Quotes from President Petersen
Sep 18th, 2006 by UCW-CWA
If you are unfamiliar with blogs, part of how they work is by listing different stories under categories called “threads.” This allows you to read every story written on a certain thread by clicking on the particular category along the right-hand sidebar.
One category on this blog that has already received considerable attention concerns statements made by UT President John Petersen to reporters of local and regional newspapers, in television interviews and at various public events. Here are three such quotes:
“You have got to protect your stars,” Petersen said last week, and “the more flexibility you can have, the better off you’ll be.” “Those higher end people everybody wants,” Petersen said. “Quite frankly, the average person, everybody can usually get.” June 26, 2005 in the Knoxville News-Sentinel
“I philosophically don’t think everybody should get the same if you don’t do as good a job as somebody else. You want to reward the producers.” August 8, 2006 in the Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Merit Pay is a bullet in the, uh, their gun, the administration here.” August 3, 2006 at Campus Leadership Meeting in Knoxville, TN
I’m glad someone’s letting us know what the President really thinks about how we should get our raises. It’s too bad that Petersen doesn’t think all our hard work isn’t worth more money. UT workers are who makes this campus work.
Thanks for this site, folks!
I, at least, am glad to see that the President is willing to reward those of us who consistently work harder than others.
I just left an office where my co-workers sat and looked at each other’s photo albums for 3 or 4 hours at a time, but I had more work on my desk than could possibly be done in a week. THe Department Head had no way of increasing my pay to compensate me for the extra effort I gave, as much as he wanted to. My raise could only be as much as my lazy office-mates was.
Merit raises will encourage the BEST to be even better. Hopefully the mediocre will eventually fade away.
My question is, what happens if the Department head or supervisor goes to Church, or went to high school, or is best friends with the co-workers spending 3 hours looking at photo albums? What happens when the hard working employees don’t receive the marks they deserve on their evaluation and low-and-behold they get a 1 percent raise or even no raise at all that year? Alan Chesney said himself that you cannot file a grievance if you receive an unfair performance evaluation, and if Petersen’s system goes through what I have described not only can happen, it WILL happen to the staff and ALREADY HAS happened to faculty members.
NO merit raises before REAL COST OF LIVING RAISES! NO merit raises without a FAIR performance evaluation system! NO merit raises without a TRUE grievance procedure!
We have not received cost of living raises in the past 10 years. We were also promised our wages would be brought up to the associated pay scale of outside jobs but it has not happened, nor I believe will it ever happen - especially with the introduction of merit raises. Merit raises are subject to the whims of the supervisor - with favorites given raises it leaves the other hard-working, subordinates out. It also encourages good workers to leave. I don’t know where Peterson gets his information, but here on this campus most people are not working for the pay. We care about the university and its students. I only stay because of the benefits of having my classes paid for and the week off at Christmas. Also, I prefer the academic atmosphere, which many can not handle. I hate to see wages used as a wedge to once again divide hard working employees and cause disruption. What kind of incentive does it provide for the person who does not get a merit raise? Does it not discourage hard work and cause a rift between co-workers?
I say NO to merit raises because there is no such thing as a FAIR performance evaluation when the evaluation is done by subjective humans.
I agree with the comments posted by BW. Merit rasies are at the whim of the supervisor. In our case, the ’supervisor’ (person doing evaluations) is not the one who actually supervises the work. There are only a couple of folks who directly interact with the one who does the evals. How is it possible to give an accurate evaluation if you never see the person’s work and rarely interact with them? I know for certain that there is favortism in our department. And, if merit pay was put in to place for staff, only those who interact directly with the ’supervisor’ would receive anything. I am completely against the merit system. I think there are other ways to reward those who deserve it (ie, flex schedule, comp time, etc)