Board of Trustees may eliminate paid faculty family leave benefits

IU’s Paid Family Leave Policy for Academic Appointees, adopted in July 2008, is currently under review to be eliminated or altered.

“Faculty members on family leave might face the difficult choice of attending to urgent family needs or continuing with full-time work responsibilities at the University,” said Thomas Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs.

The current policy extends 12 weeks of fully paid leave to eligible employees for an employee or employee’s spouse or domestic partner giving birth to or adopting a child. The policy extends the same leave time for primary care of an eligible family member with a serious health condition.

The policy will expire on June 30, and, without action by the IU Board of Trustees, the policy will revert to the old policy that focused on birth and adoption through partially paid pregnancy and childbearing leaves, University Faculty Council co-secretary Erika Dowell said.

“We would go back to a less generous policy that gives less paid time off,” she said. “We’ve had a couple meetings with administration to discuss a couple ways to tweak the policy. The Board of Trustees are concerned with the overall financial exposure.”

The faculty council plans to present the proposal to the Board of Trustees at a meeting on June 23 and 24. Any change would become effective on Feb. 1, 2012.

The purpose of the policy is to achieve a “family-friendly” campus at IU-Bloomington, Gieryn said.

“By allowing academic appointees paid time away to deal with important family matters like the birth of a child or the illness of a parent, the University affirms its commitment to “work-life” balance,” he said. “The family leave policy is vitally important for our ability to recruit and retain top-quality faculty at IU-Bloomington.”

The BFC wants to have some sort of provision in the policy that would leave it mostly unchanged, but it wants to address the trustees’ worries that the policy may become too costly for IU, said Maria Bucur-Deckard, faculty member on the University Faculty Council and member of the BFC’s agenda committee.

Of the 5,867 academic appointees on all IU campuses that are eligible to take the policy this year, only 44 have taken this leave, which is 0.75 percent of the total number of people eligible, Bucur-Deckard said.

“We are negotiating right now with the administration to try and keep some kind of limit on how many people or what percentage of the whole salary budget would be reached before this policy becomes one that needs to be reviewed,” Bucur-Deckard said. “Our hope is that they will keep the policy until our proposal of the total amount of the salary paid to those receiving it in any one year reaches two percent out of the total budget of salaries. That would be kind of the ceiling at which point we would go back and revisit the policy and see if it is feasible financially.”

Twenty two percent of the people who took leave this academic year make more than $100,000 a year, accounting for 38 percent of the total, she said.

Bucur-Deckard said this shows that people who make more than $100,000 have disproportionally contributed to making this a higher dollar amount policy.

“Because of this trend, there is a smaller percentage of people eating up this big chunk of use in terms of dollars that are being assigned,” she said. “What we are proposing is that we would put a check on how much money that would be allowed to be paid out to people.”

The council created a petition to allow employees to voice their opinion about the proposed change. Bucur-Deckard said she hopes the petition, which currently has almost 400 signatures, will have 500 by the trustees’ meeting in June.

“For each person who signs a petition, statistically, there are eight or nine others who haven’t signed but are in favor,” she said. “But if that is the case, that means the 500 pretty much represents the entire eligible population that could be taking this policy. That is powerful...The purpose of the petition is to give voice to those who believe in the benefits of this policy to be able to speak out in their own voice and talk about their stories.”

IU academic appointees’ salaries rank in the bottom third of Big Ten Universities and this policy is a better policy than at other universities, Bucur-Deckard said.

“When your salaries are lagging in the bottom, you have to do what you can do to offer as an university these policies when you try to attract someone from another place,” she said. “If you want to give birth to a child and you want to make sure you can take care of your dying parents, we are going to support you and we are going to let you do what you got to do, and then we are going to be sure you are going to come back with more energy and loyalty to this University and be less likely to go somewhere else.”

IU Paid Family Leave Policy

General
Family leave is not intended to be a supplemental pay plan. It is a policy that allows for an academic appointee to take necessary time off from work without undue financial hardship. People may need six weeks or 12 weeks, depending on their situation. It is expected that paid leave periods will vary by need and circumstance and may extend across semesters.

Eligibility
Both 10 and 12 month academic appointees are eligible for family leave after two years of continuous full-time Indiana University service. Visiting, adjunct, part-time and post-doctoral appointees are not eligible for family leave.

Eligible Family Members
The definition of an eligible family is spouse, domestic partner, parent, dependent child or a spouse’s or domestic partner’s dependent child or parent.

Leave Frequency
Academic appointees may take family leave up to twice every five years, but the appointee must return to full-time service for at least one fall or spring semester between leaves. Appointees in non-teaching appointments must return for at least five months. Family leave for the birth or adoption of a child must be concluded within 12 months of the birth of the child or the date on which the child is placed in the physical custody of the academic appointee. The first week of any family leave begins the period for calculating both the 12 weeks and five-year eligibility period.

Source: IU Paid Family Leave Policy for Academic Appointees