The wages of about 1,200 University of Montana employees will be frozen for two years under a handful of union contracts approved Friday by the Montana Board of Regents, meeting in Bozeman.

UM administrators also will see no increase in their salaries, said executive vice president Jim Foley, with one possible exception – President George Dennison.

Twelve unions represent 76 percent of the regular permanent employees on the UM campus. The two largest unions are the Montana Public Employees Association, representing 700 of the lowest-paid faculty and staff at UM, and the University Faculty Association, which represents about 580 professors, adjunct professors, researchers and lecturers.

MPEA’s membership agreed to a two-year pay freeze. However, full-time employees making less than $45,000 a year will receive a one-time lump payment of $450, and part-time employees will receive a one-time lump payment of $225.

Anyone earning less than $10 an hour will get a bump in July 2010 to that minimum.

A contract containing salary freezes “is always a bitter pill to swallow,” said Quinton Nyman, MPEA executive director.

The University Faculty Association also agreed to a salary freeze, but successfully argued for things like allowing adjuncts to sign into contracts longer than a year and for the chair of the Faculty Senate to receive some paid time off. The annual bonus payment for selected meritorious faculty was increased by $250. And the salary increase associated with promotions was increased.

“We had to pull teeth to get this extra compensation,” said UFA president Mike Kupilik, a UM economics professor. “No one else has gotten a cent.”

Since 1977, Kupilik can recall several times that UFA members agreed to a salary freeze, he said.

Now that most of the UM campus has agreed to a freeze in pay, all eyes are on whether President George Dennison will be offered a $75,000 salary increase – bringing his pay in line with that of incoming Montana State University President Waded Cruzado. Since the mid-1970s, the UM and MSU presidential salaries have always been the same.

Pay inversion is what it’s called. Hiring a less-experienced person at a higher rate than longstanding employees in the same position is a problem UM has faced for quite some time and a problem that has been studied repeatedly in the past 15 years, Kupilik said.

He estimates that approximately 30 percent to 40 percent of the UM faculty receive less pay than a junior professor in the same department.

For example, the Department of Economics saw little turnover in the 1980s and 1990s, he said. Then a professor retired at the turn of the century. The market value for an economics professor who graduated from a good school was such that the new hire was offered a salary higher than that of every professor already in the department, including the chair, Kupilik said.

Fixing the problem on UM’s campus would cost seven figures, he said. Now, one of the biggest and most talked-about inversion problems involves UM’s top leader.

All this comes at time when the university is looking for ways to plug future holes in the budget, and has proposed such ideas hiring fewer adjunct professors, not filling job vacancies and shifting a heavier workload to permanent faculty.

Needless to say, many are interested in what the regents will decide to do with Dennison’s salary, and that of Commissioner of Higher Education Shelia Stearns.

“If President Dennison can get his inversion taken care of, then the faculty should get our inversion problem taken care of, too,” Kupilik said.

And with salary freezes in the next biennium, the inversion problem only worsens, Kupilik said.

Reporter Chelsi Moy can be reached at 523-5260 or at chelsi.moy@missoulian.com.