They Lift Their Lamps Beside the Golden Bear, but do They Find a Living Wage There?

Reported October-November 2008, Written December 2008.

The 1 p.m. sun hits the statue. Its rays weave themselves into the sculpted hairs of the Bruin’s coat so as to turn the brown bear gold. Positioned on all-fours, perpetually on the verge of stepping off his dais, he is the embodied mascot of UCLA.

The bruin, or baby bear, is the younger version of an animal meant to represent a university, the University of California. The school’s oldest emblem is the “golden bear” after the state grizzly bear that also graces California’s flag.

Toddlers scurry to the Bruin, hoping to ride its back as anxious mothers hover nearby. A group of girls in their late teens sit by one of the bear’s back paws, munching on sandwiches they pull out of saran wrap and brown paper bags. Nearby, young men in wife beaters and women in sport bras emerge from the UCLA gym with sweat still on their faces.

Up the slope, a cluster of dancers moves to the strains of samba and tango. Behind them, a stone path reveals hand-painted wooden signs promoting “Model U.N.” or “Lao” or the values of “Coexistence” between religions.

The four corners of the UCLA quad hum with gossip while students elbow past one another and their Jansport backpacks to get to the cafeteria, to classrooms or to the bazaar-like tents selling knick knacks before them.

At four the next morning, Mirna Martinez gingerly steps through that quad, her footsteps echoing in the pre-dawn blackness. She quietly moves past the tents’ where the scarf vendors will set up in another few hours. A solitary figure in white shirt, pants and shoes climbs the stairs into the Ackerman Union, walks down a hall, and at the end of it finds the day’s posted menu: Caesar salad, Cobb salad and Chef salad. She steps inside the kitchen, reaches for a tomato and begins to cut what will be the first of hundreds today.

Mirna has been with the University of California for 10 years and makes $10 per hour. “We’re seeing this economy, and our salaries just don’t stretch,” she says, wringing her dimpled hands, her voice catching on the word “stretch.” It’s a living, Mirna says, but it’s not a living wage.  “These $10 are not enough. With that we have to pay rent, food or the $68 per month parking fees the university requires every time we drive to work? Impossible.”

She is one of 8,500 University of California service workers to walk out of the job to picket outside the gates of the 10 UC campuses—from Davis to Berkeley to LA to San Diego—for a five day strike in July. For one year before that, a total of 20,000 service workers—custodians, gardeners, those involved in food preparation and patient care—had been at loggerheads with the university regarding their contract and the things it would, or would not, promise them.

Though the university provides benefits and minimum wage, workers would like to see an “across the board” increase of $2 to $5 per hour. Indignant that pay raises had been denied to even long time employees, picketers rallied for “steps,” or wage increases corresponding to amount of time spent at a post. They pointed to the wages workers in similar positions at other institutions in the same market, such as community colleges, were earning. In many cases, those salaries were 25 percent more than the ones UC workers were making. Lastly, they objected to the university holding back 2 percent of their monthly salaries to add to their pension plans, a move they resented as they could barely live on their paychecks before that withdrawal.

The walk-out was a warning. Draw us a new contract, they said, or we’ll go on another strike.

Several months have passed, and service workers still do not have a contract. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 (AFSCME), the union to which the workers belong, helped organize the strike, and its leaders have set up a bargaining team system in which worker and union representatives can meet with university representatives to negotiate that contract.

The school explains that what with state coffers running very low, it can only afford to raise the workers $1 per hour.

“I already pay for every meal I have at school,” Mirna says swiftly in Spanish, looking over her shoulder toward the concession stands lying on the other side of campus. “What kind of joke are they playing, maybe offering a $1 raise while taking more money out of our salary for pension and parking then they do already?”

“With that kind of agreement,” she adds, hazel eyes flashing, “we’d be back to where we started before the strike.”

At the heart of the issue is the question of what makes a ‘living wage.’ The university says it does its best to pay market wages, and even when it can’t keep up, it would like to give more. “We’re as disturbed by this as the employees [are] themselves. Everyone deserves to be comped fairly,” Paul Schwartz says. “But raising the salaries of 20,000 people would take massive resources that the university doesn’t have right now, and we’re trying to do what we can.”

The workers say that on these wages alone, they cannot survive.

“Since I went on strike in 2005 there’s been no raise, nothing,” Mirna says. “It’s frozen. Sure $10 is a salary, but in this economy, I’d need it to be at least $13, $14 or $15 per hour to get by, to pay rent, to eat.”

