Cost-of-Living Adjustment

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We are the United Campus Workers of Arizona, CWA Local 7065, and we are demanding fair wages now. 

Introducing our Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) campaign. 

 

What is COLA?

 

Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) refers to the yearly increase in wages to keep up with the price of greed-flation. The cost of living not only includes necessities such as food and shelter, but also the cost to create and maintain social ties in addition to bettering ourselves. For our Local, COLA is the direct outcome of our universities and colleges’ responsibilities to their working communities. When we talk about pay increases in terms of COLA, we are referring not just to the pay scale needed to survive but to thrive. 

Read our petition:

 

In short, we are demanding that the Arizona Board of Regents:

  1. Implement a 20% raise for campus workers making less than 200k annually and a $30/hr minimum wage without an increase in workload.

  2. Provide additional, yearly cost of living adjustments in accordance with the Consumer Price Index.

  3. Freeze university president bonuses until worker compensation increases are implemented.

  4. Focus lobbying efforts on the Arizona state legislature to meet these demands and include these annual cost of living adjustments in the State of Arizona Budget Requests.

 

Signing our petition

 

We are asking students and workers to find us in-person on-campus at the below times to sign the COLA petition. If the times listed don’t fit your schedule, contact one of your elected member leaders or staff organizers to schedule a time to meet.

A sign on to the petition includes your first name, last name, job type (faculty/staff/student), campus (ASU/NAU/UA), job position (optional), and signature.

If you’d like to print out your own copy of the physical signature sheet to gather signatures from your coworkers and peers, please fill out this form.

Our goal is to present the Arizona Board of Regents with 1,000 signatures by the November 19th board meeting in Tucson. 

 

Background on the Arizona Board of Regents

 

“The Arizona Board of Regents is the governing board for the state’s public universities: Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona. The board provides policy guidance in such areas as: academic and student affairs; financial and human resource programs; student tuition, fees and financial aid programs; university capital development plans; strategic plans; legal affairs; and public and constituent outreach.” (Arizona Board of Regents, 2026)

The Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) are essentially top decision makers whose policies and budget recommendations majorly affect all students and workers at Arizona’s public universities. One of ABOR’s “duties” is to put out reports on tuition and fees, student retention, university success, and so forth. Year after year, ABOR identifies pay gaps between what Arizona higher education staff and faculty make and what their peers make. Read an excerpt from their 2025 report below:
 

“Resources Needed to Meet Market Levels” 

“Unmet salary need is the amount needed to raise average faculty salaries to the median of their peers and to raise other staff salaries to the average in other relevant labor markets. For FY 2027 the projected unmet salary need for Arizona’s public universities is $248.2 million. Employees’ salaries are expected to remain lower than those at peer institutions and in other relevant markets through 2026. The cost of raising the average salaries of current faculty and staff to the targeted levels will further increase as the market continues to move. For 2026, employers are eyeing flat salary increases with projected increases to remain at 3.5 percent, matching 2025’s actual increases, which continues to affect Arizona’s university’s ability to catch-up and keep-up with salary needs.” (ABOR 2025 Personnel Report, page 14)

You’ll note that their reports lack any analysis of graduate student pay or any “solution” or explanation of where the funds will come from.

The Arizona Board of Regents in their own personnel reports year over year (all available publicly on their website) have identified an approximate 20% gap between what Arizona higher education workers are paid compared to their peers in other states. That gap doesn’t even address overdue cost of living or inflation adjustments, it merely captures our lack of competitive edge. 

The Arizona legislature has also been cutting funding to public higher education in the last few decades, making the funding gap that much greater. Chart S1 in this report from ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business captures that in Arizona alone, state funding for higher education has dropped from 80% of total university revenue to a little above 30%. 

Arizona’s right-to-work laws, university administrators, and the Arizona Board of Regents are all seemingly colluding to make working at a university in Arizona an unviable career option. When the Arizona Board of Regents submits state budget requests for each university that doesn’t include requests for or specific allocations to pay increases for the employees who make campus run, they are turning their backs on workers and ignoring the opportunity to make Arizona universities better places to work and learn. Simply put, campus works because we, the workers, do. 

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