“Working the best job I’ve ever had in my whole life, I’m still … a breath away from drowning. I’m $20 away from being on the street. I am one car payment away from being repo’d. I’m barely surviving. I’m leading a substandard lifestyle because I make substandard wages.”
That is what UCLA worker Jaron Quetal told Bill Moyers Journal in June about his storekeeper job. On just $29,000 a year, he strains to support his 2-year-old son. After paying rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Inglewood and filling his car to commute to UCLA and his trade school, Quetal struggles to put food on the table. This isn’t right.
As Quetal said, “I don’t feel like working a full-time job I should be reduced to eating soup every night.”
Unfortunately, Quetal’s story is common for service workers at the UC. It is this day-to-day struggle that forced service workers at UCLA to join 8,500 other AFSCME union members from UC campuses statewide to go on a five-day strike last week. These courageous members of my union, who stood up for themselves and their families, are now back at work. They returned to work Saturday morning without a settlement of their contract ““ a longer strike would have been unsustainable for this already impoverished workforce. UC executives remain unwilling to take the steps necessary to lift UC families out of poverty.
Sleeping easy at night is not a luxury that Jose de Jesus enjoys. De Jesus is a food service worker at UCLA who after 38 years earns just $26,000 per year. In a video produced by a UC alumnus about how UC workers struggle with poverty, De Jesus explains, “Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about how I’m going to make it through the next day.”
UC workers have to make hard decisions. Just ask Leonor Orozco, a single mother who works as a senior custodian at UC Irvine. After working at UCI for five years, she only makes $24,000 a year and rents a one-bedroom apartment for herself, her three children and a grandchild. Orozco described her struggle: “I qualify for food stamps but even with that help, it is not enough. As UC increases our costs, I will be forced to make hard decisions like feeding my kids or going to the doctor when they are sick.”
It is unconscionable that workers at one of the most prestigious universities in our country are struggling to survive. In fact, 96 percent of UC service workers can qualify for seven different forms of public assistance, including food stamps, the Woman, Infants, and Children Program, and child care and public housing subsidies. Yes, you read that correctly: UC executives pay workers so little that they are forced to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. As taxpayers, this should have us all outraged.
While UC executives would have you believe they have no choice but to pay poverty wages because of the state budget crisis, they still find the funds to compensate themselves generously. UC’s new president, Mark Yudof, has been awarded a total annual compensation package of $924,642, nearly double that of UC’s last president. David Feinberg, the CEO of the UCLA Medical Center, is paid $549,000 per year. These UC executives ““ who are themselves on the state payroll ““ are being paid lavish salaries, while UC service workers remain in poverty.
Clearly, the problem at UC is not one of having the funds to pay workers sustainable wages, but of making sustainable wages for the lowest paid a priority. As Carol Vendrillo, a neutral fact finder appointed by the state, wrote in May, “It is not the lack of state funding but the University’s priorities that leave the service workers’ wages at the bottom of the list.”
The personal stories of UC service workers ““ who are in a day-to-day struggle to put food on their tables, meet rising fuel costs and keep a roof over their heads ““ outrage me, as I am sure they do the entire UCLA community. Therefore, I hope you will join me in telling UC executives to stop listening to their anti-worker lawyers and to start listening to the many voices calling for an end to poverty at UC. They should listen to the workers, their families, students, faculty, clergy and politicians who have shown incredible support for UC service workers by walking the picket lines and telling President Yudof that poverty at UC is unacceptable.
Finally, as the strike ends and you see these brave men and women back at their jobs, I hope you will tell them that we are all proud of them, that we value their work and their families, and that we will support their struggle for justice for as long as it takes until we end poverty at UC.
Harrison is a licensed vocational nurse at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and the president of AFSCME Local 3299, which represents 20,000 patient care and service workers at UC.