Job insecurity

Researcher Rita Kern’s relationship with UCLA, her
employer of over two decades, is an embodiment of the good and the
tough, the rewarding and the disappointing.

Her projects, colleagues and supervisors grew to become
important parts of her life as she worked in the same
Neuropsychiatric Institute laboratory for 24 years.

When California’s budget took a hit in the 1990s and the
impact trickled down to the University of California, Kern took a
pay cut while putting her children through college and coping with
divorce.

But the biggest letdown came last November, when the unexpected
was abruptly realized: the state funding that paid Kern’s
salary for over 20 years dried up, and the university gave her 60
days notice to find a new job.

Kern, president of the University Professional & Technical
Employees’ local union branch, said her feeling was one of
lasting shock.

“Panic. Terrified. Was I going to get another job?”
she said. “I hadn’t looked for a job in 20
years.”

At a university the size of UCLA, where bureaucracy spans all
levels, the nature of layoffs is at once impersonal and
intimate.

To legislators and administrators whose budget decisions lead to
dismissals, the names and faces of those left hunting for new jobs
remain largely a distant mystery.

But to managers who spend years alongside their workers, parting
with longtime staff is a painful process. Kern’s supervisor
of 24 years, Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Human Genetics Professor
Stephen Cederbaum, said he felt Kern worked with him, not for
him.

So when he found out her position would be cut, he took her
aside to tell her in person.

“We had become friends, and I was devastated by the
necessity of having to do that,” Cederbaum said.

“It’s not the university feeling a personal sense of
responsibility,” he added. “That generally falls to the
smaller unit, so I took a huge sense of responsibility.”

To Kern, losing her job meant parting with her research on
hyperargininemia, a genetic disorder that leads to symptoms
including mental and physical retardation. She started at UCLA
doing basic research and developing models for gene therapy, and
later took on management duties like purchasing equipment and
ensuring laboratory safety.

“When you work on a project for a long time … it becomes
your project, to some extent. I mean, it really does,” she
said. “There’s ownership of it.”

UCLA laid off 33 workers in the 2004-2005 fiscal year, down from
66 in 2002-2003, when the state’s most recent budget crisis
began pinching the university, said Lubbe Levin, assistant vice
chancellor of Campus Human Resources.

Those numbers do not include entities like parking and housing
services, which keep separate tallies. In the medical sciences
sector where Kern worked and has since found another job, UCLA let
go of 109 employees the 2003-2004 fiscal year, according to
statistics Levin provided. A large portion of funding in the
sciences depends on grants limited by time and amount, so layoffs
in that area tend to be more frequent, she added.

Facing grim financial prospects a few years ago, campus
administrators asked departments to cooperate in cost-saving
measures designed partly to prevent layoffs. Most notable was the
university’s call to keep new vacancies unfilled unless
hiring was necessary to continue operations.

Attrition kept the number of layoffs low, and Levin said UCLA
lets go of about 35 to 60 employees any year.

And while administrators may not be directly acquainted with
each employee laid off, Levin said they work hard to ease the job
search for career staff. The campus provides counseling, help
building resumes, and options for severance pay and preferential
treatment in hiring.

Many departments reshuffle resources, asking employees to fill
new roles, instead of letting them go. UCLA also encourages laid
off workers to look into campus postings, Levin said.

“It’s really an investment in the talent that we
have,” she said.

“¢bull; “¢bull; “¢bull;

Despite the university’s efforts to retain and improve
conditions for employees, Kern said she feels the UC’s
appreciation for staff has diminished over time.

“When I started out, I was pretty much straight out of
college,” said Kern, whose first position was at UC San
Francisco. “Working in the UC system in research was a career
job.”

That meant employees were well-paid, with great benefits and
stability, she said. State money covered much of UC research then,
as well as education for students, who paid a $600 annual fee.

But since that time, reductions in government funding have left
the UC operating increasingly like a private enterprise. A
decade-long fund-raising campaign that ends next year has more than
doubled UCLA’s annual intake of private donations.

Kern believes the university has become a more
“corporate” environment, valuing workers less and
focusing on the bottom line. She said while she can’t blame
the university for California’s problems, working at UCLA is
less rewarding than it was before.

“It’s been a slow erosion. … We used to get
regular raises, and now we have to fight for raises,” Kern
said.

A major blow came in the early 1990s, when the state and UC went
through a financial crisis and Kern and her colleagues were forced
to absorb pay cuts.

Levin, who has worked at the university for about 25 years, said
because retirement benefits came out of a fund unaffected by the
budget situation, UCLA was able to compensate workers for lost
salary by putting money in the amount of the cuts into
workers’ retirement accounts.

But Kern said without immediate access to the pay, she was
living off her credit cards. Going through divorce shrank her
income pool, making it difficult to cover her children’s
college tuitions.

“It was just the hardest time in my life to have a pay
cut,” she said.

That experience attuned her to what she viewed as the UC’s
problematic impersonal atmosphere, and was a defining moment in her
decision to become active in her union.

Though Kern was aware that state funding was on the decline, she
didn’t believe her own job would be slashed.

The devastation and emotions of being laid off seem fresh over a
year later, as she shakes her head, recounting what she lost and
the process she went through to find another job.

Kern said her first reaction was to seek funding in her
department to pay her salary. She said she found nothing ““ it
wasn’t the first round of cuts, and UCLA was tight on
resources.

With a resume updated with her published papers and acquired
skills, Kern applied for jobs as far away as the Martin Luther
King/Drew Medical Center near Watts.

She explored the uncomfortable possibility of using her
seniority to take someone else’s position.

Colleagues and family reassured her she would quickly find
employment, but Kern said she remained doubtful.

“I busted my butt. I worked really hard,” she said.
“I did everything I could to find a job here at the
university.”

Cederbaum also went to work, making personal inquiries and
providing recommendations. He also extended Kern’s stay in
the department, finding funding to support her job until she found
a new one after about two-and-a-half months.

“People took very seriously the fact that someone who was
here for 24 years was being laid off,” he said.

Kern got a position at the Geffen School of Medicine, and
secured a deal with the university that allows her to spend 20
percent of her work time on UPTE activities, for which the union
pays.

Still, taking the job meant accepting a demotion and a roughly
20 percent pay cut from UCLA, and perhaps most damaging, there is
no security. Kern’s position researching a lung development
gene is dependent on grant money, and it is uncertain whether
funding for the project will continue.

If not, she will be laid off again, likely within the next year,
she said.

Considering her future again, Kern said she will ponder entering
the private sphere for the first time if she loses her job. Her
penchant is for genetics and bioengineering, areas where
pharmaceutical companies offer career options that were rare when
she graduated from Santa Clara University about 30 years ago.

Kern said she would like to stay at UCLA, emphasizing the value
of research at a public institution.

But she also believes the UC no longer offers the promise of
stability she once knew it for, and she is torn because she
doesn’t view the university with the same admiration as she
once did.

“You used to feel, how do I explain this? I just remember
feeling like I was part of something important, that I was
contributing. … I don’t have the same feeling for the
university that I used to have,” she said. “I used to
have a lot of pride.”