No longer on minimum wage, Mirna does not need food stamps to buy the beef and onions she uses in her own cooking. But it takes the five $10/hr salaries she, her husband, her two sons and daughter bring home to pay for the rent of their Sunset and Vine apartment, its electricity, a car and foods like fruit, vegetables, bread and meat.

The huge disparity between their salaries and the ones university executives receive grates on workers.

“I respect them, and I understand they’re capable,” says bargaining team member and patient care security guard Patrick Mitchell. “But they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars while I’m watching many I know struggling to get by.”

One man’s salary in particular has received the most scrutiny.

The university experienced an administrative changing of the guard in March when its president, Robert C. Dynes, stepped down with Mark G. Yudof taking his place. When workers caught wind of the fact that Yudof makes an annual $600,000, almost double what Dynes earned at the school, they could barely contain their outrage.

“This is shameful,” says Mitchell. “I have nothing against Yudof or his right to a good salary, but I cannot stand by and watch such a good institution treat so many of its own as if they didn’t matter.”

“Everyone has the right to respect and dignity,” he continues fervently, Jamaican accent thickening with emotion. “These workers are human beings. If the university can pay one man almost $1 million, why can’t it afford to feed the people who work as hard to keep the school running? The world needs doctors and nurses, but what are they without the nurse’s aids or the people who clean the hospital floors and beds?”

When Mitchell first began working as a guard, he maintained another job at a printing press. “I was so tired all the time I was a danger to myself and those around me, working that machinery,” he says.

To him, a living wage would mean workers wouldn’t have to take second jobs because “one salary would be enough to pay for rent and food and transportation.”

“UC executives have no trouble spending millions on sports and new buildings and paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,” writes UC Berkeley gardener Hank Chapot in an article for Indybay.org, a Web site for the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.

“But they can’t find the pittance to pay a custodian or food worker a living wage?” he says. “What’s up with that?”

“Who wants to have their blood drawn by a technician worried about paying the rent?” he asks, and “who wants to send their child to an ever more expensive university where the toilets are neglected and the trash sits and rots due to workforce shortages, workplace injuries and underpaid staff?

But Schwartz says that as much as he and the university wish they could pay more, worker wages are, for the most part, market competitive.

“From our point of view, we try to provide wages comparable to those similar employers [provide],” he says. “Salaries for many of our employees are behind the market, and in those cases we’re trying to do what we can. But in a community college, for example, there are hundreds of job titles, so depending on the position, we do pay comparable wages. We don’t control the market, but we do what we can to pay a fair rate.”

And, he adds, posts must be compared to the same positions at other companies rather than to different positions at the same company.

He must remind those appalled at Yudof’s salary that the amount UC pays its new president befits the leader of an institution carrying 220,000 students and 170,000 faculty and staff members in it. In addition to being a challenging job description that uproots Yudof from his current home, he says, the salary is actually behind the market when compared to the one other school presidents make each year.

“The university is like a small city,” Schwartz says. “It’s an academic enterprise with a health center, performing departments, a police department, a fire department, and the person running it has to be a proven manager, someone with outstanding academic credentials, who could handle managing the school and all the extra things that that entails.”

To Mirna, what matters is her reality. The Salvadorian woman who is a legal U.S. resident works at the university five days a week, some days arriving at 4, others at 6. Her shift lasts the usual eight hours, but when the university asks her to come in on the weekend to help cook for a large event, it pays normal, not over-time, wages. “After everything,” she says, “I get home at around 4 p.m.; it takes awhile.”

She, her husband, her 30-year-old son, her 28-year-old son and her 22-year-old daughter share that living space on Sunset.

“I get home to prepare food for everyone. We buy what we can at the market nearby, and I cook authentic Salvardorian dishes like pupusas,” she adds. “I can’t stay awake past 8,” she sighs. “I’m just so tired.”

Her two sons wake up at 3 in the morning to take the bus to Vernon, where they work at a vineyard. Her daughter is a baby-sitter, her husband a grocer. In 1998, she came to UCLA earning the $6 minimum wage. In 2005, she and her fellow workers went on strike, and the university raised her salary to $9. After bargaining, they agreed on a $10 per hour wage. That was three years ago.

In 2004, the National Economic Development and Law Center (NEDLC), an Oakland-based consulting firm that researches what its mission statement called the “economic health” of communities, released a report titled “High Ideals, Low Pay.” The eight-page study analyzed how the salaries UC system employees earned compared to the ones those working in similar positions at same-market- institutions.

The report’s writers also provided a “self-sufficiency standard,” or guide to what they considered a wage workers could live on without seeking government aid.

They detailed that “The California Self-Sufficiency Standard” tests whether or not UC service workers’ “income is sufficient” to meet family living costs of childcare, healthcare, transportation, taxes, rent and food on a “county-by-county basis.”

