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Casey Kovarik: UC unprepared, misguided on statewide wage increase

(Shelby Chan/Daily Bruin)

By Casey Kovarik

July 27, 2015 7:09 a.m.

After an academic year full of tension surrounding the University of California’s increasing costs, the University has just volunteered to increase them anyway.

All UC employees who work at least 20 hours a week will be paid a minimum hourly wage of $15 an hour within three years, a wage increase that the UC has said will cost an estimated $14 million.

In the current UC budget crunch, there are questions over where the extra revenue to cover the higher wages will come from. The UC Office of the President claims these costs will be covered by parking fees, bookstore sales and hospital income – a narrow source of overall revenue.

This means either the plan to cover costs is insufficient, as those are small sources of revenue for the UC, or that this increase in wage will affect very few people.

The UC should be a leader in fair wages, but this new policy is the wrong approach. The plan lacks a method of increasing revenue to support the wages and excludes some student workers from those who benefit from the increase.

If the UC wants to enact a fair wages program, the wage increases should be tied to the relative costs of living in the city the campus is located and a revenue plan to cover these costs should be set forth at the same time.

This new policy means that workers at UC campuses in cities with a much lower cost of living and a lower minimum wage will still be paid the same wage as workers at UCLA, which is located in a much more expensive city.

Minimum wage for UC employees will reach $15 an hour more than two years before that becomes the Los Angeles minimum wage.

The cost of living in Los Angeles or San Francisco is far higher than that of living in rural Davis or Merced. The median rent in LA is nearly $2000 per month – more than double that of Merced, at $834. This doesn’t even take into account the relative cost of groceries, transportation, and recreation – all of which is generally more expensive in a larger city.

This isn’t to say that contract workers or hard working students in Merced don’t deserve the raise – they absolutely do. This is only to say that at this point, either the UC needs to raise more revenue – through state support or otherwise – to accommodate everyone, or it has to reduce the raises to be less costly and more realistic.

This is especially true given the University’s track record. In the past, UC’s have failed to even meet the minimum wages of the cities they reside in, claiming to be state agencies and only accountable to the state minimum wage. Yet now they plan to exceed the rate of increase of minimum wage in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive UC locations. This makes no sense.

Students equally affected by these varying costs will, at large, not experience the benefits of minimum wage increases as students with work-study programs and other part-time jobs rarely work more than 20 hours a week.

Nearly all students are excluded from benefits of this plan while watching the pot of money that could’ve been used to help them shrink.

The group most affected is direct contract employees, people who are not employed by the UC, but are contracted from outside companies, as most full-time career employees at the UC already make more than $15 an hour.

It is not fair to students who bear the burden of both the increasing cost of living and potential future tuition hikes that they do not benefit from this increased minimum wage. Many students who work part time on campus struggle to make rent and buy groceries just as direct contract employees do, and they also face the huge cost of attending a UC institution.

Even if the University is correct, and the costs can be covered by these revenue streams, the fact remains that this is money that could’ve gone to help students and now will not. Workers deserve a raise – this much is a fact. But the UC also has a commitment to its students – and the fact that this helps few of them is unnerving.

If the UC was so concerned with the wages of outside, contract workers, then it could have lobbied Sacramento on their behalf or joined in a political coalition. These workers deserve more – it’s just not so clear that the UC helped them in the best way.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s finance department spoke out against the increase this month, saying that it will increase costs to the UC and hurt the overall economy. After all the work that Brown and the UC have done to the balance budget, the fact that UCOP would go ahead and make this decision is strange.

The intent to increase minimum wage is good and necessary for hard working UC employees. Yet it is unclear how the financially struggling UC system will pay for this without burdening the students it excludes from the wage benefits.

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