State allocates $6 million to increase institutes’ studies funding

NEW LABOR RULES The California Nurses
Association is concerned with some provisions in new regulation
approved by the Industrial Welfare Commission.

• Non-union, private health care workers may be required to work
  13-hour shifts in certain circumstances.
• Health care employers may declare a emergency requiring workers
  to work an additional four hours for a 16-hour workday.
• IWC regulations offer no provision for enforcement of
  violations.

SOURCE: California Nurses Association

By Timothy Kudo
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Currently existing university programs that study labor issues
will be expanded due to a $6 million allocation from the state, UC
officials announced last week.

The money will expand programs at what are currently known as
Institutes for Industrial Relations at UCLA and UC Berkeley, which
research labor trends in the state and reach out to organized
labor.

The institutes serve both students and faculty in addition to
labor groups who are the target of the institutes outreach
programs.

“We’ve been severely constrained by a limited budget
so we haven’t been able to support as much outreach as
we’d like,” said Paul Ong, co-directory of the new UC
Institute for Labor and Employment at UCLA, which the two
institutions will now become.

Right now, the budget for UCLA’s Institute for Industrial
Relations consists of a little over $500,000 from the campus and
$1-2 million in other funding.

Though the $6 million will be split with the UCB institute,
which currently receives about $1 million from the state, the
increase is significant.

“Some of the money will go to university wide programs,
but certainly there will be a significant portion going
here,” Ong said.

The institutes previously did studies on the state of labor in
California but the cost of doing large scale surveys was too
expensive.

With the new funds, for example, the UCB institute will begin a
statewide survey costing about $400,000.

The director of the UCB institute, James Lincoln, said the focus
of each institute is to improve policy relating to labor.

“We’re trying to keep our fingers on how labor
issues are changing to give policy makers in the state, the public,
and the press a read on how employment conditions are
changing,” Lincoln said.

He said the goal is to mirror similar labor studies programs at
the University of Wisconsin and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, though with the $6 million the UC program will be
better funded.

Additionally, funds will expand grant programs ““ ranging
from $15,000-$90,000 ““ and outreach programs where the
institutes give training to current union members.

Currently, the institutes give occupational health and safety
training to various unions throughout the state.

“It’s not entirely academic, it’s an outreach
program,” Lincoln said about the institute’s role.

In addition to focusing on labor, the institutes study
management because the two are intertwined, the directors said.

Belying fears that the institutes are partisan in any way,
Lincoln said the issues they focus on are universal and mostly
academic.

In the UC Berkeley business school, “I offer a course in
bargaining and negotiation, is there anything partisan about that
particularly?” he said.

“The labor institutes work with employee constituencies,
unionized and sometimes non-union,” Lincoln added.

Sean Leys, an organizer for the University Professional and
Technical Employees union, first became involved in the union as
part of his studies at the original Institute for Industrial
Relations.

He said he remembers the institute being underfunded when he was
there.

“Hopefully they’ll be big enough to hold the
university accountable for how it treats its own employees,”
Leys said.