“We define a living wage as whatever it takes [for an individual or family] to live in economic security, in dignified housing, with food, transportation and childcare costs, not worried how they’re going to get by on a day-to-day basis,” economic researcher and one of the report’s writer, Tim Lohrentz, explains over the phone.

Lohrentz and his colleagues calculated where UC service workers from the school stood in the self-sufficiency scale based on the salaries NEDLC obtained through university records. They found that if workers were single adults aiming to support only themselves, 35 percent of them would not be able to meet the self-sufficiency or living wage standard.

The same set of results showed that if workers were members of a household that included two wage-earning adults with a “preschool- and school-age child,” 46 percent of them would fall below the standard.

Finally, if those same workers were “single adults with a preschooler,” 93 percent would be incapable of living self-sufficiently with the wages granted them by the university.

Neither Lohrentz nor the reports other writers could gain access to information that would outline “family compositions” among workers. So they could not, based on what they had, know for sure how much more common it would be to find workers who supported themselves versus those who supported themselves and a child, for example. They did, however, know some permutation of that family make-up had to exist, thus validating their statistical analyses.

The economy has since soured, but Lohrentz still works at NEDLC, and he has explained that the firm’s self-sufficiency standard and the results the company found with regard to UC service workers four years ago are still, for the most part, relevant.

This year, AFSCME’s economic researchers applied university workers’ current wages to the demands of the national economy and the respective markets the employees live in and found the number of people living below the “self-sufficiency” standard has risen.

“The categories are the same: single adult, single adult with preschooler, two wage earning adults with two children,” begins AFSCME research analyst Faith Rader. “But in this analysis, we see that 96 percent of workers seem to make a salary that’s not quite a living wage.”

She clarifies that most of the workers cannot maintain just that one position and have enough to pay for groceries, their rent, the electricity and a way to get to work. They are earning money, she says, but not enough to keep them from having to take another job or from needing to turn to such public assistance programs as Medi-Cal, food stamps, housing subsidies, low-income home energy assistance, child care subsidies, low-income telephone subsidy and free or reduced school lunch.

“We really do want to raise workers’ wages,” Schwartz says. “We’re doing what we can. I wish it could be more, but it’s very difficult given what we have.”

For five days in July, workers walked away from their mops, hoses, kitchen knives and dishes. They clamored for a new contract, but by the end of summer, they were still waiting.

On July 25th, Yudof issued a statement addressing the possibility the state would revert back to paying all service workers minimum wage.

“We will make every effort to ensure that employee salaries will continue to be paid at current levels and that all labor contracts will be honored until an agreement is reached on a State budget,” he wrote.

“At the same time,” he added, “we recognize the severity of the budget crisis confronting the State, and as in the past, UC will take appropriate measures to assist the Governor and the State in addressing its fiscal situation.

Despite conducting weekly meetings to negotiate that possible new contract for the service workers, the union bargaining team indicates that none of its members have met or communicated with the Mark G. Yudof, the university president, himself.

“We haven’t been able to speak to UCLA’s chancellor, let alone the university president,”  says Patient Care worker and AFSCME Bargaining Team Member Monica Martinez with a slight jeer.

Other than the words he wrote in the statement, workers have heard nothing from Yudof, considering him a silent cipher. Few have seen him but in photos.

But they have heard of his fondness for buttermilk pancakes.

“These are so good you want to put them in a syringe and mainline them,” he once told Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, describing a homemade batch he’d tasted at a local cook off.

So AFSCME members thought they’d try another tactic.

They would invite him to a pancake breakfast outside his home in order to discuss what his next approach to workers’ wages would be, in person.

Union leaders contacted the president’s office to give him advance notice that members would be making their ways to his house September 27th, so they could make sure he knew to be home.

As the fog burned away to reveal the mid-morning sky shaded a bright Bay Area blue—a  combination of cyan with forget-me-not—nearly 100 service workers trudged up into the Oakland hills bearing steaming trays of fresh pancakes to share with the president for breakfast, or brunch, rather.

When they rang the doorbell, there was no answer. No one seemed to be home.

“He [was] a no-show, the ingrate,” wrote Hank Chapot in his Indybay.org article.

“It was completely inappropriate for a group of dozens of union employees to just show up at his home,” UC Communications Director Paul Schwartz says.

“If they want a meeting, that’s what the collective bargaining process is for,” he adds. “That’s why it exists. Just showing up is a violation of the process.”

“The president is sensitive to all employees,” he says.  “He wants to give them all fair benefits, have a discourse with them. But why ASFCME thinks it has more of a right to just visit someone at home is unclear.”

