offer is discretionary and is more like 14 percent over four years. Professors at CSU earn, on average, $71,000, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. Many newcomers are making around $50,000 and say they're feeling more pinched by paychecks frozen by recent state budget cuts and the lapsed contract.

The Legislature gave CSU extra money this year for raises and other costs, but the funds for faculty pay are being held until the contract issues are resolved. As the impasse continues, the faculty, who have only received one raise in the past four years, are furious that two rounds of pay raises have been approved for campus president Alexander Gonzalez and other CSU executives since 2005. Gonzalez's salary was increased to $265,000, retroactive to July 1, 2006.

Source: Sacramento Bee

All of this leads me to state the obivous. Why do we pay a newspaper publisher $2M a year when we pay a University president $250,000 a year and a university professor $50,000 a year? Doesn't it seem that our priorities are out of whack?

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive

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