Melanie Chan/Staff

Right now, the city of Berkeley is considering an increase in its minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would help thousands of residents afford the city’s high costs of basic living necessities, like food and rent. It would also give our university’s students a fighting chance to pay for college.

I am fortunate enough not to be in a situation where I need to depend on a minimum-wage job to support myself during school. But as a Cal student and a former restaurant worker, I know how difficult it is to maintain such a job while taking a full course load. Living on those wages while paying for tuition would be nearly impossible. Unfortunately, for many of my classmates, surviving on low-wage jobs is a reality.

A lot of people don’t realize that putting yourself through college is much more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. Today, tuition prices are higher than ever, and students are struggling to survive on a severely outdated minimum wage.

A couple decades ago, the total amount of fees due for the 1994-95 academic year at UC Berkeley was $4,346.50 for an in-state student, as reported in the fee schedule archive on UC Berkeley’s Office of the Registrar website. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, that amount of money has the same buying power as $6,848.35 in 2013. That’s half of the $12,864 an in-state UC Berkeley student is going to have to pay this year. This hefty price tag doesn’t even include textbooks or housing.

In 1994, California’s minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations website. That would be would be worth $6.70 today, as measured by the CPI inflation calculator. If the 1994 minimum wage worth $6.70 doubled in constant dollars like UC Berkeley’s tuition costs, students today would be paid more than $12 an hour. It’s absurd that the minimum wage has only increased from what would be worth $6.70 today to just $8 — or $1.30 in constant dollars over the last two decades.

In an ideal world, a full-time student would be able to work 25 hours a week, every week, earning $10,400 for the entire year. However, a more realistic picture would take into consideration all of a student’s responsibilities outside of class: doing homework, studying for midterms and finals, writing research papers and participating in extracurricular activities and internships. These overwhelming priorities are vital for a successful career after graduation, but they often make sleeping, eating and sometimes even maintaining personal hygiene difficult to attain for most college kids.

Furthermore, anyone who has ever worked a minimum-wage job knows it isn’t easy, especially in a restaurant. Contrary to popular belief, this type of job can be incredibly fast-paced, intense and exhausting. Customers don’t often realize that their server has been running around like crazy, constantly rushing to get the next order out for the last five hours. They don’t know their server’s friendly smile could be masking the aching of tired feet as well as anxiety about an upcoming midterm.

That smile is bright and cheerful because getting decent tips could mean the ability to afford groceries that week. Still, there’s never any real certainty or stability in tips, especially for servers at casual restaurants. Tipped workers depend on the noncompulsory generosity of strangers, which can vary greatly among restaurants. At least tipped workers in California can rely on the guarantee of the minimum wage; tipped workers in some other states are paid as little as $2.13 an hour.

However, here in Berkeley, we have an opportunity to do better. Adding a couple of dollars to the minimum wage isn’t a lofty or outrageous goal; it is a small but vital change that would better the lives of our poorest workers.

Raising the minimum wage for everyone isn’t an attempt to run beloved local businesses out of town either. A higher minimum wage would increase the spending power of tens of thousands of people, including Berkeley’s students — one of the city’s largest consumer demographics. It’s a hard fact that operating costs are getting higher and harder for business owners to maintain. But that also means rent and food costs are increasing for their employees as well.

Our college students and minimum-wage workers need higher wages, especially here in Berkeley. We desperately need a higher city minimum wage for everybody, including tipped workers. The cost of living in Berkeley is much higher than it is in the rest of California. It is far too much to ask of anyone to survive on $8 an hour. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a stagnant wage to adequately provide for the constantly rising costs of going to college and living a decent life.

Shannon Lin is a second year student at UC Berkeley.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post All we need is a fighting chance appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Today, we hear constantly that “taxpayers” shouldn’t fund such “entitlements” because they represent cave-ins to powerful unions. This is certainly not the case with the UC retirement system. The current problems with the retirement plan began back in 1991: During a state financial crisis, the regents and the state decided to suspend all contributions to what was then a technically overfunded retirement plan, hoping that its investment income would fill the gap.

Not contributing saved the tax-starved state of California hundreds of millions of dollars and softened the impact of state budget cuts on university operations. But it impoverished the UC retirement system. Within little more than a decade, as the disastrous consequences became clear, the UC Academic Senate began calling for the resumption of contributions. The state refused. Without state funding, the regents declined to restart either the employer or employee contribution.

The situation worsened with the financial crisis of 2008 and the Federal Reserve System’s policy of keeping interest rates at historically low levels. The financial managers of the retirement plan began to borrow from future retirees to honor the pensions of those who had already retired. They spent funds that they had counted on to generate the investment income needed to cover the cost of financing future pensions. The percentage of funded liabilities began to plunge, beginning a downward spiral that could have led to the plan’s financial implosion.

