The 1,600 members of the UMass Amherst Professional Staff Union — the people at UMass who, among other vital jobs, support and advise students, direct the residence halls, and administer all manner of department activities — have been working without a contract since mid-2024, for over 500 days.
As negotiations with the UMass administration drag on, members of the staff union’s negotiating team report that the administration’s current contract offer includes no built in step increases in pay, as is common with other state government professional staff positions. It also includes cost-of-living pay adjustments for the first two contract years only, 2025 and 2026, with no automatic cost-of-living increase for 2027, the last contract year. This is while the ongoing crisis of affordability is by far the most pressing economic concern for most people in the U.S. today.
In my view, the administration’s offer is unfair and even disrespectful to its professional staff members. Having been a UMass Economics faculty member for 27 years, I know from long first-hand experience how talented and committed our professional staffers are. I do not exaggerate in saying that every one of the couple hundred staffers with whom I have interacted on some substantive basis have been highly capable and supportive in everything I have done in terms of teaching, student advising, service and administrative work, and research.
According to the union negotiating team, the median professional staff members currently earn about $77,000 a year. This means that half of the UMass professional staffers earn below $77,000, including many well below that. Even the median $77,000 pay level is below what amounts to a living wage for most family types in Hampshire County, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. According to this MIT Calculator, a living wage income in Hampshire County for a single parent with one child and working full-time is about $97,000 a year. Moreover, the MIT Calculator deliberately sets a low threshold for its living wage standard in any given community. They write, “The living wage is the basic income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity.”
In its current negotiating stance, the UMass administration is effectively proposing that its professional staff member take a base pay cut in 2027. That is the effect of the administration offering no automatic cost-of-living pay adjustments for 2027. It means that, if your pay in 2026 is $77,000 and U.S. inflation continues at its current rate of about 3 percent per year, the result is that, in 2027, the buying power of your base pay will have fallen effectively to $74,700 — i.e. a 3% pay cut.
The administration’s offer does allow for cost-of-living increases in 2027, but only as the result of a merit review by each staffer’s supervisor. The working assumption here is that our staff members deserve to have their salaries cut in buying power in 2027 unless they convince their supervisors otherwise.
The administration certainly must recognize that this arrangement will lower morale among the staff. Lower morale will, in turn, lead to increasing staff resignations and turnover, and, thereby, reduced capacity for the remaining staffers to meet all the demands of their jobs.
Since the COVID lockdown was lifted in 2022, the UMass Amherst operating revenues from all sources — including student tuition and fees, grants, auxiliary enterprises and state support — has grown from roughly $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion. This is a 4.6% average rate of revenue growth annually. In the Introduction to Macroeconomics course that I teach, I explain to my students that we should evaluate economic policy proposals according to two principles — whether they can achieve their desired outcomes efficiently and whether they are fair. According to both principles, the pay levels for our professional staff members should be targeted to rise at least in line with the university’s revenue increases. There is no legitimate principle that suggests otherwise — that the UMass professional staffers should receive pay cuts and a shrinking share of the university’s growing revenue pie, while also being expected to continue making indispensable contributions to everything that goes on at UMass.
Robert Pollin is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst.