Faced with "substantial financial pressures in the year ahead," MIT will institute a one-year freeze for campus faculty, staff and administration salaries, effective immediately. The announcement was made in a letter distributed Tuesday to faculty and staff by Provost Robert A. Brown and Executive Vice President John R. Curry.
In a second money-saving step, the campus will be closed from Christmas Day (Thursday, Dec. 25) until Monday, Jan. 5 to save on heating, electricity and other costs over the holidays. This will constitute additional paid time off for employees.
The salary freeze affects all campus faculty and staff whose base annual pay is $55,000 or greater. Lincoln Laboratory staff will receive "very modest salary increases" for fiscal 2005, based on performance. Employees at other off-campus MIT locations will be contacted by their Human Resources representative regarding pay policy.
There will be pay increases of up to $1,000 in fiscal 2005 for campus employees (both full-time and part-time) who earn less than $55,000 on an equivalent full-time basis and whose performance is satisfactory.
Brown and Curry noted that even with the salary freeze, up to 250 campus jobs must be trimmed over the next year to balance the budget in fiscal 2005. "If it weren't for the salary freeze, which will save approximately $10 million, a much larger number of jobs would have to be eliminated. In other words, the salary freeze saves jobs," they wrote.
More information can be found on the MIT Finances web site at http://web.mit.edu/finances and the Human Resources web site at http://web.mit.edu/hr.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 29, 2003.
