You’re at your desk. It’s late. You stare at the computer, bleary-eyed and bored.

You live, perhaps, in Los Angeles. You’re restless. You’re in the midst of experiencing a very real and overpowering urge to be elsewhere. If only you could be abroad right now, you think, somewhere different, somewhere distant.

You have neither the time nor the money to travel. And even were you, by some miraculous stroke of luck, to chance upon significant amounts of both, gratification would come far from instantly.

Then you remember other avenues lie open to you. You’ve heard of Google “Maps,” the option directly adjacent to “Images” and two to the right of “Web.” Google Maps has been around since 2005, but within that tab lies a newer, more exciting antidote to your ennui known as the “Street View.”

You enter Barcelona, Spain into the search box. Suddenly a map of the city appears. You press on the “satellite” box to the right of the screen, and the icons morph into photos. You zoom in so closely you can, as the heading promises, view the streets, wrought iron balconies visible in high relief, colored tiles glistening in the sunlight. You move your mouse, and the photo follows you, as you get a 360 degree view of the boulevard you’ve chosen to visit.

Voila, with but few brief clicks you’ve effectively managed to transport yourself to another country and another world.

Inspired, you wonder how far this Google function’s reach extends. Less than two years old and designed by humans, Street View cannot be omnipresent, you think. After all, you reason, you read in The Scotsmanthat Google added the UK to its arsenal just two days ago. In a moment of curiosity, you type in your home address, not believing your house would simply show up, that someone could have shot photos of your residence without you noticing.

You gasp as a photo of your home illuminates the screen. You nudge your mouse clockwise, watching Google Maps show you that 360 degree view of the street, this time your street, the houses, your neighbors’.

Unsure of what you should be feeling, you undergo a series of emotions, at turns awe and amusement, at others indignation and worry.

How impressive! Or how frightening. Google didn’t ask for your permission, and anyone typing in your address could see where you live, get a feel for the lay of the land and could eye your home from somewhere as near as West Hollywood or somewhere as far as Beijing.

Did Google Maps invade your privacy?

—

Privacy as a right exists in some form or another in nearly every state. Because one’s “reasonable expectation of  privacy” is a feeling, the courts within those states view the invasion of that privacy as a personal tort.

While it is a right, however, that right to privacy—or the intentional seclusion from others—is not an absolute one. Public figures who have chosen inspected accountability through their positions as political candidates, government officials, entertainers, sports figures or even through their involvement (voluntary or otherwise) in newsworthy occurrences, do not possess the same right to privacy other citizens would. Were, for example, the enjoyment of full privacy to affect the manner in which the public figure could carry out his or her public responsibilities, the figure would have to waive the right to that enjoyment.

Nevertheless, the states consider the invasion of privacy as wrong and a wrong that can be parsed into the four segments of false light, misappropriation, publication of private facts and intrusion.

So did Google intrude upon your privacy?

—

Aaron and Christine Boring argued it did theirs.

The Pittsburgh couple sued the company in April 2008 for an “’intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of privacy’” after noting photos of their house crop up on the Street View segment of Google Maps, The Smoking Gun reported.

In the five count (invasion of privacy, trespass, injunction pleading, negligence and conversion) complaint they filed, one The Smoking Gun then published, the couple stated they bought their house on Oakridge Lane for $163,000 in large part for the privacy the street afforded them.

Because of the house’s location, they said, they had a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The loss of that privacy, they added, had caused their house to shed much of its value as well as to inflict mental suffering upon them. Google, they said, should, thus, pay them $25,000 in damages.

When it comes to invasion of privacy, the defendant may be liable if its invasion is both “highly offensive to a reasonable person” and is “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

The Borings explained they found Google’s shooting and posting of the pictures and what they called the subsequent devaluation of their property with the attendant mental suffering it evinced in them highly offensive. Similarly, they viewed the above actions as those not falling within the legitimate concern of the public.

They described this invasion as reckless as Google included the photos without considering the “commensurate risks,” presumably robbery, involved.

