Today, we are engaged in a struggle with the UC administration over issues that affect us and our families deeply: retirement with dignity, wages and jobs that sustain us, and the ability to advocate for ourselves and the campus community that we serve.

At age 60, after 20-plus years of hard work, we will retire with permanent injuries, unaffordable healthcare and an average retirement income of $18,000 a year.  By contrast, UC President Mark Yudof can retire after just seven years of service to the UC system on more than $350,000 a year, with decreased health insurance costs.

We pay for our retirement benefits each month of our working lives so that we can afford to stop working when we are old, and we have foregone hefty raises for the promise of healthcare when our bodies are too broken to work. The UC Regents, however, have proposed changes to these benefits that will leave us impoverished: We would retire at age 65, well past the point of physical ability, and for some of us, the increased cost of our health insurance would exceed our monthly retirement income. Yet our risk of work-related injury is only increasing.

The UC system now hires fewer custodians, maintenance workers and gardeners to clean campus restrooms, fix the lights in classrooms, and make the campus clean and safe. The people who work for outside contractors, make poverty wages with no benefits and have no rights at work are increasingly doing these jobs. This creates unsafe working conditions for us and poor conditions for UC students’ education.

For this, students are paying higher fees, yet the training and research they do while at the UC system is the foundation for what is a highly profitable university system. We think that the UC system can and should do better.

 The UC system is the third-largest employer in the state, impacts one out of 46 jobs in the state, and reported an increase of $414 million in net assets last year. The University of California is an economic engine that can either help drive the state’s economy forward or help drag it down, but the administration is making further and deeper cuts to students’ education and our livelihoods. How will workers be able to retire if the UC system continues to cut our pensions? How will students be able to earn their degrees if the UC continues to raise fees and cut classes? How will California recover and grow if the UC system’s workers and graduates are living in debt?

We ask that the campus community understand, as they see us on the picket line this year, that we are putting our greatest effort into reaching a fair agreement with the UC administration — one that honors our dignity, safety and livelihoods, and that can help to restore the excellence that students deserve and should expect from the University of California.  

—Kathryn Lybarger
President, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Local 3299