Bill 124 Salary
Adjustment Calculator

This calculator is designed to estimate differences in earnings over a 10-year period by comparing the UW 1% scale adjustment to inflation, and the deals that the Queen’s University Faculty Association and Trent University Faculty Association negotiated.

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Editor's note: The calculator has been updated to reflect the latest adjustment, which was announced in a memo on May 29, 2023. The wording of the adjustment is not quite clear, so we are using 4% as an estimate of the UW increase for faculty hired before 2021 and 3% as an estimate for faculty hired after 2021. Although we are not certain, we are fairly confident that this reflects the proposed adjustment within a reasonable margin of error.

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How It Works

From Year 1 (2021-2022) when Bill 124 first came into effect at UW to Year 3 (2023-2024), we use the actual inflation rates and the actual scale increases negotiated at Queen’s and Trent for those years. From Year 4 to Year 10, we hold inflation and the scale adjustments constant at 2% across the board. This is to isolate the long-term effects of the present scale adjustments.

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Example

Using the default values as an example, suppose that a faculty member earns $120,000 in annual salary and has an average merit score of 1.5. For this model, we assume that the merit increase for a score of R=1 is $2500 (this is hard-coded in so you don’t need to worry about this value). Generating values, we see that over a 10-year period:

• At UW, this faculty member would earn $1,573,389.14 if they were hired before 2021.

• At UW, this faculty member would earn $1,559,485.75 if they were hired after 2021.

• If the scale adjustment were indexed to inflation, the faculty member would have earned $1,637,375.04, a difference of (i.e., more than) $63,985.90 compared to UW ($77,829.29 more than new hires at UW).

• If the faculty member had gotten the adjustments from Queen’s University, they would have earned $1,617,587.80, a difference of $44,198.66 with UW ($58,102.04 more than new hires at UW).

• If the faculty member had gotten the adjustments from Trent University, they would have earned $1,589,839.57, a difference of $16,450.43 with UW ($30,353.81 more than new hires at UW).

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Final Thoughts

The key message is that differences in scale adjustments of just a few percentage points can, over time, translate into significant differences in earnings. Consider what you could do with an extra $16k, $44k, or $64k over 10 years: pay off your mortgage sooner; pay for childcare; pay for tuition; put it in a savings account; invest it.

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It’s worth noting what the 2023 UW adjustment would need to be to be roughly on par with the other adjustments:

• 9.25% to match inflation

• 7.65% to match Queen’s

• 5.5% to match Trent

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Finally, we note with dismay that new hires in particular are done a disservice. Since salary differences compound over time, a small percentage difference now translates into non-trivial lost earnings down the line.

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We encourage you to plug in your own salary and merit scores and click “Generate” to see how your 10-year earnings would compare.  (Note: Your data privacy is important to us. Information from the calculator is not sent or saved anywhere. All the calculations are done using javascript operating locally on your browser.)

  

 

 

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