In order to provide the necessary images for Google Maps’ Street View, the Web behemoth’s minions must drive around, painstakingly shooting numerous digital photos of the streets they glimpse.

Should they restrict themselves to simply taking photos of objects at street level, they will not invade anybody’s privacy, as such buildings exist in plain view and are thus fair game.

But Google could not have obtained such detailed photos of their house, the Borings argued, unless its employee(s) had driven up Oakridge Lane, a street marked “Private Road,” and trudged up the 50 feet of driveway to the home, LAW.com printed.

That, they continued, was trespassing onto private property, an actionable offense falling within the intrusion category of what constitutes “invasion of privacy” from a legal standpoint.

Yet the Bay Area-based corporation explained that the home’s address was barely if at all visible in the pictures, and the Borings need simply check a box stating they did not wish to share the photos of their address for the photos to disappear from Google Maps Street View.

The Borings felt that was not enough. In addition to demanding damages, Christine and Aaron Boring stated Google should destroy the photos of their property and “cease and desist” from entering Oakridge Lane again.

Even were Google to have destroyed the images, as it later did, pictures would remain on the county real estate Web site from which the couple had discovered the property in the first place, The Pittsburgh ChannelWeb site’s Technology section indicated.

In what Law Shucks called “the silver lining” of “Google Getting Hit from all Sides,” the U.S. District Court of Western Pennsylvania dismissed the Boring v. Google lawsuit, rejecting the five counts within Borings’ complaint this past February.

The federal judge on the case as the photographer shot the photos from the street, as Google took the photos down on request and as a photo remains on a real estate site unaffiliated with Google.

—

Oh the irony of it all.

The Borings did not win their case, but they certainly garnered a great deal of attention, thrusting themselves further into the public’s eye than they–or the photos of their property–ever would have been had they not sued the search engine king.

In attempting–and failing–to protect their privacy, they made themselves victims of the “Streisand Effect.”

Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick coined the term in 2005, while writing about a trademark-related case. He said

How long is it going to take before lawyers realize

that the simple act of trying to repress something they

don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that

most people would never, ever see

(like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort)

is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.

Masnick based the name on the 2003 case Barbra Streisand filed against a photographer/representative of an environmentalist group who had taken pictures of California’s coastline in an attempt to capture proof of its erosion but who had, in the process, shot photos of the singer-actress’ sprawling property as well.

In late May of that year, Barbra Streisand sued California Coastal Records founder Kenneth Adelman for $10 million for invading her privacy by intruding into her seclusion and by publishing private facts upon taking and posting the one photograph of her house along with the 12,000 others he shot and had put up on the group’s Web site to demonstrate the state’s eroding coastline and how developments had damaged it most.

The photograph, taken from a helicopter, depicted a large house with pool on the edge of a sort of crag. Because she had been threatened in the past, Streisand stated she felt showing this picture left her house more exposed to potential break-ins than it would otherwise have been, as she had been careful not to publicize either its whereabouts or the lay-out of the property, and that this was highly offensive to [her as] a reasonable person.

The Smoking Gun quoted Streisand saying the photo provided a “‘road map into her residence’ and ‘clearly indentified those routes that could be used to enter her property’” while clarifying that they, the site’s writers, were “not sure how an intrusion would be accomplished, but you never can discount the craftiness of rock climbers, hang [sic] glider pilots, and parachutists.”

In short, getting to Babs’ through the back’s no picnic.

Nevertheless, the singer filed her complaint in a tizzy and in it insisted Adelman take the photo down while also seeking an order to prohibit him from distributing the image. She argued that this  picture was not of legitimate concern to the public.

But Streisand is a voluntary public figure, thus relinquishing the right to a certain measure of privacy and pushing any related information into one more of legitimate concern to the public than it would otherwise be. Moreover, the one photo was taken from above, so her property, described by Superior Court Judge Allan J. Goodman as containing “nothing private or personal” on it, could be visible from another plane.

Goodman and the court dismissed the case in December of that year.

