I was shocked to learn this morning that Chancellor Birgeneau's home was violently attacked Friday evening by a group of terrorists who called themselves protesters. They chanted "no justice, no peace" while throwing objects at the house, breaking windows, and trying to set the place on fire while Mr. Birgeneau and his wife were home. Occupying a campus classroom building is one thing. Threatening and endangering the life of the Chancellor is quite another. I truly wonder what good these people believe their actions could do. When similar attacks took place at UC Santa Cruz, the so called protestors were demonstrating against harmful testing on innocent animals. Was the group this past Friday demonstrating against harmful tuition-billing of the innocent middle class? I fail to see how tuition hikes and violent attacks go together. Although something about this sounds a little like the beginnings of the American Revolutionary War.
The unions have finally come to an agreement with the university on the temporary layoffs. CUE members will have the 4-6% pay reduction as outlined originally by the university through temporary layoff days timed with scheduled university closures, which are the scheduled furlough days for those of us not in the union. These employees will be temporarily laid off for those days. They have the option to spread their pay cuts over a twelve month period, and if they do that, their benefits will accrue as normal. Yes, you are correct: this is almost exactly the same as the furlough plan already in place, but with different vocabulary. Our department's unionized staff member basically rolled her eyes and shook her head that it took this long for those "bunch of idiots over there in the union" to come to the same conclusion the university worked out in August.
I've heard the word from the chairman's mouth: university administration has all but officially committed to ending the furlough on time, and practically promised that the furlough will not be extended into next year. While promises are of course light and easy compared to actual action, the chairman believes that it would be extremely damaging for the university to make such a claim only to go back on in 260 days from now, and he therefore believes them. Perhaps he is right. But federal stimulus money will disappear next fall, and the state shows no signs of giving back our funding, so the fact that 70% of the university's budget is in payroll indicates to me that while we may not see furloughs, we will likely continue to be in a hiring freeze and maybe see more layoffs.
A member of our staff has resigned to move on to bigger and better things away from UC and California. We are of course very sad to see her go. But our collective held-breath has let out just a little bit knowing that she will not be replaced, and her exit will therefore help to better secure all of our jobs, even if just ever so slightly. What a state of affairs when we are thankful that a hard-working, appreciated colleague is leaving her full-time workload on our shoulders so that we might all wake up to work another day.
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My take on it is that furloughs are not likely because the faculty may leave. If the budget continues to be as bad as this year I'm assuming they will lay off more staff instead of furloughing them. But then, maybe a lot more people will leave for greener pastures and they will just shuffle around the remaining staff.
ReplyDeleteFrom my understanding of it, CUE has perhaps the better deal: I was told that if they are being technically "laid off" rather than "furloughed" a department can chose to cover those 11 or more days out of another fund and they won't be missing any pay at all. (Similar to those faculty who are allowed to buy back their furloughed amount out of another fund, if one is handy). For those of us who are furloughed but still technically work full time, there is no way to cover the furloughed amount, we are just SOL.