Two-Day UC Strike Unlikely to Sway Bosses

A strike by nurses and other patient care workers at University of California (UC) hospitals and medical centers entered its second and final day Wednesday, despite efforts by the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to block some employees from participating. UC officials said it would “threaten public health and safety,” the SF Appeal reported this week. The dispute involves over 12,500 employees, who are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union (AFSCME). Hundreds of members of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union threatened to join in a one-day sympathy strike on Wednesday.

According to AFSCME officials, the PERB injunction only barred around 120 employees from participating. Almost twenty-four of them had already been exempted from striking under the union’s “Patient Protection Task Force,” which allowed them to cross the picket line to help maintain emergency patient care.

UC officials predictably condemned the strike, saying it would cost them $20 million “to ensure patient safety” for two days, while completely ignoring how their own policies endanger patient safety every day of the year. Some of these policies include downsizing patient care staff, which reduces the ratio of nurses to patients. It has also resulted in a reduction in the Lift Teams used to shift immobilized patients in order to reduce bed sores and increase circulation. This is one of the more dangerous responsibilities of patient care workers because of the risk of lower back and other injuries and it becomes even more risky when there aren’t enough staff members to do it safely.

In an attempt to vilify the union and turn public sentiment against them, senior vice president for health sciences and services, Dr. John Stobo, said “It is completely inappropriate to threaten services to patients as a negotiating tactic—the health of our patients must not be held hostage.” Another official said that the staffing reductions were an inevitable consequence of revenue losses stemming from Obamacare (or the Affordable Health Care Act), which is reducing Medicare and Medical payments. Yet, according to one union member, the university’s hospitals have been making over $100 million in profits every year for the past 15 years (KPFA Morning News, 5/22/13), while administrative salaries have soared. In reality, the cuts have far more to do with maintaining high profits and administrative salaries and have been a far bigger threat to patient health and safety than a short, two-day strike.

While health care workers, like teachers and many other public sector workers, do provide essential health and safety services, this cannot be used to compel them to work under dangerous conditions that threaten their own health and safety. Wage workers have little freedom in the long term (one must work for wages in this society in order to feed one’s family)—hence the term Wage Slave. However, they do (at least in theory) have the right to withhold their labor in order to fight for better, safer working conditions, unlike chattel slaves, who could be beaten or killed for such impudence. According to Dr. Stobo, however, hospital workers do not even have this right because of their role in maintaining patient health and safety. (Similar arguments have been made to ban teachers’ strikes). Yet, if we take this argument to its logical conclusion (i.e., that patient health and safety trump all us), health care should be provided free of charge to everyone, since profit- and insurance-based healthcare result in thousands of preventable and premature deaths each year. Likewise, hospitals should be required to provide all necessary services to maintain both patients’ and workers’ health and safety, and not be permitted to reduce these services either to maintain profits or administrators’ bloated salaries.

UC and AFSCME have failed to come to an agreement on several contractual issues, including staffing ratios and the demand that workers pay more toward their pension plans. Unfortunately, a limited two-day strike is unlikely to cause enough pain to compel the bosses to concede to the workers. To make matters worse, many employees crossed the picket lines, including AFSCME members. The Los Angeles Times reported that 601 AFSCME members crossed the picket line at UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, out of 1,095 scheduled to work, a solidarity rate of less than 50%.

Censorship and Suppression of Academic Freedom at UCLA

UCLA Professor David Delgado Shorter has been asked to remove a link on his website that calls for the boycott of Israel, according to the Los Angeles Times. The university has asked him to remove the link and claimed he has agreed to not use the link in the future. Shorter claimed he never made such an agreement. In fact, he thought they had agreed to continue discussions over the issue and to provide an explanation of the campus policy on the matter.

Shorter said the link was one of a number of suggested links for his course “Tribal Worldviews.” The links were not required reading and were provided only as part of a “clearinghouse” of ideas.

The UCLA leadership was acting on a complaint by the Zionist AMCHA Initiative organization, a group of Jewish faculty that has accused other UC campuses of ignoring anti-Semitism and allowing harassment of Jews and that has acted as an apologist for the state of Israel.

While it is commonly believed that a professor’s job is to teach students how to think, not to think for them, exposing students to political movements, protests and other partisan activities cannot be banned or limited without also diluting or undermining the very nature of many courses. Furthermore, it’s a stretch to argue that exposing students to a cause is in any way condoning it or recruiting for it.

A political science teacher might ask students to visit the MoveOn.org website in order to study how digital fundraising can influence an election, while an ethnic studies professor might ask students to visit a hate group’s website to study how they recruit new members or to analyze the content of their speech.

Prohibiting political links on a professor’s website could prevent a philosophy of science teacher from posting links to organizations opposing stem cell research or those denying evolution or climate change, even those there are pedagogically sound reasons for asking students to study such organizations.

Such academic policies suppress academic freedom, critical thinking and learning and do little, or nothing to prevent the proselytization of students. Merely posting a partisan link as one of many in a clearinghouse of resources available for students is not at all the same as espousing or condoning a particular viewpoint. If our goal as educators is to teach students how to think, and not what to think, we must be allowed to expose them to a variety of resources and viewpoints, including controversial ones and ones we may ourselves oppose, while at the same time encouraging them to assess the content critically.

Davis Profs Endorse UC “General Strike”

In the wake of the savage assault on Occupy protestors last week at UC Berkeley, activists are calling for a system-wide “General Strike” on November 15. While they are confused on the concept and terminology, they are correct in calling for an intensification of their protests.

A General Strike entails the overwhelming majority of workers in a city or region refusing to work, whereas the UC actions are an attempt to shut down only one employer, the University of California. Therefore, it would not be a General Strike.