The judge determined that there was nothing highly offensive about the photo or the publishing of it, and that it was within Adelman’s First Amendment rights to shoot it and place it within the series of 12,000 from the get-go. The state of California’s coastline is of public interest and taking photographs of it in order to better highlight its erosion is an action that falls within the “public affairs” section of 1972’s Coastal Zone Protection Act.

Streisand’s position as a public figure, and one who has expressed an interest in environmental policy to boot, could influence coastal zone protection, so retaining her name on the image would be a potential service to the public.

In filing this suit, the singer got both far less and far more than she bargained for. She certainly didn’t get those $10 million. She spent seven months fighting for the removal of a photo. But not only did she not achieve that removal, in those seven months, numerous other sites picked it up and published it, and it continues at present to languish online. Her house is far more visible today than it would have been had she quietly accepted its singular and comparatively unobtrusive presence on the California Coastal Records site–hence, the “Streisand Effect.”

Following Masnick’s neologism, Mickey Mellen founded a blog titled The Streisand Effect, chronicling all such instances of the phenomenon as they would crop up in the news.

The site carefully followed the Boring case, determining it as a situation falling within the descriptive confines of the Streisand Effect.

Though Streisand’s case predates Google Maps Street View, it appears to be a sort of prelude to cases like those of the Borings’, that deal with the unasked for online photos of purportedly private property with the further potential for widespread dissemination.

Some could perhaps say there’s something self-indulgent or even silly about both the Borings’ and Streisand’s claims, but some of the issues they raise, especially those the Borings raise with regards to Google Maps Street View, have what this writer feels is some merit.

But does Google Maps invade our privacy?

—

Legally and generally speaking, this writer does not think that it does.

If Google’s photographers remain true to the Street View function’s name and only shoot those things in plain street view, than they have neither intruded upon nor trespassed onto others’ privacy.

If they have simply depicted what the camera showed with no contextually incorrect or inapproprate captioning, than they have not presented those objects or people in the photo in a false light.

Should they have taken a photo while driving by a house and have shown a man leaving a strip club or in a romantic embrace with a woman other than his wife, they can take the damning shots down.

If those employees have caught an actress on digital Google-owned film but have not used her image to turn a profit, for example, they have not misappropriated it.

All that said, both Streisand and the Borings bring up a few of the numerous potential pitfalls plaguing Google Maps.

While the Street View option may not legally invade one’s privacy, it carries with it a certain unsavory quality that feels menacing, as if the function has by its very existence and actions legally, but no less perturbingly, encroached upon some implicit sense of the personal.

Google Maps does not notify individuals their streets and living spaces have been photographed. Of course, that would be difficult to impossible to do–especially given the fact that at the end of the day, humans take the photos and cannot knock on every door of every house of every street of every city of every country in the world. (Well, it’s impossible given Google’s ambitious plan to “provide” the Google Maps Street View to and of every metropolis on the globe.)

But wouldn’t it be, maybe, better to knock on those doors at the expense of a multitude of unathorized, if not illegal, photos? What purpose do those photos really serve? Aside from its delightful ability to transport an individual to another place in a few heartbeats, is there really a point to Google Maps Street View?

If its intent is simply to better ground the online visitor in the place he or she seeks to see, than this legal but slightly creepy bout of photo-taking seems pointless when the maps the site offers are, indeed, quite thorough.

Far be it for this writer to clamor for less information, but Streisand’s case raises some important questions.

Why should the person have to fight to take down a shot of his or her own home that he/she did not take or agree to?

When the photo is either kept where it is or taken down upon request but posted onto other sites, why should the layman have to deal with the Streisand Effect?

Barbara Streisand, herself, is a different case. While the “effect” bears her surname, she does not seem to present the ideal image of the invaded victim. Again, she is quite the public figure and should be subject to different privacy laws, but experiencing the Streisand Effect when not a public figure could be irritating, at best.

The Borings may have been pushing it with a $25,000 damage-seeking suit and one that claimed their property had significantly lost its value.

