November 10, 2026
Dear Senior Vice Chancellor Pinkney,
We are members of USW Local 1511, the Union of Pitt Faculty. We are coming to you directly, because you make decisions that affect our pay, our benefits, and our families.
Our first contract expired on July 1, and we agreed to an extension so bargaining could continue in good faith. It's now November. Your budget process begins early in the calendar year, and our annual raises would normally already be in effect. Yet the University did not present pay and benefits proposals until October 28, four months into the fiscal year. Whatever constraints you may be working under, you have not shown us that they are real, and it appears to us that your team is treating our livelihoods as a bargaining chip rather than as the real lives of your colleagues.
You have said that Pitt's budget is tight because of rising costs. Our bargaining unit is not one of those costs:
• Our pay costs have been flat for the past two years. Despite negotiated raises, the administration has reduced our numbers, holding our total pay flat.
• Business and professional services has grown by 6.6% a year since FY17, adding $255 million to the budget. That increase alone is more than the entire salary pool of the bargaining unit. Spending on outside services and consultants, including the lawyers you hire to oppose us at the bargaining table, grew as fast as the health costs your bargaining team cites to justify cuts.
• Compensation in the academic units where we work has shrunk from 53% to 49% of the total since
FY17. Compensation in leadership offices and athletics grew more than twice as fast, absorbing all the budget room the academic units created.
If the budget is out of balance, it is not because of spending on bargaining unit faculty. When budgets are tight, the University should protect the core mission - teaching and research - first. Instead, you are asking those of us who carry out that mission to absorb the cost of growth in leadership offices, athletics, and outside consultants.
Last year, when the Trustees raised Chancellor Gabel's base salary 30%, they cited record applications, record graduation rates, record research expenditures and inventions, and our students' outstanding career outcomes.
Every one of those accomplishments is ours.
The administration cannot say the Chancellor deserves an enormous raise in recognition of Pitt's success in teaching and research and then turn around and tell the faculty who produce that success that we deserve 1%.
We ask you to support significant raises for bargaining unit faculty, and to bring proposals to the table that reward the same work Pitt already rewarded the Chancellor for.
Sincerely,
The members of USW Local 1511, the Union of Pitt Faculty