A lawsuit filed in the Michigan Court of Claims Tuesday claims the University of Michigan owes back pay to about 3,600 U-M professors after systematically underpaying them by delaying pay raises.
Sociology professor Fatima Müge Göçek filed the lawsuit. Sommers Schwartz, P.C, the law firm representing Göçek, is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, which would represent U-M faculty hired under similar contracts from 2018 to the present. Göçek’s lawyer, Matthew Turner, told The Michigan Daily the lawsuit is important because faculty deserve to be paid what they were promised.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a professor, a lawyer, a journalist, a police officer, or somebody who works at McDonald’s — you’re entitled to get paid what you were promised to be paid,” Turner said.
U-M faculty members are employed under a “University Year” system in which they teach for two academic semesters at a time. They are paid in 12 equal installments from July 1 to June 30. However, when faculty receive a raise, they do not see an increase in pay until September, according to the class-action complaint filed Tuesday, meaning faculty do not receive the promised increase in pay during those two months.
“The bottom line: Faculty appointed on a University Year basis have been systematically underpaid each year they received a salary increase by the amount equal to the raise of their base pay multiplied by two twelfths,” the complaint states.
The U-M Faculty Senate Assembly passed a resolution in April asking the University to provide back pay for affected employees.
The University agreed to change the payment schedule for affected faculty members beginning July 1, 2025. However, the complaint states that this change did not provide back pay for the current year or previous years.
“Despite acknowledging that it has improperly paid faculty raises for years, Defendant has refused to provide any compensation for underpayment in the current year, or for any years prior,” the complaint reads.
For Göçek, this back pay amount totals $3,643.67 from July 2018 to present. According to Turner, this amount is roughly estimated to be about $2.5 million per year across the whole university. The lawsuit seeks back pay for the previous three years — the maximum allowed under Michigan law — but Turner said the underpayment has been occurring for much longer.
“My insight, really, is that the University just stuck their head in the sand and refused to acknowledge that they had a problem, and nobody was forcing them to come to grips with it until now,” Turner said.
University spokesperson Kay Jarvis told The Daily in an email Wednesday that the University has not yet been served with the lawsuit, and declined to comment on the case.
Daily News Editor Abigail VanderMolen can be reached at vabigail@umich.edu.
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