Illustration by Amanda Alten

As students and their families struggle to pay ever-increasing tuition costs, UC executives watch their wallets bloat. While university executives are granting themselves and their peers larger paychecks, students are pouring money into a system that cannot even guarantee them access to classes, professors and teaching assistants.

But a new piece of legislation, authored by California State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), aims to address such financial irresponsibility by restricting UC and CSU executives from receiving pay increases in years of tuition hikes or state budget cuts.

Such legislation could not have come at a more appropriate time — 12 UC administrators and attorneys received salary increases in December, ranging from 6.4 percent to 23 percent — but it is only a glimmer of hope.

While CSU executives would legally be bound by the bill if it passed, the UC would not be forced to comply, according to reports from The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student-run paper. The UC is outside the control of the state legislator, so the bill serves as more of a suggestion than a rule.

Respecting the UC’s autonomy — because this isn’t a question of whether or not the UC should be autonomous, though Yee has previously attempted to bring the system under the state legislature — it is nonetheless important that the UC follow the guidelines laid out by the bill if it is passed into law.

This is a question of fairness: Is it fair that students watch the accessibility and diversity of their education dwindle while executives grant themselves unnecessary (and arguably undeserved) compensation?

December’s salary increases have been justified by the regents.

“UC President Mark G. Yudof and other UC leaders defended the raises, saying even during an economic crisis the 10-campus university system with 180,000 employees needs to retain and recruit top staff and faculty,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

But such an argument seems arbitrary when students do not even have access to such “top staff and faculty” because they cannot enroll in their already overcrowded classes. Furthermore, when UC representatives necessitate pay increases to continue recruiting such grade-A faculty and staff, they indirectly spin such decisions as ones made for the good of the student body.

It is hard to understand how executives’ already engorged pay will benefit the students, many of whom work multiple jobs just to scrape by while attending university.

If Leland’s bill passes, executives at the UC should adhere to its guidelines and prioritize students — and prioritize them in a way that doesn’t manifest itself in growing six-figure salaries.

Illustration by Matt Boblet.

If there were no workers on campus, the East Field would be dry, dining halls would serve fewer customers and bathrooms would never be cleaned. If there were no workers on campus at UC Santa Cruz, the nine other UCs, the five medical centers and other UC facilities, these facilities would not function at their current standards — in fact, they wouldn’t function at all.

To say our UC workers go unappreciated is an understatement.

The University of California workers’ union, the American Federation of County, State, and Municipal Utilities Local 3299 (AFSCME), more than deserve the recently ratified contract with the UC, which includes increases in salary and retirement benefits.

The union workers have been fighting for this for over a year, and students and others affiliated with the UC should support them. In an institution where the UC regents can raise administrative salaries by 10 percent with a simple meeting vote, it’s a shame that UC laborers had to fight for a year for a 3 percent raise. It’s clear where the power lies in the UC system, and students and workers should form a united front in working for what they need.

Beneath the glamorous, endowment-winning research and academia lie employees who cannot provide for their families with their UC salary.

The documentary “Hanging by a Thread” features a UCSC food service worker who earns $20,000 less than needed as a single mother of three in Santa Cruz. She works at the Boardwalk to make up for this deficit.

Workers do not tend to students just through their jobs. In past protests, workers have stood beside us, backing us. It’s crucial we, as students, don’t let gaps in age and lifestyle separate us from the UC workforce.

The university should not pride itself on its prestigious endeavors if it does not even show concern or care for all its employees. As students, we cannot forget we are not the only afflicted amid budget cuts and rising fees. People are not dispensable.

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

Though the UC system may be in dire straits financially, some of its most vulnerable workers have achieved a small victory. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union ratified a wage increase for librarians in the UC system late last month.

“We believe this is a fair proposal that rewards librarians for their dedication and their hard work, while being mindful of the tough economic climate the university is facing,” said labor relations contract negotiator Peter Chester in an official statement released Oct. 10.

Aspects of the agreement include merit-based wage increases.

“An employee [would] meet with his or her supervisor and be evaluated on an objective set of criteria pertaining to the job. Based on this, the supervisor determines the merit increase,” said Dianne Klein, a media specialist from the UC Office of the President.

This increase was prompted in part by a similar increase being given to other nonrepresented academic faculty.

“The librarians, who are considered academic employees, were in effect put on the same wage schedule as nonrepresented academic employees,” Klein said. “The university’s financial crisis informs everything we do.”

