Rutgers Freezes Pay Using Loophole

CAMDEN, N.J. - Due to state budget cuts, Rutgers University employees are seeing their pay raises canceled and their salaries frozen.

Professors and the rest of the 13,000 workers at Rutgers' three campuses in Camden, Newark and New Brunswick are all feeling the same financial squeeze that the rest of the state's public employees and educators have been hit with.

Employees said they were suddenly and very surprisingly told by e-mail Thursday that the raises they were supposed to start getting on July 1 were canceled.

The 12 unions who represent most of those workers are wondering how the college can cancel the raises already in a contract.

But Rutgers wrote that an "extreme fiscal crisis exists" and a hardly-ever-used loophole in the contracts says Rutgers doesn't have to give raises if the university doesn't have the money for them.

Rutgers has said a 15-percent cut in state aid – just like a lot of the local school districts got – left the university almost $100 million short this year.

Not paying those raises saves just $30 million but may save cutting classes and employees by way of mass layoffs.

The unions say they're outraged, especially after voluntarily signing agreements to defer or put off last year's raises until this year to help keep Rutgers' finances solid in the recession and to help avoid layoffs back then.

And so the unions said they are going to their lawyers Friday, and likely going to court after that, to challenge the contract loophole Fox 29's Steve Keeley reported.

The average Rutgers professor makes $104,000 and was scheduled to get a $3,000 raise next month.

Administrators average $54,000 and were also set to get a 5-percent raises, which adds up to about $3,000 as well.

The clerical staff is the lowest paid. They make just $36,000.

Rutgers is trying to keep tuition hikes down, too, but the fall tuition rate has yet to be set. Those numbers are expected to come out next month.