New salary deal has been signed

The new salaries come into force as of the 1st October 2016 and back-pay for October and November will be included along with the next wage packet on the 21st December.

Most of you already know, or will find out in the next few days, what your new salary will be. Everyone has the right to discuss decisions regarding the allocation of wages with either their department head or the person responsible for setting pay levels.

There were two separate approaches to this year's negotiations. Pay discussions with the majority of institutions followed the usual model, whereby we negotiated directly with university representatives responsible for setting wages. Negotiations with IMT, IEI and large sections of the administrative body, on the other hand, were carried out via individual salary negotiations (lönesättande samtal). We believe that both approaches went well and the average pay increase for our members undergoing a pay review was 2.4 %, which must be considered as a positive result considering that the University is once again running a deficit this year. As I often point out, the Swedish state only reimburses the university for a percentage of the increase in its wage bill, which means that this year LiU must once again pay most of the wage increases from its savings (its 'myndighetskapital').

We will eventually publish a brief break-down of the outcome of the negotiations on this website.

We were particularly successful this year with the negotiations regarding PhD students. The new PhD salaries can be found here.Current PhD students should check that their new salaries are correct.

The RALS-T agreement stipulates that individual salary negotiations will also be the default method of negotiation, even in the higher education sector. Our partially joint understanding is therefore to continue to expand the implementation of this approach, where the conditions are met  and in a gradual fashion, in those bodies and institutions where we believe it will work well. However, we must all be prepared sooner or later to commit fully to the new model for salary discussion.

Please also note that employees who are not members of any union receive a salary which the employer deems to be appropriate. It is therefore in the interest of every employee to be a member of at least one union.

Finally, let me wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Krzysztof Marciniak

Chairman Saco-S/LiU