UC librarians are not alone in their negotiations with the UC system. Their increase negotiations were among several union contract negotiations recently settled.

“With 12 systemwide unions and 14 local bargaining units, the university is almost constantly in labor negotiations,” Klein said.

Despite this gain, the UC library system remains on difficult terrain.

“The UC library unit is pretty small — we had about 420 [employees] last time we negotiated in 2008, and we’re down to 350 now. This is through attrition,” said UC-AFT representative Kenneth Lyons, a UCSC reference librarian who has been at the university for 10 years. “With fewer and fewer librarians, the workload has increased.”

In addition, UC librarian wages don’t measure up to other systems’ standards.

“We’re behind CSU librarians by about 20 percent, and we’re behind community colleges as well,” Lyons said.

Though the McHenry Library’s recent facelift may project a hopeful air, Lyons is less optimistic.

“There’s not as much money for materials anymore,” he said. “We were lucky enough to be able to refurbish McHenry, but they started that project 15 years ago.”

The negotiations themselves went about as well as could have been expected, Lyons said.

“I feel like both sides came to some understandings this time,” Lyons said. “They agreed there were some recruitment and retention problems in the UC library system, and that something needs to be done about that disparity. If it hadn’t been for rank and file actions to inform and get support, I think nothing would have happened.”

The negotiations were representative of a give-and-take between the UC system and the unions it deals with.

“The university appreciates deeply the AFT’s willingness to craft an agreement that recognizes the current fiscal crisis we’re facing,” said UC vice president for systemwide human relations Dwaine Duckett in a February UCOP press release.

Though aspects of the UC librarians’ contract have been hammered out, the entirety of the contract will be subject to renegotiation next September.

“We’ll be back at the bargaining table next year,” Lyons said. “The library workforce is shrinking, so it costs [the UC] less to bring us up to parity with other universities in the system.”

Watsonville mayor Daniel Dodge (left), speaks out for his residents at a discussion panel after the screening of the documentary “Hanging by a Thread.” The film showed the struggles of UC employees many of whom are Watsonville residents. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Maria Romero can’t support three kids on her annual salary of $30,000. The University of California pays the single mother less than living wages to feed students at a UC Santa Cruz café by day. She cleans boardwalk bathrooms at night. Romero is a central figure in Rico Chavez’s documentary “Hanging by a Thread,” which illustrates the treatment received by the UC workers and staff as opposed to the regents, and their differing lifestyles.

The Student Union Assembly, community studies department and the California Federation of Labor co-hosted a screening and follow-up discussion of the film at Merrill on Jan. 27. The discussion was led by a panel comprising Watsonville mayor Daniel Dodge, associate professor of psychology Regina Langhout, fifth-year student Moses Massenburg, Romero and her translator. They explained the pressures workers face under the UC system for an audience of around 30.

About 40 percent of UCSC workers reside in the Pajaro Valley, which includes Watsonville. This is because living in Santa Cruz is expensive, said Dodge, a self-described “activist who just happens to be the mayor of Watsonville.”

“When we talk about high rents, in Santa Cruz County the cost of living is comparable to Manhattan,” Dodge said.

Romero struggles to make rent in Santa Cruz, and she doesn’t know how she will send her children to college.

“[I] can’t say [I’m] going to pay for it,” she said with the help of a translator. “All I can do is hope for the best and hope my kids are doing well enough in school now to receive grants or scholarships that are going to help them and push them to where they want to, because that’s pretty much practically the only way.”

While the UC provides scholarships for the children of university faculty, many service workers do not know about them, Langhout said. And their family situations make it more difficult to get into a UC. The children still have to get the grades, apply and be accepted before applying for scholarships.

Another financial dilemma is found in the UC’s health insurance plan, the recent changes of which affect faculty, staff and workers.

“The price doubled to stay on Health Net,” Langhout said. “They offered instead this thing called the ‘Blue and Gold [HMO]plan,’ which I’m calling the ‘Blue and Black plan’ because I think it’s more appropriate.”

Not all employees’ doctors are included in the new budget-friendly plan, according to the “Frequently Asked Questions” page of the Health Net Blue & Gold HMO website.

“Health Net Blue & Gold HMO features a select network of participating providers,” according to the website. “Due to its narrower size, it costs less for both the university and the employees who choose it … If your medical group isn’t in the network, it means they did not meet the participation criteria for cost-efficiency and access.”

