Testimony: Our Higher Ed Faculty and Staff Deserve to Be Compensated Well for the Essential Work They Do

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Chair Oliveira, Chair McMurtry, and Members of the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group fighting for a more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic commonwealth.

We urge you to give a favorable report to H.2185 and S.1365: An Act to provide fair wages to employees of public institutions of higher education.

We commend the recent work from the MA Legislature to strengthen our Commonwealth’s commitment to public higher education, such as making community college free and expanding aid and scholarship programs for students attending our four-year public colleges and universities.

As we work to ensure more students are able to benefit from high-quality public higher education, we must also work to ensure that quality, and that means properly compensating faculty and staff.

Faculty and staff at MA’s public colleges and universities are paid less than their peers in private colleges and universities and in colleges and universities in nearby states. When we compensate faculty less, then we make our public colleges and universities less attractive to the best teachers and researchers when they are weighing various opportunities. We increase the burnout of those that we are able to attract, and we create a scenario where faculty and staff may have to take on side jobs to make ends meet. They lose out, and our students lose out too.

Not being competitive in compensation is especially concerning given that MA stands out in our high cost of living. We have among the most expensive housing, health care, and child care. Our state has much to offer, but so often that is only if you can afford it.

These bills would ensure that future wages of public higher education employees are at or above the national average when adjusted for cost of living and require the Commonwealth to pay for the full cost of fringe benefits and collective bargaining agreements. They help us to continue to deliver on the promise of public higher education and its role as a creator of opportunity, a bastion of critical thinking, and an engine of our state’s economy.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

Happy Tax Day! Time for Large Corporations to Pay Their Fair Share

Last week, Republicans in the US House voted to advance a budget outline that entails steep cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and other essential programs in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations.

Their priorities are clear. And so should ours in Massachusetts.

The federal budget fight isn’t over. But MA needs to ensure that, regardless of what Congressional Republicans do and regardless of Elon Musk’s illegal federal funding freezes, we are not cutting essential services. We need to do more to meet the needs of all, not less.

And we know how to raise such funds. It’s not by giving tax cuts to rich people and large corporations as our Legislature did two years ago. It’s by ensuring that large corporations are paying their fair share.

That’s why we’re supporting Raise Up Mass’s Corporate Fair Share campaign to ensure that billionaire global corporations like Apple, Google, and Walmart pay their fair share and can’t get away with tax-dodging antics.

Can you email your legislator in support of this important legislation?

Did you know that Massachusetts taxes a smaller share of offshored corporate income than New Hampshire? An Act Combating Offshore Tax Avoidance (H.3110 / S.2033) would fix that, bringing us in line with the federal government and other states and raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new annual revenues.

Email, Call, and then Show Up

Want to make sure that your legislators hear that message loud and clear?
Join us next month — on Wednesday, May 28, at 10 am at the State House — for our annual lobby day.

RSVP HERE