To forestall this, the regents boldly agreed to self-finance the employer contribution in 2010. To reduce the financial shock, however, they approved a plan to ramp up contributions gradually over eight years. The slow ramp-up meant that the unfunded liability continued to grow — to roughly $10 billion (yes, billion!) in 2011. Even with this year’s contribution increases and the start of a tiered system in which new employees receive reduced pension benefits, our combined employer and employee contributions don’t yet come close to covering the interest on this huge unfunded liability. We won’t begin the long, costly process of paying off the interest on this debt until 2018, when the employer contributions rise to 18 percent and total contributions reach 26 percent.

The state’s decision to shift the entire cost of funding the university’s retirement plan onto the university itself has had a terrible impact on students, faculty and staff members. Together with repeated state budget cuts, it has forced the university to keep raising tuition, pushing more students and their families into debt. It’s degraded operations by necessitating massive staff layoffs. Because the 3 percent and 2 percent salary increases that went into effect in October 2011 and July 2013 only partly offset the increase of employee contributions to 8 percent and the skyrocketing cost of health benefits, the decision has also created hardship for many employees raising families in our state, which has a high cost of living. It’s also put the university’s ability to maintain the quality of its faculty at risk by adding to the cost of recruiting and retaining world-class scholars. (Berkeley now ranks 24th in faculty salaries at elite research universities.)

Our new president, Janet Napolitano, should make correcting this situation one of her top priorities. She could start by urging the regents to reduce the current $250,000 cap on retirement plan pensions to $200,000 until the unfunded liability is extinguished. Except for top administrators — whose bloated salaries are so unpopular with many Californians — and some medical and professional school faculty members, very few UC employees are close to reaching this cap. Reducing it would ensure that the pensions of the best-paid few will not drain the retirement funds of the rest while the retirement plan is being restored to financial health.

Above all, Napolitano must use her political skills to remind those in Sacramento that the state’s refusal to fund the employer contribution threatens the university’s historic mission to provide world-class, affordable education to all qualified Californians. It is a shameful retreat from a legal obligation that it continues to honor with all other state pension plans. Napolitano needs to convince the legislators and citizens of California that the refunding of the current retirement plan is in the public interest. UC faculty and staff members serve the public. They are already doing their part to restore the retirement plan’s fiscal health. So are UC students. It’s time for the state to share the burden.

Christine Rosen is an associate professor at Haas School of Business and vice chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. James Vernon is a campus professor in the department of history and a co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post Fixing the UC retirement system time bomb appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Joe Wright/File

Students, like others who pass by the tents pitched on the steps of Berkeley’s century-old Downtown post office, may well wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, we’re all using the Internet now instead of popping letters to Mom in those disappearing street mailboxes, and the lines at that post office and many others grow irritatingly long as the clerks who used to staff them vanish as well.

A recent article in The Daily Californian attributes U.S. Postal Service spokesman Augustine Ruiz as explaining that as a result of a decline in mail volume, the Postal Service only needs to retain 4,000 of its 57,000 square feet of space and that keeping ownership of the entire building would not be economical. Disposing of a tax-exempt property one holds to lease space elsewhere doesn’t make long-range economic sense, but doing so doesn’t enter into the accounting of current Postal Service management. That the public paid for Berkeley’s post office also goes unmentioned in the service’s press releases. Indeed, the very notion of the public good represented by the ennobling architecture of the Downtown post office as well as the buildings at the center of the UC Berkeley campus has faded in tandem with the right of every American to have quality and tuition-free education along with a cheap and efficient postal service mandated by the Constitution.

Take a look at the materials, craftsmanship and design of buildings such as Doe Library, Wheeler Hall, the Campanile and Hearst Gym. Equivalent to those of expensive Ivy League colleges, those buildings and others at the heart of what was once simply the state university represent that taxpayers and wealthy individuals previously believed students from even the remotest parts of the state deserved to to become fully-rounded citizens. They were elements of two Hearst-sponsored plans that sought to create an ideal City of Learning on the hills facing the Golden Gate Bridge. By 1914, the treasury allotted a generous bonus to erect a post office in Berkeley worthy of the nearby university. It was modeled after Brunelleschi’s famous Foundling Hospital in Florence, Italy. During the Great Depression, the Treasury Relief Art Project further embellished the post office with both a mural and a sculpture at the same time that the Works Progress Administration set female artists to work laying mosaics on the university’s brick powerhouse east of Sather Gate. Those mosaics celebrate the expansive power of the humanities.

