A single parent living in Riverside County or Orange County needs to earn $24.74 an hour to make ends meet, according to a report released last October by the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan think tank. In a two-parent household, each parent needs to earn at least $17.48 an hour to break even.
But after 10 months of negotiation, $11.50 an hour is the last, best offer the 10-campus University of California has made to 8,500 gardeners, janitors, kitchen workers, parking attendants and the like. In response, their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, called a five-day strike, which began Monday.
UC hospital workers, represented by the same union and also in stalled negotiations over wages, have been offered a somewhat better deal: $13.50 an hour. They aren't technically on strike but, with the union's blessing, those who feel they could walk out without harming patient safety have joined the picket lines.
Will the world notice? Will Californians? So far, the main blip of attention came in June when 20 UC commencement speakers, including former President Clinton, canceled their speeches because a fair contract had not yet been offered to the university's service workers.
Labor negotiations for the UC administration are handled by its executive director of labor relations, the tough-talking Howard Pripas. One rationale for the university's intransigence? It's facing a budget shortfall. Union leaders are quick to point out that only 8% of the UC hospitals' budgets come from the state, and the campuses, too, are not entirely funded by state money.
The high-profile administrators of the university, who cultivate donors and maintain UC's reputation with the Legislature and the public, keep themselves studiously in the background during labor negotiations. UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake, for example, told me the negotiations are entirely out of his hands. (Union sources characterize him as more sympathetic to the workers than some of his UC counterparts.)
And yet the pittance paid to the campus service workers (and hospital workers) has the potential to call into question the compensation paid to just such administrators, beginning with the $828,084 a year promised to the university's incoming president, Mark G. Yudof -- a compensation package nearly twice what his predecessor was paid.