But take the money out of their complaint, and the angry surprise they expressed feeling at finding their home (a difficult one to reach and not likely to be seen by a casual passerby) on Street View seems completely valid. No one let them know their house would be on Google Maps. Once they found out and took it down, it was too late. Granted, a photo of their home lay on a real estate site–one of the reasons the judge dismissed their case.

Yet had their home not been on Google Maps, they would not have filed a lawsuit. Had they not (some could say rashly) filed that suit, the photos of their house would not be all over the Web, and they would not have experienced the Streisand Effect.

This writer fails to see how that house really contributes to the general quality of Google Maps Street View. She applauds the thorough and honest, but few would have seen the Boring house in person and only those chancing upon it by accident would have found it on Google. Now, that could be a conversational defense for keeping it on Street View, but would it have killed Google not to drive up 50 feet to shoot photos of a house no one would see or care about that those owning would not enjoy the viewing of in an online capacity?

Streisand’s mention of “commensurate risk” makes sense. Yes, those determined enough could rob most homes. Thieves have broken into or attempted to break into homes for likely as long as the concept and reality of homes has been around. But why make it easier?

Unlike the Streisand/Adelman situation, the photos on Google Maps do not provide the names of the people owning and/or living in the homes pictured. But in a time when so many may either own or gain access to computers, the steps between discovering where an inividual lives are but few. Say, for example, a thief does not know or care who resides within the home, though. He or she could simply see the address on the street, type it into Google Maps Street View and study it in a detail that would look suspicious were he/she to do so at the actual site, and he/she could likely spy nooks or crannies not immediately visible to the naked eye.

Google Maps Street View presents other possilities for awkwardness, squeemishness or discomfort.

It seems rather unlikely any photos compromising “national security” would remain on Google long. The Times Colonist explained how last week, the Pentagon barred Google from taking street view shots of “military installations” such as Fort Sam Houston.

But what of those photos of children or the scantily clad? Again, users could take them down. But more and more it seems impossible to erase even–or especially–a paperless trail, particularly when the Streisand Effect exists so vividly.

What if you’re at work, and your boss asks you to remind him what your address is, and you tell him, thinking because he is your boss, you have to tell him, remembering that he has it anyway. What if you watch him look your childhood home up and listen to him make comments about it, pass judgments on what your upbringing must be like and what your persona must thus be?

That is not an invasion of privacy, but it certainly feels inappropriate—completely irrelevant to the workplace and to whatever it is you’re doing and should be doing there. Yet that scenario can happen, has happened–to this writer, in fact.

Technology has changed, is constantly changing. Privacy was never clean cut, but when watching and recording and posting are so much easier, and accusations of a “Big Brother”-like world fly around with ever greater abandon, “privacy’s” nebulous nature becomes even more difficult to discern, penetrate or pin down. The law may itself have to evolve in order to accommodate a mutable or mutating world.

Perhaps the first step would be to legally bind Google into asking permission of those owning homes on residential streets. Is this unfair to those who reside on busier thoroughfares? The writer’s not sure. Is this tantamount to asking for an injunction, enacting prior restraint and thus limiting a freedom? Maybe.

But should folks have to find out their homes are visible online…by accident?

Or, short of that, should those same people have to ok the posting of pictures that already exist, thus keeping those photos at an ever-leakable position? Who would post the ok-ed photos? A human? Could not that same human send those photos to another site or sell them to those that would use them as break-in guides? Do not computer-generated algorithms sometimes err, publishing what they should not? It could happen.

That’s a lot of ifs–and possibly over-paranoid ones at that. But again, what purpose does Street View reallyserve? The manner and amount by which it improves upon Google Maps (just the drawings of the areas searched) remains unclear. So these questions may be a propos, after all.

In the meantime, you will take all this into account, accept that for now, your house is visible on street view, that you will do nothing about it and that you will, instead, alleviate your itch to travel with a five minute foray into Paris or Berlin.