The language of the public good is neither spoken nor understood by those who now run both our postal service and once-public universities. Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe let Mayor Tom Bates know that he feels Berkeley’s pain, informing the mayor that “the Postal Service is the first to acknowledge how important it is to preserve our historic buildings, which is why we are going through a lengthy and transparent process to assure their protection before they are sold.” Three months later, Tom Samra, vice president of facilities, wrote that though he was “sympathetic to the concerns raised by (the city, elected officials and numerous other parties),” he was denying their appeals so that there “is no right to further administrative or judicial review of this decision.” Though listed on the National Register and paid for by the public it serves, Berkeley’s post office and others don’t represent a trust to those such as Donohoe and Samra but simply real are estate assets to be flogged by their exclusively contracted agent CBRE, the broker chaired by UC Regent Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Although not for sale yet, the decay of the classically inspired buildings at the core of the UC Berkeley campus suggests that those who run the university ever more like a business, rather than a public trust, regard them as plum sites of opportunity for more profitable ventures. While they have recently poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new sports and biotech facilities, buildings such as the magnificent women’s gymnasium designed by Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck as a memorial to UC benefactor Phoebe Hearst slouch toward ruin.

The physical decay and outright sale of what their builders intended as monuments of unaging intellect represents not just a betrayal of the public trust but also the loss of an ethical language that created a world-class university and universal postal service. We must recover that language to understand what is being taken from us and to whose advantage it is taken at our collective loss.

Gray Brechin is the project scientist of the Living New Deal based in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post Lost buildings mean lost history appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Phoenix Delman/Staff

Everyone should be able to retire with dignity with a pension after a lifetime of work. Productivity has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, but most of this increased income has gone to the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, these earners in the top 1 percent have made the decisions that have taken away pensions, so most will be forced to try to work into their 70s. 401k plans have not made up the difference, as 57 percent of Americans have less than $25,000 in their 401k plans and other savings. Many will be laid off at an earlier age and be forced to live in poverty or move in with their adult children. What happened? The top 1 percent have underfunded pensions, then claimed they are too expensive and discontinued them. IBM underfunded its employees’ pensions, then converted them to 401k plans, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars each for many IBM employees. United Airlines went bankrupt in order to stop paying its pensions, ruining the lives of many former employees. Is the UC system following this example?

From 1990 to 2010, no taxpayer money or student fees went into the UC pension system. UC employees were assured that the pension was so overfunded that the regents actually took money out in 1991 to 1993 and even 2002 to 2003. By 2006, the regents claimed that contributions were needed again but refused to allow an actuary hired by the unions to verify this. It took five years of litigation for the UC system to allow a union-hired actuary to even get the data. What was UC system trying to hide? The union-hired actuary found a potential $1 billion in savings. Meanwhile, the state got used to not funding UC pensions despite funding CSU pensions at 20 percent of salary — compared to a 5 percent employee contribution. Has UC management displayed competence and transparency in allowing this to happen?

Who gets hurt by these changes? In the case of the UC system, executives like President Mark Yudof come out unscathed. He’ll receive an additional $230,000 per year after his five years of service. But UC workers pay more for fewer benefits. For younger workers, the system has drastically changed the rules on qualifications for retiree health care benefits. As of July 1, one’s age and years of service must equal 50 — and one must be vested — in order to avoid cuts to health care benefits in retirement. These cuts could equal one-third of one’s retirement income. For faculty and staff members hired on or after July 1, the UC system has a new retirement tier in which employees must pay a little less and get a lot less, about one-third of what some co-workers will get and about half of what others will get.

Two unions, UPTE-CWA 9119 and California Nurses Association, oppose the tiered retiree benefits and are in bargaining over these and other matters. The UC system refuses to consider any proposals from the unions.

Before the contribution holiday, the sysetm had contributed two, three and five times as much as employees contributed to the fund. The retirement benefits helped retain faculty and staff members. Now, with two tiers of retirement, why would newly hired employees spend lifetimes at the UC system for meager pensions? And if these tens of thousands of employees do not stay, how does the fund stay solvent?

The UC Regents now want UC employees to pay more and get less, an experience familiar to UC students. It’s really up to us to say no to these ongoing shifts of resources from students and workers to, yes, executives, Regents with connections to development and finance, CEOs, consultants …

Turning the tide means working together to challenge decisions and priorities that diminish our future and the future of the university and working together to preserve (and, where needed, reintroduce) decent pensions for all.

No to exorbitant UC executive pensions; yes to decent pensions for UC faculty and staff members.

Paul Brooks is an elected staff representative on UC Retirement Advisory Board. Tanya Smith is president of the Local 1 of UPTE-CWA 9119.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post Employees should retire with dignity appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Katie Holmes/Staff

Four years ago this week, we saw the federal minimum wage rise to a meager $7.25 an hour. The state minimum wage has been stuck at $8.00 for five years. For a full-time worker, this amounts to just $16,640 — far below the national poverty level for a family of four ($23,550) and much less a living wage in the Bay Area.

