UC Unions, Employees Protest Pension Plan Changes

BERKELEY, Calif.--The salaries of 125,000 Californians are about to be significantly reduced -- and, according to an actuary, unjustifiably so.

On the premise that the University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP) will soon be underfunded, the university's administration has announced that UC workers will contribute part of their payroll to the plan. Contributions are scheduled to start July 1, 2007.

A rate has not been fixed, although Lakesha Harrison, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), says the UC will eventually have workers contribute around 8 percent of their salaries to the UCRP.

But a report just released by the Venuti & Associates actuary firm, commissioned by a collation of UC employee unions, states that "UC has not justified the need to restart contributions at this time" and that such a plan will not be defensible "until a more comprehensive and real-world based analysis is considered."

In fact, according to union representative Michelle Squitieri, "the university's own actuary said that they should be doing much more complex research, but it wasn't authorized by the Regents."

A recent report by that actuary, the Segal Company, is what UC president Robert Dynes and the UC Board of Regents point at to demonstrate the urgency of employee contributions to the UCRP. The Segal report says that the UCRP will soon be incompletely funded "unless contributions are restarted or extraordinary market gains occur."

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