Langhout said she is upset with the new plan because it costs about the same as the previous plan but has limited services.

“Everybody would have to change their doctors,” she said. “UCSC is a big employer in Santa Cruz County and if something like that happened, it could potentially destabilize health care for a lot of people in Santa Cruz County … There’s also the issues of what we’re paying now and people not really having a choice.”

On top of the financial obstacles the UCs put before their employees, faculty and workers are not acknowledged for their work, fourth-year Massenburg said.

“There are some workers who are over-qualified and clean when they understand the appropriate measures for chemicals,” he said. “And some of their supervisors’ supervisors just sit behind desks and push papers, and have no idea what [the workers] are doing. A lot of times the [workers] are put in danger.”

Romero said labor strikes can increase the difficulty of the job, but most workers cooperate through a union.

“Are you going to miss a day of work and fight for what you want,” Romero said, “or are you going to risk losing your job that’s paying for rent and whatever your responsibilities are?”

Dodge said while being on strike can be a “romantic notion,” it’s not a good sign when these employees say things are so bad at this institution that they have to stand up to it.

He credits the UC workers’ oppression to a cycle of near-poverty.

“A single mother, for example, can’t afford to send her children to this academic institution,” Dodge said. “So by the wages that are paid, you’re not allowing for the people who work here, who provide the service to the community here, are not allowed or able to send their children here. What you’re seeing here is keeping working people in the sense of poverty … Everybody is two to three paychecks from being in poverty.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865 ratified a new contract with the University of California ending a four-day voting period Dec. 2 of last year. The proposed contract was approved with a final 62.4 percent vote in a statewide tally.

The union represents more than 12,000 academic student employees, whose members were divided on the terms of the new contract. While the University of California and the UAW were able to reach an agreement after six months of negotiation, some members are unhappy with the contract’s terms.

“The contract’s a joke,” said Brian Malone, literature graduate student and campus unit chair in UCSC for the UAW Local 2865. “I think we’re only seeing that more clearly now. By UC’s own admission, our stipends are wildly below what they should be.”

The UC Office of the President’s recent graduate student survey report found that UC’s average net stipend offer was lower than its competitors’ by $2,697. Adding in the average cost of living at UC locations over non-UC locations, the UCOP report found academic student employees had an overall shortcoming of $4,978.

“I really think this drives home the point that UC is making itself noncompetitive with similar institutions,” Jessica Lancaster, UCSC academic student employee representative, said in an e-mail.

In an open letter, Malone and Lancaster of UCSC, Nick Kardahji and Jessica Taal of UC Berkeley, and Bron Tamulis of UC Irvine, all dissenting academic student employee representatives, said they felt disappointed by the annual 2 percent wage increase, which falls short of the 3 percent annual inflation rate reported in 2009.

“It’s so expensive to live here in California, already [without the 2 percent increase],” Lancaster said.

The dissenters are in the process of forming an additional organization within the UAW called Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU), which stemmed from the “no” vote campaign on the contract. Those who disagreed with the tentative agreement, which was settled Nov. 16 of last year, raised a campaign within the two weeks before the voting period.

“It was really exciting to see people coming together so fast at so many campuses,” Lancaster said. “There was this large coordinated effort to blow down the contract, so we could go back to negotiations and get something better for our members.”

AWDU members are now creating official chapters on UC campuses, with headquarters in Berkeley. The UCSC chapter is expected to officiate by the end of this month. Because the current contract is legally binding, Malone said the group cannot change the terms of the current contract, but instead hopes to change the structure of the UAW.

“We’re organizing these caucuses as offering a different vision than how the UAW executive board has been running the union,” Malone said. “I got the feeling that a lot of [representatives in the UAW bargaining team] were tired and scared of the UC, and felt like, ‘If we can get anything, we can then go back to our members and say that we squeezed something out of the UC.’”

Michael Strack, an academic student employee for UC Santa Barbara, had a different take on the results of the contract.

“[The contract] is a really good deal for me, being a TA,” Strack said. “I’m very satisfied. The major win was obviously that, as things are getting worse, and programs and everything are getting cut, being a TA is still an appealing job.”

Santa Barbara, which received one of the highest number of “yes” votes, holds the majority of UAW leadership.

“I haven’t met anybody who’s complaining about the contract,” Strack said. “This is my specific department [in electrical engineering], so I can’t speak for everybody else, but I know that we’re very happy. It seems to be all positive feedback from the community.”

