UC Regents Committee Votes to Enact Furloughs

Amid rancor and outcry from employees, a committee of the UC Board of Regents voted Wednesday morning to force its employees to take unpaid days off in an attempt to balance its unprecedented $813 million reduction in state funding over the past two years.

The full board is expected to approve the plan when the meeting resumes Thursday. Unions still in contract negotiations with the UC system need to approve the furloughs before they take effect on Sept.1.

The furlough plan, which UC president Mark Yudof proposed last week, will implement a sliding scale of unpaid days off ranging from 11 to 26 days per year, with top earners possibly seeing the highest percentage reduction in salary.

If the full board approves the plan, the furlough program will last until August 2010 and affect most of the system's 180,000-person workforce.

Senior management executives, including campus chancellors, will be limited to only 10 furlough days regardless of salary.

Staff and faculty positions funded fully by research grants, as well as student employees, will be exempt from unpaid furloughs.

Yudof said the choice to implement furloughs was hard to make, but was better than the alternative of massive system-wide layoffs.

"It's better to lose a piece of it than better to lose the whole employment," he said.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, employees and union members chanted "open your books."

Most faculty will see an 8 percent reduction in salary as a result of the furlough days, decreasing salaries already 20 to 25 percent below those at top private peer universities, an effect UC professors said would make it nearly impossible to attract new faculty and retain senior professors.

"As a department chair, I cannot retain these people as well as hire people," said Sandra Faber, chair of the astronomy and astrophysics department at UC Santa Cruz. "We do not have that long because our professors, particularly the assistant professors, are gong to bolt, and we are going to enter an irrecoverable slide."

Before the meeting, a number of UC professors said many junior faculty are already considering leaving the UC system. If the furlough program should last longer than a year, Mary Croughan, chair of the Academic Council, said it will damage the UC system.

"We bought ourselves a year with hits furlough program, but we will not be able withstand sustained damage for any longer."

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