UC wage standard a ‘smoke screen’

Review shows many contract workers paid well below level set voluntarily by university

In 2015, UC President Janet Napolitano announced with great fanfare that the University of California would become the first public university in the country to voluntarily set a $15 minimum wage.

But two years later, a review of audits and pay documents by this news organization indicates that the system is doing a poor job of monitoring compliance with Napolitano’s feel-good edict

— and that at least some workers continue to make far less.

UC’s largest employee union, AFSCME Local

3299, says the purported wage bump is nothing more than a hollow attempt to drum up good publicity.

“It all appears to have been a smoke screen,” said Todd Stenhouse, a union spokesman.

To make the point, the union provided this news organization with two sets of pay stubs for a single contract food service worker at UCLA who logged a combined 106 hours over two

“The key issue is whether vendors are meeting the wage requirements, and we have no reason to believe that is not occurring.” — Janet Gilmore, UC Berkeley

weeks at $10.50 an hour. Not only was the hourly rate well below UC’s $15 minimum, the union alleges the company issued the same worker checks in two names to avoid paying him overtime.

The union shared the pay stubs under the condition the name of the worker and the company that employs him not be revealed because the worker is fearful he will be fired.

“I believe it’s unjust,” the worker said. “We’re doing the same work as the rest of the workers there and they’re paying us less.”

Claire Doan, a spokeswoman for UC, said in an email that the worker might be employed by a company that has a contract with UC that predates the policy change, meaning the company can still legally pay less than $15 an hour.

John de los Angeles, another union spokesman, said even if that’s the case, “it’s just another massive loophole.”

UCLA did not respond to a request for comment. In a separate incident, the campus also recently ended a contract with a company that employed valet workers at the school’s hospital and in turn, the workers claim, hired part-time student workers who were exempt from UC’s new wage policy.

“I believe it’s unjust. We’re doing the same work as the rest of the workers there and they’re paying us less.” — UC contract worker

Fiscal stewardship?

The pay dispute comes as some campuses are shelling out big money to ousted administrators. UC Berkeley, for instance, is paying ex-chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who resigned after mishandling sexual harassment cases and the school’s budget, $434,000 to take a yearlong paid sabbatical.

“It’s a scandal by itself,” Stenhouse said, “but it’s a horrifying scandal next to Dirks getting paid huge sums of money for not working.”

As part of the so-called Fair Wage/Fair Work policy, companies that do at least $100,000 of business with UC annually are supposed to submit independent audits to the campuses proving they are paying workers enough.

UC has a hotline where workers can report concerns, but the union says it’s unfair to put the onus on workers to keep companies in line, particularly when their livelihood is at stake. And that hotline? It’s run by Navex Global, which, according to Glassdoor, pays communications specialists who field calls less than $15 an hour. The company declined to comment.

Antonio Ruiz knows what it’s like to feel trapped as a worker. Ruiz, 48, worked as a contract parking attendant at UC Berkeley for more than two decades earning around $12 an hour, or about half what attendants working directly for UC earned. UC eventually moved him inhouse after Ruiz publicly protested the disparity.

“UC doesn’t take these situations seriously,” Ruiz said, adding that many of his friends and coworkers have been scared to come forward with wage concerns for fear of reprisal.

These stories of contract workers struggling are not unusual, says the union.

And a series of internal audits of contractors conducted by the campuses and obtained exclusively by this news organization show that they sometimes go unchecked. Many of the companies that are supposed to prove they’re obeying UC’s wage rules never submit that proof to the campuses and some campuses don’t have standard procedures in place for reviewing contracts.

Not one of the five companies UC Berkeley tested could initially prove they were in line with the new policy. The campus noted in its report that other campuses “have had similar problems.”

This news organization reviewed internal audits from all 10 campuses and found evidence of problems at each one.

Vendors complying

“The key issue is whether vendors are meeting the wage requirements, and we have no reason to believe that is not occurring,” Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokeswoman, said. By 2018, she added, the school expects to have a system in place to address problems, which could mean ending contracts with companies that don’t submit appropriate proof that they are paying wages in line with UC policy.

Doan, the UC spokeswoman, said that by the end of the year, the system will add more information to the Fair Wage/Fair Work plan website and provide more training to UC employees who oversee campus contracts.

But UC faces ongoing backlash over an April state audit that accused UC of hiding $175 million in funds even as it prepared to raise tuition for the first time in six years, and an August state audit that said UC doesn’t always obey its own rules for deciding when it’s OK to oust a university employee for a cheaper contract worker.

“They are either unwilling or unable,” Stenhouse said, “to do the right thing.”