College Staff Win Big Raises in Oregon
Just 1 in 5 classified staff at Central Oregon Community College, in Bend, Ore., were paid a living wage in 2025. The other 78 percent relied on the college’s food pantry for meals and its used-clothing closet to stay warm.
By 2028, however, more than 3 in 5 of the college’s staff will make a living wage—which is $26.81 an hour in Bend—thanks to the solidarity of union members.
“We knew we had a lot of talented people, and a lot of people dedicated to working in public education, but they simply couldn’t afford to live in this community,” says union president Scott Dove, an academic technology specialist. As a result of poor pay, last year the unit had a 17 percent turnover rate.
In October 2025, the union—which includes academic advisors and custodians, as well as financial aid and e-learning specialists—affiliated with the Oregon Education Association, which helped them gain more power at the bargaining table, Dove explains.
Last spring, when administrators refused to budge on pay raises, even while acknowledging they could afford them, union members set a strike date for April 2. On April 1, they settled the contract.
The new agreement achieves two things regarding pay: It eliminates the three bottom steps of the salary schedule, increasing the floor from $18.91 to $23.23 an hour; and it applies 15 percent raises over three years. For the lowest paid staffers, this means 28 percent raises. The union also negotiated improvements to healthcare benefits that will save each member $900–$2,000 a year, without changes to coverage. “We do feel really proud and excited of what we accomplished,” Dove says
The Secret to Success in New Jersey
In May, faculty at Salem Community College—in one of New Jersey’s poorest counties—won 11.5 percent raises over three years. The keys to their success?
- “Preparation,” says union president Jenna Lucente. “We read the contract like 90 times. We’d sit there together and be like, ‘What about this paragraph? What about that paragraph?’”
- Relationships. “We do not have an attitude of us versus them. We just think of it as us,” Lucente says. This means coming to the table with a smile, a willingness to listen and, most of all, a confidence that everybody has the same goal: for our students to do better, she says.
Finally! FAMU's Persistence Pays Off!
In April, the faculty union at Florida A&M University (FAMU), a historically Black university, ratified a new contract after 64 months at the bargaining table.
“It has been a long, arduous journey,” says United Faculty of Florida-FAMU President Samique March-Dallas, an associate professor of finance.
The new contract provides the largest raises in March-Dallas’ 15 years at the university. The highestpaid faculty (mostly in business and engineering) got $6,750 raises; the middle tier (mostly in the sciences) received $5,750 raises; the third tier (mostly in the humanities) got $4,500. For the lowest paid faculty, this means 7-9 percent raises; for the highest paid, 4.5-6 percent. While these raises are substantial, they do not erase the gulf between FAMU salaries and those at other research institutions in the state.
News Flash! Union Members Get Paid More!
The evidence is in: Faculty who belong to unions get paid more than faculty who do not.
The union advantage is especially large at community colleges, where union faculty earned an average of $19,000 more in 2025 than their non-unionized peers working in the same states—and an average of $30,000 more than faculty in states without collective bargaining, according to the 2026 NEA Faculty Salary Report. At research universities, the average difference is $20,000.
That union faculty get paid more than non-union faculty is not at all surprising to NEA Higher Ed members.
“We have power on these issues—and it’s through collective bargaining. The power is at the table,” says Alec Thomson, president of NEA’s National Council for Higher Education.