UC Irvine and UC Davis were the only campuses where voting results were close in number, reflecting division with the campuses.

“Irvine is a really interesting case,” Malone said. “A group of activists has sprung up [in UC Irvine], very independent of the UAW… and sort of said, ‘We’re willing to fight, and we’re not willing to take whatever the UC and the UAW leadership tell us.’”

Illustration by Patrick Yeung.

Full-ride scholarships to a UC for 196 students. Fifty-five thousand textbooks. Health insurance for 454 families (maybe the ones who make less than living wages cleaning the bathrooms in your dormitory). The salaries of 40 well-paid professors (maybe the ones who lost their jobs in the languages, community studies or American studies programs). For $5.5 million, the UC could have any one of these things — not to mention beginning to pay off its $22 billion deficit.

But for 36 UC executives, that money would be better spent on retirement benefits. Their annual salaries — which exceed a quarter of a million dollars — just aren’t enough. The group demands full-salary retirement benefits instead of pensions based on a $245,000 federal cap. These proposed benefits would cost the UC $5.5 million annually.

Those leading the charge say the UC broke a promise. Politicians, unions and the University of California Office of the President, however, say the UC just can’t afford to pay the extravagant pensions these executives demand.

The Master Plan was developed to provide a public research university system that any qualifying student could attend regardless of income or socioeconomic background, free from tuition. That is not our reality.

It is the responsibility of UC employees to advocate for and protect students and educators’ best interests.

While the 36 UC executives threatening to sue may have legal grounds, they are morally corrupt.

You can’t put a price tag on accessibility or progress, but an annual $5.5 million toward the university could help put the UC back on track to being one of the leading public universities in the world and improving the lives of tens of thousands of students.

Christopher Edley, Marie Berggren and J. Thomas Rosenthal are just three of the 36 petitioning for full-salary retirement benefits. In 2009, Edley, Berggren and Rosenthal earned $336,511, $637,824 and $729,186, respectively. Edley is dean of UC Berkeley Law School, Berggren is chief investment officer, vice president of investments and of Office of the President and acting treasurer of the regents, and Rosenthal is chief medical officer at the UCLA Medical Center.

The letter-writers claimed it would be “unprecedented” for the university to not provide the benefits discussed in the past.

But the reality is that the UC has broken many promises in the last decade. In November, the UC Board of Regents voted to increase out-of-state student enrollment. Programs are being cut and class sizes are growing. Union employees work for less than living wages. Professors and teaching assistants are out of work. And students are running out of patience.

But not once during rallies have students or workers called for increased spending for executives. And we’re the ones paying administrators’ salaries.

