One year after the media and the public called the University of California’s compensation disclosure into question, UC officials have released a preliminary report on last year’s payroll data showing increases in both employee base pay and bonuses.
The individual employee information contained in the preliminary report is considered under California state law to be public material because, as employees of a public university, data such as compensation is defined as open record.
“We remain committed to openness and transparency, and for that reason have decided to take two additional steps,”” UC Board of Regents Chair Gerald L. Parsky stated in a press release. “We will be making public, effective-immediately, total compensation for all university employees … [and] as part of our ongoing commitment to understand and address compensation issues, we have undertaken an analysis of this past fiscal year’s payroll data.””
The data released in the preliminary report reveals that employee compensation “above base pay”” — a category of pay referring to anything other than overtime and salary — has increased from $843 million to $916 million over the past year.
UC President Robert C. Dynes defended the university’s right to spend the additional money on its employees.
“Today’s competition for the most talented faculty and staff means that preserving the quality of the institution costs money,”” Dynes stated in a press release.
According to the report, the reason for increase in above base pay compensation can be attributed to several factors. The workforce has grown as a result of an increase in services provided by the university. As a result, employee salaries, or “base pay,”” has increased for UC employees, forcing the university to increase employee spending in order to be competitive in the job market for educational facilities.
However, audits of the university’s compensation practices that discovered inappropriate practices have prompted reforms.
The university has implemented approval requirements for exceptions to policy, introduced open-session regents’ committee votes for compensation matters, created new oversight positions and policy compliance mechanisms at the UC Office of the President and formed new policies for employee hiring negotiations.
Although the regents have created new methods of publicly revealing compensation information, concerns still remain about the university’s distribution of payment.
According to the report, compensation for the university’s 185 senior managers — a category of employees including chancellors and vice chancellors — increased from $7 million to $7.17 million during the past year.
“We support workers being fairly compensated for their work,”” American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union local representative Celene Perez said. “That being said, executives of a public institution are getting obscenely high pay and perks while some workers collect cans and work several jobs to make ends meet. UC executives will not go hungry if they don’t get more money. The same cannot be said for some workers’ families.””
