The Coalition of University Employees — representing 14,000 UC-wide clerical employees — filed an unfair labor practice claim to the Public Employment Relations Board last September, after the UC Office of the President announced it would be implementing temporary layoffs.

While waiting for a ruling, CUE and UCOP temporarily agreed on the terms of the layoffs last month. Under the plan, CUE employees who otherwise would have been laid off this year will instead receive a 4-to-6 percent pay cut. These pay cuts will be expressed in the form of temporary layoffs, or mandated off-work without pay.

CUE chose to exclude its approximate 14,000 employees from the faculty furlough plan, approved by the UC Board of Regents last July. Effective Aug. 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010, the furlough plan requires 18 days off-days per academic year and is projected to save $184 million.

Although the faculty furlough plan was meant to represent all employees, unionized employees could negotiate implementation through collective bargaining.

The main perk of the CUE-UCOP agreement, effective Feb. 2, is paycheck consistency. Instead of a direct pay cut being employed at once or during the period of off-days, the plan allows employees to disperse this cut throughout the year by receiving consistent monthly salary reductions despite the reduced work schedule.

The university is projected to save $13 million over a 12-month period.

Although CUE’s bargaining team is attempting to fight the temporary layoffs as a whole, they still negotiated the terms of a temporary layoff program to help benefit their members as much as possible.

Temporary layoffs have been a topic of discussion since all faculty furlough negotiations began last July. UCOP Associate Director of Labor Relations Peter Chester worked with CUE’s bargaining team to negotiate the agreement.

“In some form or another, this has been going on since July,” Chester said. “We started out by negotiating over the furloughs, and those negotiations went on for months. But when it became clear we weren’t going to find an agreement on that, we began bargaining over the impact of the temporary layoffs. And those negotiations were completed within a matter of weeks.”

The plan also encourages scheduling of off-days  on the same dates as regular university closure days, in order to minimize disturbance of university operations.

“In the absence of having them coincide, the employees would have to use vacation days [or] compensatory time off, if they want to be paid for the time, or use leave without pay,” Chester said.

The Dec. 10 agreement marked the immediate implementation of the plan for Cue employees; accordingly, the majority of these layoff dates occurred during the winter holiday closure. The rest of the days off will fall on other closure dates scattered throughout the remainder of the year, and ordinary working days where necessary.

“If an employee who is taking a 4-percent cut — which corresponds to 11 days off —uses up all the closure days at the holiday time and adds to that the days in March and perhaps June, there will be relatively few additional days that would have to be taken off,” Chester said.

Despite these terms, CUE representatives said members are still unhappy about the pay decrease. Further negotiations will continue later this month, with a mediator between the two groups.

“UC brought to us that salary reduction and furlough plan, and we did not agree to that,” CUE bargaining team member Dianna Sahhar said. “They said if we don’t agree to this, we are going to lay you off temporarily instead. And we said, well, that’s illegal — that’s not bargaining, that’s the same choice. So we filed for unfair labor practice, which we have not heard the results of yet. In the meantime, what we did was we bargained the effects of the layoff.”

Certain campuses — including UCSD, UCSF and UC Davis — have rejected the CUE-UCOP plan, choosing not to implement the temporary layoffs.

“At UCSD, Chancellor Marye Anne Fox is the one who said it’s unfair,” Sahhar said. “ After break, they might be sending out temporary layoff notices, but they haven’t yet. We’ll see what happens.”

While much negotiation still lies ahead, Sahhar said that members of CUE are content that, at minimum, some effects of the layoffs have been mitigated.

“We’re all unhappy with the pay cuts, but our members are really happy with what we negotiated for them,” Sahhar said. “It’s less cuts than what it would have been otherwise, and at least now they get their vacation, and at least we tried for them. Also, we put in that UCOP, and we’ll see how that goes. But if we win, our members will get their money back.”

Readers can contact Ayelet Bitton at [email protected].