This time at least, the UC is protecting the integrity of the university. Promise or no promise, the priority of the UC is to provide high-quality, accessible higher education to California’s students, not to pay for tropical vacations and extravagant retirements.

~~~~~~

Salary information provided by sacbee.com and a UC salary database compiled by Bay Area News Group.

A protester outside the meeting speaks to the media about impending furloughs and pay cuts. Photo by Jenny Cain.

As hundreds of people rallied outside a meeting of the Board of Regents of the University of California, held July 14-16 at the UCSF Mission Bay Community Center, a university worker inside, opposing the pay-cuts proposed at the meeting, publicly condemned the salary of UC President Mark Yudof.

“You’re making twice as much as the President of the United States,” the man said as he raised his voice and eyed Yudof, who simply shook his head from left to right. “Show me the books,” he began to chant in reference to the regents’ transparency in accounting.

Despite opposition from various groups and individuals, including regent and Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, the board approved a plan that will require each member of the 180,000 UC workforce to take between 11-24 unpaid days, off depending on salary level.

If the plan is also approved by labor unions in contract with the university, top earners making over $240,000 could expect to see the largest salary reduction, while those making under $40,000 could expect to see the smallest. Overall, employees could see a 4-10 percent pay reduction for twelve months, starting Sept. 1 2009.

Senior management-level employees, however, would be limited to ten furlough days regardless of salary. And all positions funded by research grants would be excluded from furloughs.

“I disagree with the ‘open the books’ statement. You have our audited statements online,” Yudof replied to those hinting at a lack of precision and openness in the budget process.

The furlough plan came as Gov. Schwarzenegger attempts to close the $24 billion dollar deficit by reducing future expenses, including the expense of higher education. The University of California budget currently faces $813 million in cuts for the upcoming fiscal year. One quarter of that is meant to be absorbed by increased student fees. The furlough plan is supposed to offset another quarter of the $813 million. Administrative cost controls and cuts spread across all 10 UC campuses is supposed to offset the rest.

Yudof said that “the plan is fair,” but many opposed to the resulting pay-cuts induced by the impending furlough plan say that senior administration wages are too high and disproportional to other salaries.

But in a separate press conference, Yudof defended UC administrators’ salaries, saying that some senior executives are underpaid.

“The truth is, our faculty’s underpaid by 15 to 20 percent,” Yudof said. “Many of our staff are at market; some are as much as 10 percent below market. But the chancellors are 33 percent below market.”

At the meeting several chancellors, including UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal, expressed concern that the cuts might affect their ability to retain and recruit high-end professors.

“While I reluctantly support the need for pay reductions, these actions make our campus, our university and our state vulnerable to a rapid brain drain,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also spoke about UCSC’s elimination of 55 faculty positions and 160 administrative positions. He explained that fewer teachers mean fewer courses available.

“For some students this means a longer time till graduation,” Blumenthal explained. “We understand at Santa Cruz that everyone must share in the pain and contribute to the solution but we will not compromise on UCSC’s mission to be a leading public research university.”

When Yudof introduced the furlough plan he dubbed it “flexible” as university employees will get to choose what days they take off. He also said that furloughs will have less impact than lay-offs.

Lt. Gov. Garamendi, the only regent who voted against implementing the plan, encouraged fellow regents and chancellors to look for new ways to generate revenue. He specifically pressed them to support AB 656, a proposed bill that would tax oil companies and generate an estimated $1 billion, all of which would be directed toward universities and colleges in California.

Regent Bonnie Reiss agreed with Garamendi that a tax on oil or gas was a possible solution.

“This is a revenue problem,” Reiss said. “We need to keep reminding elected leaders to support the public.”

Governor Cuts Funding to Domestic Violence Centers

As a means to balance the state’s budget, all funding to domestic violence programs was eliminated, leaving Santa Cruz’s two shelters, the Women’s Crisis Center and the Walnut Ave. Women’s Center, without $750,000 and $414,000, respectively. Both of these figures represent more than half of each programs’ funding.

Kristie Clemens, director of domestic violence services at the Walnut Ave. center, said she’s seen an increase in the severity of domestic abuse in the last six months, due in part to financial pressures facing families in the recessive economy. She and her counterpart at the Women’s Crisis Center, Laura Segura, deplored the cuts. Both said it is heartbreaking to lay off dedicated staff members and close their doors once a week as a cost saving measure when both places have seen a need for services increase.

Pay Raises for Some, $813 million Cut from the Rest

In a round of closed-to-the-public sessions during their three-day July meeting, the governing body of the University of California, the regents, approved stipends- periodic payments above a salary designed to compensate for additional duties- for more than two dozen senior leadership positions.

These votes fell on the same day the regents implemented layoffs, pay cuts and mandatory furloughs for all UC employees to tackle a state funding shortfall of $813 million.

The regents justified the stipends and pay increases as necessary to attract the best and brightest minds to the University of California’s top-tier positions.

Positions that will see an increase in their salaries and/or a stipend are the Associate Vice President-Federal Government Relations in the UC Office of the President, who will see a 10.4 percent increase in base salary, and UCSF’s interim chief operating officer, who will receive a 6.5 percent stipend, boosting his salary this year to $500,763.

For a complete list of individual’s stipend and pay increases, check out cityonahillpress.com.

Competency of UC President Questioned with a Vote

The University of California Union Coalition, comprised of unions whose members work in various sectors of the UC, called for a vote of no confidence in Mark Yudof, the president of the university.

Phil Johnston, president of the local chapter of the Union of Professional and Technical Employees, said the unions are fed up with the draconian actions taken by the university’s administrators to deal with a perceived budget crisis. Among them are pay cuts and mandatory furlough days for all state-paid UC employees.

Johnston said that as only $3 billion of the UC’s $19 billion budget comes from the state, the measures undertaken by the regents are based on false premises. Furthermore, there are other options, he said, the regents could take to offset the cuts, such as tapping into the university’s rainy day fund, which has not yet been done.

“[The regents] are downsizing and destroying the university,” he said. “When I see the effect [regents’ measures] have on the quality of education, I feel bad for the students and their families,” Johnston said. “As an alum, I hate seeing what it’s doing to the quality of the experience of being here.”