“High Ideals, Low Pay”—how the University of California exploits its employees

At an Oakland press conference organized to present the findings to the public, senior program specialist at NDELC, Tim Lorentz, stated, “The University is so intent in seeing itself as a premier academic institution, it loses sight that it needs to be responsible for the community.” But is UC really “losing sight” of its social responsibility or consciously exploiting a disorganized and disoriented labor force?

The report evaluates the wages of 7,300 service workers employed at each of the nine UC campuses and five medical centers in California. The term “service worker” incorporates a wide range of job classifications, including custodian, food server, cook, bus driver and groundskeeper. Custodian and food server positions make up almost half of the service workers on UC campuses.

The report’s analysis is informed by the Self-Sufficiency Standard Index (SSSI). The SSSI is a more accurate measure of poverty than the federal poverty threshold in that it takes into account the daily costs that working families must incur on a county by county basis. Moreover, the SSSI calculates the cost of living for 70 different family compositions of either one or two adults and varying numbers of children at varying ages. There is no exact data on how many workers are in each family category. However, the three family combinations focused on in the study were based on UC health benefit data. Notably, 51 percent of service workers have benefit plans tailored to families with children.

Struggling to meet “bare bones” needs

The measures were adjusted to October 2004 dollars and the index was used to assess the degree to which the income of UC service workers is sufficient to meet their families’ “bare bones” needs. The results revealed that 46 percent of UC service employees earn wages that do not meet the cost of basic needs (rent, food, child care health care, transportation and local taxes) in their particular counties, for a dual-income family of four where both adults earn salaries equivalent to those paid by UC. Thirty-five percent earn wages insufficient to even support one single, childless employee.

This figure reaches a high of 58 percent at UC San Diego, most likely due to the accessibility of a super-exploitable immigrant labor force. Ninety-three percent earn wages that would not meet the basic needs for a single adult raising one child, and that figure jumps to nearly 100 percent if the UC worker is the sole bread winner of a two adult family.

Average annual pay for senior custodians and food service workers—almost 50 percent of the sample—doesn’t meet the self-sufficiency standard at any of the nine campuses. When compared to similar occupational wages in the California State University system, various California community colleges and Kaiser medical centers, it was found that UC wages were lagging behind the labor market average by up to 26 percent. For all UC food service workers with one child, wages were low enough to meet income eligibility requirements for up to nine publicly funded welfare programs, such as the Women Infants and Children’s food voucher program (WIC), housing assistance, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, various child care subsidies and the MediCal/Healthy Families program.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/ucal-f26.shtml