For some University of Alaska faculty, the next paycheck could be $0

This story was originally published in the Alaska Beacon on Sept. 4, 2024.

When Tara Palmer checked her upcoming paycheck online on Tuesday, she got an unwelcome surprise. For her first weeks back to full-time work as a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, she was scheduled to be paid $0.

“I am a single parent. I have a daughter in college that I help support, and a daughter in high school, and this is a very significant financial issue for me,” she said. “I try to plan ahead. I try to be careful with my money, of course, but missing an entire pay period is significant, regardless of how carefully one plans.”

An unknown number of university faculty learned this week that they were not scheduled to be paid on time for their first weeks of work after three months of summer without paychecks. Faculty and union representatives said Tuesday that the state university system’s failure to pay certain employees on time would be a breach of trust – and the law. They brought up their concerns at a public meeting with the university regents on Tuesday, when one faculty member called it a “travesty.”

Palmer said the situation has left her feeling uncertain about the future. She testified at the meeting.

“If I knew it was just me, and they screwed up something, I could roll with it. But this is numerous people. It’s not just my college, it’s not just UAA, and they aren’t fixing it. They’re just saying, ‘Oh, we’re short staffed,’ which is just utterly unacceptable,” she said.

Several other faculty said they would also not receive their next paycheck, but had concerns about speaking out.

Employees can manage their paychecks through an online portal, which shows the amount that they will receive on the upcoming payday. For the pay period of Aug. 11-24, for which employees are scheduled to be paid on Sept. 6, several faculty members see they will be making $0.

Palmer said she has been with the university for two decades and it is the first time her employer will have missed a paycheck. But she said she was disappointed that the university didn’t reach out and let her know that it would be failing to uphold one of its basic obligations as an employer.

“It’s a terrible way to treat your employees. I’m utterly baffled. And I love my job. I really love my job, but I do not love how they are treating us right now,” she said.

Jonathon Taylor, a spokesperson for the university system, said that university leadership has identified solutions over the course of the day on Wednesday and may be able to pay all employees on time.

“UA has been aware of the issues for several weeks, and we are working diligently to resolve them. Employee compensation is at the heart of our responsibility, and we are working to get all of our employees paid as quickly as possible,” he said in an email.

Taylor said the university does not yet have a count of how many faculty may be affected.

“The issues stem from a confluence of factors, including the start of the academic year, the holiday weekend, and the deadlines for getting hire paperwork submitted for the start of the semester,” he said in a subsequent email. “The full scope of the potential issue came into focus after the holiday weekend. There has been an effort to warn staff who may be affected.”

That message has not been making it out to faculty in the right way, said Jill Dumesnil, a math professor at University of Alaska Southeast and the union president there.

“They’re getting emails from their deans and directors saying … they might get paid next week or in two weeks,” she said. “Part of what’s really upsetting is just the casualness with which our members are being contact and told, ‘Oops, this happened.’”

Union members say they are hearing from administrators that the issue is a result of understaffing in human resources. Dumesnil stressed that the affected faculty are not to blame: “They signed their paperwork, they did their part, they did their job, they showed up, they worked and they should be paid on time. Understaffing in HR is not a legitimate excuse for not paying employees.”

The news comes as United Academics, the union for full-time university faculty, negotiates a new contract with the university. Several faculty members who called into the Tuesday meeting with the regents said their pay is not keeping up with the cost of living in the state. One faculty member from UAA described seeking relief at the local food bank because her salary is too high to qualify for food stamps.

Dumesnil said the paycheck issue comes on top of other financial concerns.

“We’ve already suffered the loss of purchasing power and a lot of faculty are living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “A lot of faculty can barely afford to live in their communities, especially in the rural communities and in Southeast.”

Dumesnil added that the problem of late pay has come up before. “To our knowledge, this is at least the third occurrence of this problem in the last four years,” she said.

Douglas Cost, a union representative, associate professor and program chair in the education department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said he has been getting texts, calls and emails from faculty concerned to see the university will not pay them at the end of the week.

“In cost-cutting measures, (the university) reduced HR to a shambles of what it once was. Now the HR concerns come to the union because faculty know that HR is not going to be able to really help them,” he said.

Cost said his colleagues have worked hard to get their degrees and achieve their roles on faculty at a university, but said it was laughable to have “made it” and then find you can’t count on a paycheck: “You’ve arrived, and you’re like, ‘Wow. T.J. Maxx has never not paid me.’”

UAF is currently seeking to double its doctoral student graduation rate to become a top-tier research university. Cost said he is unsure how the university can be top-tier without attracting talented faculty with competitive wages.

Graduate students are also affected. K. Janeschek, an organizer of the newly formed graduate student workers union, said not all graduate student workers have gotten their contracts processed by the university either, including several who have already started work. Janeschek said paperwork issues like this are “standard operating procedure at this point” for graduate student workers, but that has cascading consequences.

“For students the effects are pretty extreme,” they said. “Their salaries are small and most people can’t pay rent without biweekly paychecks. People I’ve known have missed rent payments in the past.”

Janeschek said that the union made sure their contracts included protection from late fees on tuition if contracts are processed late because students were charged late fees on tuition they don’t even owe.

They said human resources employees have pointed to short-staffing as a reason for delays, as well as the time-consuming nature of inputting the information by hand.

“Manual data entry in 2024 for thousands of contracts is not a good system,” Janeschek said, adding that, according to another union member, the university had about 150 graduate student contracts left to process as of last week.

In Anchorage, Tara Palmer said she has not heard anyone from the university say the problem may be resolved soon enough that employees like her are paid on time, but she hopes it will be. She checked her online account again on Wednesday afternoon, and her pay for the last two weeks of full-time work was still scheduled to be $0.

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