More than 4,000 names grace the two sides of the shirt.

The white specks form a vivid contrast to the black cloth of the tee. Yet some of those names rest beneath a tomato shade. Put together, the red reads “Bush Lied” on the front side of the shirt and “They Died” on its back.

Dan Frazier-owned, Flagstaff, Ariz.-based, politically oriented t-shirt and sticker company “CarryaBigSticker” designed the garment in 2005.

Since then, soldiers, their families and legislators in various states such as Louisiana and Oklahoma have reacted strongly to the content of those shirts, managing to ban them in the latter two states in 2006.

Some of those families have supported Frazier’s pieces. Most have expressed outrage, claiming the use of those names to protest a war in which the dead had chosen to take part perverted the names themselves.

But Californian officials did not vocally take a stance on Frazier’s shirts and his use of dead soldiers’ names until recently.

Assemblyman Mike Duvall—Republican legislator representing the 72^nd District, one that includes Orange, Yorba Linda and parts of Anaheim, among other areas—proposed Assembly Bill No. 585 in late February.

Only now, however, has the seven-page bill gained enough momentum that both Frazier and news outlets in the state capital have begun to pay attention.

The existing law states that using the signature, voice, name, likeness or photograph of a “deceased personality” for “commercial purposes” within 70 years of that person’s death without permission is an actionable offense.

The law explains that a “deceased personality” describes an individual whose signature, voice, name, likeness or photograph possesses “commercial value at the time of his or her death.”

For example, it would be against the law for the owner of a small curio shop to plaster Elvis’ face onto the mugs he sells without first being authorized to do so by whomever “owns” “The King’s” image.

Assembly Bill No. 585 (AB 585) seeks to “expand that definition of ‘deceased personality’…to include any natural person whose name, voice, signature, photograph or likeness has commercial value either at the time of his death, or because of his or her death.”

The reason these names have a political and monetary value for Frazier (he sells the shirts for $18; he does not give them away) is because they belong to those who have died. But as of now, and in California, the dead soldiers do not fall under the heading of “deceased personalities.”

That is, Frazier has the right to use those names on the garments.

Yet Duvall’s bill would make it illegal for Frazier to stamp them onto his shirts without first asking the soldiers’ families for approval. In other words, if the bill passes, the law will say Frazier invaded these soldiers’ privacy, misappropriating the names of deceased personalities for commercial purposes.

Misappropriation is a type of invasion of privacy. Having the option to call the use of a name or image “misappropriation” serves a dual purpose. It shields individuals from the suffering they would experience upon discovering another had put their image or name to commercial use while also taking care of any property interests famous figures would wish to maintain in their own personas.

In general, though, using the individual’s name or image if it is newsworthy will protect the person utilizing that name or image from liability. But that is not always the case. Much of the answer hinges on the subject’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

A public figure has chosen visibility and has, for the most part, waived his or her right to privacy. When it comes to the deceased, heirs may not file a suit on behalf of the dead, but misappropriation could present an exception.

Duvall’s bill would make putting the soldiers’ names on the commercially used t-shirts a misappropriation of their identity and a suit the soldiers’ families could bring against Frazier in California.

But the obstacle facing Duvall lies in the fact that while Frazier may, indeed, earn money from the shirts and, thus, the names of the soldiers, he has the constitutional right to Free Speech and may make a political statement should he choose to.

And Frazier views the proposed bill as a violation of his First Amendment rights.

“I would say I have a free speech right [to print the shirts],” he said over the phone. “One of the ironies here is that soldiers are fighting this war in Iraq, and they’re fighting on behalf of their country and the Freedom of Speech, but a California legislator is trying to take that away.”

However, Duvall’s office does not think this bill encroaches on Frazier’s rights at all.

Duvall would not comment on the matter. But his Chief of Staff, Carolyn Ginno, explained the assemblyman’s reasons for authoring the bill.

“This legislation is not about limiting free speech,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Assemblyman Duvall strongly supports free speech. AB 585 is about property rights, which are another fundamental American right.”