But service workers and their representatives continue to react to the chasm between their salaries and Yudof’s.

“Workers don’t want to get rich,” Chapot wrote. “But we are starving and are insulted they [the school] would hire president Yudof at nearly a million a year…while pleading poor to long time workers stuck at $11 an hour.”

Chapot sneered at tthe $11,000 month rent the university pays for Yudof and his wife while it subsidizes the renovation of his $9 million home.

The president could not be reached, but as one of the school’s communications directors, Paul Schwartz acts as his representative and regularly fields questions posed to the president.

“To most people including me,” he says, “that’s a lot of money, but a chancellor’s salary at any university is several hundred thousand dollars a year, and a president is a higher position still.”

“If you look at the market they [the presidents] are in,” he continues, “if you compare such salaries to the equivalent positions at, say, the University of Michigan, believe it or not, we lag the market by 25 percent.”

U-Michigan’s president, Mary Sue Coleman, earns nearly $800,000 a year, or about 25 percent more than lawyer and law professor Yudof does.

He is also very careful to address the worker wage and pension investment raises.

“The university has an operating budget of $18 billion,” he begins. “The school may only allocate $3 billion of that money to salaries. We want to offer the workers more, but even raising  employees salaries 5 percent [in Mirna’s case, a 50 cent per hour raise] would cost the university $400 million.”

“In terms of the pensions,” he states, “right now, the university takes nothing. This would all begin next year. Employees have not needed to contribute to their pensions in 18 years because the university made good investments in stocks, bonds and real estate.”

“Both sides were spared for that time,” he says. “But the surplus has run out, and what we’ve determined is the best retirement plan for workers is, beginning July 2009, to take 2 percent from the payroll towards a 401 K plan.”

“Employees wouldn’t see a difference the first year, they would receive all their money back with interest upon retirement, and the university would split the money with them,” he says.

“What the university contributes to the workers’ pension plan would never be lower than what the workers put in themselves,” he stresses.

But when it comes to such solutions, however, Mirna, Monica, Patrick, Faith and union head Mario Fuentes all seem to wonder the same thing. Can the university’s plan alleviate the problem behind having employees work at a school for years without seeing a significant increase in their salary?

Independently of one another, they all bring up the example of Jose Jesus Lopez Ruelas, who has been washing dishes at the UCLA Faculty Club for 38 years and makes $12.54 and hour.

“He has so many calluses on his hands from years of dish washing it looks like a disease,” Mirna says with concern.

“When you’ve given an institution more than half your life, don’t you think they should award you with something more substantive, something more dignified, than $12.54 an hour?” Patrick Mitchell wonders.

But Jose would just as soon sever ties with all quarrelsome parties.

“I am sick and tired of the union’s hypocrisy,” he says in Spanish, voice tight with suppressed fury. “I feel betrayed by them. They hold me up as this mascot ‘look at Jose, his life his hard because of the university, help him,’ giving out my cell phone number left and right without even asking me, but when I contact them every week to ask them how the contract talks are going, they completely ignore my calls.”

“It’s a disrespect,” he adds quietly.

Ruelas is 64-years-old and left Guadalajara, Mexico as a young adult. He’s been scrubbing the kitchenware in the Faculty Club—a mysterious and almost anachronistic ranch-like architectural island in a sea of brick campus buildings—since 1970. He starts work at 3 p.m. and leaves at midnight. He lives with his wife, and their grown daughter, who has a baby. His daughter has a clerical job in Santa Monica, and his wife stays at home.

“She cooks the meals,” he says. “She’s never worked.”

During the weekend, he supplements his income by following a gardener friend and picking up aluminum cans to sell.

“Everybody always tells me ‘oh, I’m sorry, I’ll what I can do for you,’” he says of the union members, university representatives and journalists who regularly approach him to talk about his situation. “But no one gives a hoot. No one ends up doing anything. I haven’t heard from the school or the union, and at the end of the day, everyone says ‘I can imagine; that must be so terrible.’”

“But I have to live this,” he says, voice taking on an edge. “This is my daily world and life, I can’t leave because who else could hire me? What else can I do?  So I’m going to go back to work and hope it all gets better. But from now on, I don’t want to talk to any of these people again.”

Mirna says she feels great sympathy for Jose and wishes it didn’t have to be this way for him. That, she says, despite his reaction, is what she’s fighting for. That and the ability to make what she considers a living wage.

“I feel affection for my fellows and for the place,” she says, getting up from the white bench she’s been sitting on during a break to return to Ackerman. “But as of now, it’s too hard to get by, and if we can’t come up with a decent contract by February, I’ll be going back on strike.”