Labor unions took a ‘no-confidence’ vote on Sept. 3, a symbolic gesture meant to tell UC President Mark Yudof that they are not pleased.
The UC Union Coalition representing seven unions and roughly 70,000 UC employees voted from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2. According to UCSD employee and union leader Carolan Buckmaster, 9,600 faculty and staff members, or about 96 percent of the 10,000 who participated in the vote, said they had ‘no confidence’ in Yudof.
‘[The vote] shows the university and President Yudof that [the voters] don’t approve of the direction that he’s taking the university,’ Buckmaster said. ‘We hope that he will think about his responsibility, and hopefully he will make some changes.’
The movement to take a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Yudof is partly in response to the UC Regents’ vote this July that instituted a mandatory furlough plan in an attempt deal with severe reductions in state funding.
The yearlong program, which began Sept. 1, requires over 100,000 UC employees to take mandatory unpaid days off. The furlough plan establishes seven different salary groups of employees ‘mdash; the employees who earn the least, $40,000 or less, will be subject to a 4-percent reduction, while those that earn over $240,000 could expect to see up to a 10-percent reduction in pay.
Yudof and the Chancellors announced that faculty members were not allowed to take their furlough days on teaching days, angering many of them.
‘Nobody has said anything about reducing committee and other service obligations,’ UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge wrote in his blog, www.ProfessorBainbridge.com. ‘Likewise, nobody has said anything about reduced research expectations. So where exactly is my furlough time off?’
Buckmaster listed pay cuts, executive pay raises and lack of union participation in the decision-making process as major sources of faculty discontentment.
University spokesman Peter King said that there is no way to tell if 10,000 people actually participated in the vote because he claims there is no documentation.
‘Even if it was 10,000, there are 70,000 union members, so that’s one in seven ‘mdash; and we have 180,000 employees,’ King said. ‘So you’re talking about a very small fraction of the people who participated, in essentially what is a public relations antic.’
King said that mediocrity must be avoided at all costs.
‘The state is obviously having a financial crisis and we’re willing to do our part, but it’s a painful thing,’ King said. ‘The first choice was a balanced budget, but Sacramento whacked it.’
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