A system-wide strike is a necessary step in asserting students’ rights to peacefully assemble, speak freely, and participate in university life free from police brutality. It is, however, only a step, not a solution. Furthermore, it is only step toward defending the right to free speech, which itself is only a step toward their actual goals of lowering educational fees, ending privatization of the university system, restoration of funding to the system, and the ever-nebulous “making the rich pay.”

Students have won the support of at least some of their professors. The UC Davis Faculty Association has endorsed the strike, setting the way for the professors to walk off the job and join students.

UC Plans to Raise Tuition 16%

The University of California is now considering annual tuition increases of 8% to 16% over the next four years, according to the Los Angeles Times, which could bring the annual fee to $22,068 for the 2015-16 school year.

UC officials said that the plan would help families plan more realistically, by which they meant to say that middle class families should consider second and third mortgages, as soon as the banks start lending again, while the working class and poor should give up all hope of ever sending their kids to UC.

The UC budget for this year will be $650 million less than last year. Even if state funds rise by 8% annually, regents say that tuition increases will still increase to $16,596 over the next four years, and this does not even include campus fees or room and board, which can more than double the total annual costs to students. If state funding only grows by 4%, tuition would increase to $19,188 by 2015-16.

The Business of UC: Higher Paying Clientele

The California Master Plan for Education guarantees that every academically-eligible California student will gain admittance to the prestigious University of California. At least it did. Due to existing cuts of $500 million, and with further cuts expected, UC has announced it will no longer admit every qualified California student.

In order to make more money, the UC regents have decided to turn away local students to make room for out-of-state and international students who are required to pay $23,000 more in tuition each year than state residents, the Los Angeles Times reported today. Last year, many state residents who were turned away from the UC campus of their choice were referred to the relatively new Merced campus, which is seen by many students as the least desirable of UC’s many campuses. Over 12,000 students were referred to Merced last year, according to the Bay Citizen. However, even Merced is now starting to fill up, which means that many eligible state residents will be denied entry into any of the UC’s campuses.

UC Berkeley, which is the second most desirable campus in the UC system after UCLA, saw its admissions of non-state residents increase from 13.6% in 2009, to 31.2% in 2011, wrote the Bay Citizen. The Los Angeles Times said that non-resident admissions at UCLA went up to 29.9% last year. However, state residents have additional problems, even if they are lucky enough to be admitted. In-state tuition is projected to double for undergraduates to $20,000 for the 2012-2013 school year, if taxes aren’t raised to close the state’s remaining $13 billion budget deficit.

There was a time when a quality higher education was both affordable and attainable in California. As recently as the 1980s, fees to attend UC Berkeley were as low as $500-600 per semester, while a student could find a room in a communal flat for less than $100 per month. In those days, it was entirely feasible for students to work their way through college and not depend on their parents or have to saddle themselves with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. What has changed is that tuition and fees for both the UC and CSU systems have increased much faster than tuition due mostly to cut backs by the state. These cutbacks have been justified as necessary to close the yearly budget deficit, a problem that seems to get worse each year.

State budget problems are typically portrayed as “natural” or unavoidable. However, they are almost always due to declining tax revenues that have resulted from changes in tax law. Consider the following statistics published yesterday in the OB Rag:

• California’s richest residents currently only pay 7.8% of their incomes on state and local taxes.
• In 1997, only 579 wealthy residents got away without paying any taxes. Today there are 2,431wealthy residents who are paying absolutely no state taxes.
• Corporate taxes provided 12.4% of the General fund last year, down from 14.6% in 1980-1981.
• Corporate tax cuts implemented in 2008 and again in 2009 are estimated to cost the state $2 billion in revenues.
• The corporate tax rate is officially 8.84%, but is effectively only 4.7% due to loopholes.

March 2nd Day of Action in Review

At UC Berkeley, 9 protesters chained themselves together on the ledge of the roof of Wheeler Hall as part of the March 2^nd National Day of Action for Public Education. The activists were demanding that recent tuition hikes be repealed. They also demanded rollbacks of the 32% fee hike implemented in 2009 and an end to police repression of protesters. Their action followed the arrest of 17 students who had occupied Wheeler Hall the night before. The activists eventually came down from the roof after the administration agreed to allow them to meet with the chancellor and offered probation to those arrested rather than jail, fines or expulsion.

At UC Santa Cruz, students rallied on campus on March 2^nd with many staging a sit-in to protest budget cuts. The sit-in lasted over night. The protesters demanded a moratorium on cuts to academic divisions, library or other instructional services; an end to wage and benefits cuts to employees; the re-opening of daycare facilities for students and staff; a 32% cut to administrators’ salaries; and no disciplinary actions against student activists. They also demanded that administration work with them to create an Ethnic Studies Department and Major, something they’ve been fighting for since 1981.

In a related protest on the UCSC campus, about 500 students spelled out the words FREE EDUCATION with their naked bodies on an athletic field.

“Green Card” Marriages Make College Affordable

Wedding Cake for Gaming UC (Eric I.E.)

According to the Bay Citizen, students are placing ads on Facebook to find California residents willing to marry them so they can avoid paying out-of-state tuition for the University of California. 

Non-residents of California must pay $30,000 per year (not including food and housing) to attend UC. This is approximately $22,000 more per year than California residents must pay.

One student estimates that such a marriage saved her $50,000 over the course of her college career. The Bay Citizen was able to find nine couples who married solely to benefit from the lower tuition. Understandably, most people are unwilling to identify themselves or admit to doing this, even though it does not break any laws. Since the 2007-08 school year, tuition at UC campuses has gone up from $7,500 to $11,000 for in-state students and from $26,000 to $33,000 for out-of-state students.