She continued by saying that “your identity is your personal property, and the bill simply closes a loophole in existing law that treats deceased individuals differently if they are celebrities.”

“This is not fair,” she concluded. “Whether you are alive or deceased, famous or not, you or your next of kin should have the right to approve or deny the use of your name or your identity.”

Yet Los Angeles-based First Amendment lawyer Ben Sheffner cannot really see a bill like AB 585 surviving because of the threats it poses to the constitutional right to free speech.

After hearing about the bill over the phone, he said it was likely “there would be very strong grounds to strike it down.”

“The names are clearly being used for a political purpose, not to sell candy bars,” he said. “First Amendment rights are at their height when you’re talking about political speech.

“The names of soldiers who have died are newsworthy,” he continued. “Those are matters of public interest.”

Sheffner made it further clear that though Frazier has put these names to a commercial use, that does not mean the law would view the printed names on the t-shirts as a misappropriation.

“Just because you make money off something doesn’t necessarily mean it will win against receiving protection,” he stated. “News stations all make money; they make a profit. But that doesn’t diminish their First Amendment rights.”

Those soldiers who have contacted Frazier have explained they were offended by the inclusion of their comrades’ names on an article that went against what their friends had believed in.

These men and women were not drafted, the soldiers told Frazier; they had enlisted in a war fully aware of potential consequences behind that action.

“As you would expect,” Frazier began, “I’ve heard mostly from [soldiers] who are upset. They’re trying to tell me what their fallen friend would have wanted. They think I’m out to make a buck. That is a myth.”

“We honor our loved ones by putting their names on tombstones,” he said. “Well this is a way of honoring them [the soldiers].”

He said he received many e-mails from the soldiers’ family members—many expressing unequivocal support for his t-shirts, others threatening to sue him if he did not take their relative’s name off the cloth.

“I feel terrible for the families,” he said. “I feel terrible for their loss. But they’re taking their pain and anger out on me, and I think that’s sort of misplaced. It just strengthens my resolve to do what I can to try to shorten the war and lessen the amount of suffering.”

But the lawyer, Ben Sheffner, explained the family’s suffering had no official  bearing on either the fate of Frazier’s shirts or for AB 585’s chances of passing.

“There’s the legal question,” he said. “And then there’s the question of taste. I can certainly understand the objections families would have to this, that they would feel exploited. But one of the costs of the First Amendment is that we’re allowed to say things that are offensive to others.”

If, though, Frazier’s shirts bore a resemblance to the Three Stooges case, he would have to deal with misappropriation after all.

In 2001, artist Gary Saderup made a charcoal drawing of the Three Stooges—Larry Fein, Moe Howard and Curly Howard—then created lithographs of those drawings finally putting them onto t-shirts as well.

Comedy III Productions sued Saderup for what the company deemed an unauthorized utilization and misappropriation for commercial use of the deceased personalities’ images over which they had control.

Saderup claimed the First Amendment protected his right to free speech, and the amendment covered political commentary and satire, why would it not also protect an artist’s work?

Trial, appellate and superior court did not think it came down to that free speech, as Saderup had not transformed the images enough to constitute an exemption from misappropriation.

Frazier did not change the names of the soldiers, yes, but Sheffner did not think Frazier would run into the same problems Saderup had.

“I think there is more a First Amendment protection for what [Frazier] is doing,” Sheffner said. “There’s more than with the Three Stooges case.”

“These are just names,” he added. “The Three Stooges case [Comedy III Production, Inc. (Three Stooges) v. Gary Saderup, Inc] seems to apply to visual representations and not as much to words. Words are most literally speech, and that gets a very strong First Amendment protection.”

Sheffner said that even if the bill were to pass, it was unlikely that it would either stay active long or that Frazier would ultimately have to deal with a set of misappropriation cases or that he would have to stop selling his t-shirts in California.

“The court would have to decide,” Sheffner said. “But I’m very skeptical anything like that [bill] could survive a First Amendment test.”

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.”