A 1988 study by Hay Management Consultants showed that university faculty career earnings were demonstrably lower than comparable positions in the private or public sector. According to the Hay report, average total career earnings at that time were as follows:

• Universities $1,673,600
• Private Sector overall $2,180,976
• Private Sector professionals $2,273,424
• Public Sector $1,904,128

When, because of severe fiscal restraint, faculty are forced to accept suspension of career development increments, their career earnings deteriorate drastically. Understanding CDIs and how they work requires an examination of several apparent paradoxes in the system of faculty compensation.

The first involves the contrast between individual and group experience over the last quarter century. Since the early 1970s real scale salaries for university professors have declined substantially relative to the cost of living or to other occupations, despite the fact that most of us have seen our individual salaries increase more rapidly than the cost of living.

The second paradox involves contrast between faculty salaries and other employee groups. University professors have, compared to many other groups, very high average salaries, particularly at the Full Professor level, yet the average annual salary for a professor over the course of a full career is less than most other occupations including some skilled trades.

The explanation for the first paradox is simple enough. When we sign on with the Canadian University system we buy into a salary system that includes regular annual increases (or ‘increments’), spread over the course of our career. These are sufficient to ensure relatively high earnings at least from our late 40s on. Our initial salaries are very low by labour market standards, but we accept this with an understanding that we will attain the upper reaches of the salary scale by retirement. In the long run, things are supposed to ‘average out’ – although even then, as you can see, university professors still earn less than average public and private sector employees. When salary controversies arise, what typically gets reported is an overall percentage increase. But it is important to recognize that these percentages have two components: one which is rightly considered a ‘raise’, and another which properly should be considered as deferred compensation.

When we accept scale increases (‘raises’) below inflation – or more to the point today, when we receive no scale increases – what happens essentially is that our deferred income gets used by the university to fund our salaries. It is misleading – and damaging – to represent such salaries increases as ‘raises’ because despite an increase in pay, we are still losing ground on career earnings. It does not require much mathematical sophistication to see what happens when professors are forced to forego both scale increases and career development increments, as has been the case at Brandon University.

Let’s look at it another way. In the university system, professors are given initial salaries well below what they are worth: they have been students living on subsistence income for many years, while their counterparts in the public and private sector have been earning solid incomes and earning promotions. So salary scales are structured to permit professors to ‘catch up’ (well, not quite) over the course of a career. Each time a senior professor retires, his or her salary returns to the employer, who is supposed to use the difference between that rather substantial salary and the low salary paid the new replacement professor to fund the career increments of those who remain. Thus, in the long haul, career development increments cost the employer nothing – provided of course that the employer does not regard that as pocket money and spend it on something else.

University professors clearly have a problem. To begin with, we have an extraordinarily long "probationary" period as we "learn the job." For most of this time we are not employees at all, and manage to survive on student assistance. Those who survive one of the labour market's most extended and grueling training periods are hired often in their early 30s. A professor's starting salary, meanwhile, is only marginally higher than entry level white-collar jobs available to many B.A.'s. The gap, meanwhile, between entry-level university salaries and the highest ranks that can be expected in a normal career is extremely wide by labour market standards. The career development increments necessary to make it to the top of the progression are small and spread over the entire career. Annual salaries for full professors are very high relative to the labour market, but others in the labour market earned those "lower" annual salaries often for a decade or more before the university professor was even hired. As a consequence full professors earning $90 to $100K often have still not caught up with the career earnings of friends who chose to forego graduate school and enter the labour market after a B.A. Any interruption in career increments during the course of a career thus has a devastating impact on career earnings.

Brandon University professors have been forced in recent years to accept both interruptions to their career development increments, Leave Without Pay days, and scale increases of zero. Although this hits everyone hard, the greatest burden falls to those about to retire (who are denied the chance to achieve the full salary and pension benefits of a career), and those at the start of their careers (whose loss of career earnings will compound each year over the rest of their career).

Faculty salaries have been deteriorating for almost a quarter of a century. But the concessions made during recent years at Brandon University have done more damage to faculty compensation than all previous losses combined. At the same time, Administrative salaries and positions have remained curiously immune to such trends.