Dear Colleagues
This information is being distributed to you to keep you as well informed as possible with regards to Discretionary Funds (DSI) for UUP Members for 2021.
The opportunity for Discretionary Funds for UUP members comes from 2 sources:
- Discretionary Funds Controlled by the university – One half of one percent of UUP payroll is made available to the university to distribute to UUP members as the university sees fit. The UUP Buffalo Center Chapter recommends that you ask your immediate supervisor and/or Department Head what criteria (if any) is used when considering awarding these funds. If you feel you should be considered, you are encouraged to submit a Self-Nomination request to your immediate supervisor no later than Friday, October 15th.
- Compression – The other one half of one percent of UUP payroll is made available through a contractual Salary Compression process. The Contract provides for salary compression remediation, a multi-year process to be run once/year over 4 years. We anticipate that UB will run compression very soon. Once it has been run, if you discover errors in your individual data, it cannot retroactively be corrected. Therefore, if you are concerned or have reason to believe that UB may not have the correct information for you, you should contact Jamie Bluhm at jlbluhm@buffalo.edu as soon as possible, to confirm the following:
o years of service.
o terminal degree (if you have a terminal degree and are an academic in a discipline where the terminal degree is other than a PhD, confirm that you are flagged as having a terminal degree (e.g. J.D., MFA, etc.);
o the name of the benchmark used last year (the actual salary data for the benchmark is proprietary but not which benchmark was used);
o the salary used (all merit pay increases, including DSI for merit pay will be backed out);
o which SL grade was used (UB has the discretion to use/add a .5 SL just for the compression run where the duties are higher than those of the straight SL)
Traditionally, we would expect that the distribution of Discretionary Funds to occur soon after the first of the year.
The Chapter also plans on posting the distribution of the Discretionary Funds once it becomes available.
In Solidarity,
Ken Kern
Chapter President
UUP Buffalo Center