Report finds UC clerical employee wages fall below cost of living

The majority of support staff workers in the University of California earn less than the yearly wages needed to support a family, according to a preliminary report released by a nonprofit research group on Jan. 26.

The report found that 81.9 percent of employees in the UC-wide Teamsters Local 2010 and 86.7 percent of the employees in the union at UCLA earn less than the local family budget.

The Teamsters Local 2010 union, which represents clerical employees across the UC, asked the Economic Policy Institute to compile the report before its contract negotiations in 2016. Some union members said they plan to use the report to lobby for more state funding for the UC and for greater workers’ wages.

The Economic Policy Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., that conducts research on the effects of a variety of issues – such as immigration or globalization – on working-class Americans, according to its website. The Economic Policy Institute’s research has also been used by other organizations, including a union in Oregon that used it to assess hospital worker pay in a report released in January.

The local family budgets were determined based on the cost of living for a one-adult, one-child family in the metropolitan area where each campus is located, said Elise Gould, the author of the report and a senior economist at the institute. Based on the Economic Policy Institute’s calculation, the local family budget for the L.A. area is about $53,000 per year, Gould said.

Teamsters Local 2010 represents administrative assistants among other support staff. As of May 2013, administrative assistants in California had a mean yearly earning of $38,260, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average yearly salary for all the workers in Teamsters Local 2010 is about $46,000, said UC spokesperson Shelly Meron. The UC determined the wages based on local market rates for the different job classifications at the University’s locations, Meron said.

Jason Rabinowitz, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 2010, said the union requested the report to give an idea of the financial status of its members before it goes into negotiations with the UC for its next contract in 2016.

“Our workers are feeling the pinch as real wages have been declining over the years throughout the country, and we wanted to have economists study our wages and confirm what we knew,” Rabinowitz said.

Meron said it is difficult for the UC to respond to this report because it was not certain about some of the underlying data for the study. She said the UC recognizes the importance of cost of living for its workers, and the wages for the workers in Teamsters Local 2010 are within the average range of wages for these types of jobs.

“The University does its part, and, in some cases, leads the market when it comes to wages and benefits for our union-represented employees,” she said in an email statement.

Meron added that the University has other benefit packages for its workers, such as pension programs, which do not factor into the cost of living.

Some UC workers said they think the report confirmed what they already thought.

Rejeana Mathis, a management program designer for UCLA Campus Human Resources and president of the UCLA Staff Assembly, which is not a union group, said she thinks many nonunion workers face the same challenges as the union workers in the study.

“All this survey does is give data to back up what people have said for years,” she said. “Many people have talked about how difficult it is to stay in the University.”

While the Staff Assembly does not negotiate wages with the UC, it does voice concerns from the staff regarding wages and the difficulties of supporting a family, Mathis said.

The final version of the report should come out by the end of February or early March, Gould said.