Over the past three years, our Raise the Wage movement has talked with thousands of Bay Area voters about this issue. When asked whether they support an increase in their city’s minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, people overwhelmingly say “Yes!” On street corners and at grocery stores, there’s excitement and support. In community college classrooms, it’s not unusual for us to sign up every single student as a supporter, with many volunteering their time, labor and personal resources to the cause. Last November in San Jose, 60 percent of voters in this politically moderate city said yes to an increase to $10 for all workers — despite being bombarded with hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars predicting doom and catastrophe if the measure passed.

Katie Holmes/Staff

Why such overwhelming support? Because average voters have a basic sense of fairness. They understand that people who work hard and play by the rules should make a decent living. They understand that the challenges of small and local businesses cannot be solved by squeezing our most vulnerable workers to do more with less. They understand that when you give a raise to a low-wage worker, most of that money goes right back into the local economy.

If you listened to the naysayers, you would believe that poverty is simply an impossible problem to address. But if you talk to the 40,000 working people in San Jose who now have $4,000 a year more to spend supporting their families, you’ll hear a different story. You’ll hear about having more money to put food on their tables, to pay their rent and to put gas in their cars so that they can get to work and school.

We have already proven that we do not have to wait for some distant and watered-down solution from Sacramento or Washington. We can lead the way right here in the Bay Area to provide a high-road model of economic development and anti-poverty measures.

Last April, Berkeley City Council took an important first step when Mayor Tom Bates introduced a resolution directing the city manager to draft an ordinance that would set Berkeley’s minimum wage at $10.55 an hour and build in an automatic cost-of-living increase pegged to the region’s consumer price index. This was a bold measure that matched the progressive values of this city. Mayor Bates’ measure passed with a unanimous vote by the City Council. Now, the city’s citizen labor commission is studying the issue, receiving public comment and preparing its recommendation for council action. A vote could come as soon as this fall.

Last week, 100 community members, low-wage workers and friends rallied in downtown Berkeley and marched to the labor commission meeting to encourage Berkeley City Council to continue on its high-road path in raising the minimum wage. Please join our efforts. You can contact us at www.raisethewageEB.org.

Nicky Gonzalez Yuen is the founder of Raise the Wage East Bay. He is the chair of the political science department at De Anza College and was on the steering committee for the San Jose Minimum Wage Campaign.

The post Raising minimum wage is obvious choice for Bay Area appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Yi Zhong/Staff

It’s 8 p.m. Sunday night, June 30, 2013.

We just found out that the BART negotiators had no further proposals to present.

Paper in hand, we did the math. The last offer they left on the table meant a cut of more than 12 percent in take pay per year — times four years. This is the offer that we faced after four years of zero wage increases, four years of BART budget surpluses and an increase in ridership of more than 11 percent.

On June 25, the BART unions voted by an overwhelming 98.6 percent to authorize a strike under these conditions.

What were we to do? In addition to the economics, the district rejected the union’s safety proposals (which included safety lighting and reopening the public restrooms in the underground stations), and they also left their draconian management rights proposals on the table (such as invasive sick-leave procedures and unilateral changes to job descriptions).

These negotiations weren’t supposed to happen this way. We did everything that we could to prevent a strike. We got started with the process early. Our researchers began in October 2012 — the bargaining team, back in December. Despite our best efforts, the district stonewalled us and left us with only seven weeks to bargain the contract.

BART’s relationship with its unions has always been contentious. Sixteen years ago, when I began working at BART, I was told, firstly, to save my money, because we were going on strike (the 1997 strike). Then, I was told to keep in mind that the district (management) could never be trusted.

I was advised about how to perform my job within the framework of the BART system. How to get things done by calling on another Union Brother or Sister. They would be the ones to advise me about how to access the stations after dark, how to keep safe (by riding in the first transit vehicle at night), where to park my car, where to get a meal at 2 a.m., which high-rail vehicles I should request in order to perform preventive maintenance safely inside the transbay tube, etc. Most importantly, I was warned to never, never, ever trust that management would be there for me if I got into any trouble.

The BART transit system is the ultimate experiment in collaboration. Every station, every shop and jurisdiction operates as a separate entity and has its own flavor. The unions are the glue that connects this system. Going through the recent media, there is an underlying misconception that the BART system is a well-tuned, high-tech, well-managed transit system. BART promotes a vision that it has a clear understanding of how to get things accomplished, that all systems are lined up for productivity — all they really need is a flexible work force.

In my 25 years prior to coming to BART, I’ve never seen an organization with a more “exactly incompetent” managerial staff. The truth is that they rely heavily on manual procedures, institutional history and the discretionary passion of individual workers. So much of the system has never been documented. Contractors come and go without a trace, leaving regular workers to do forensics and reverse engineering in order to keep the system going.

Back to negotiations. The last few months have been an exercise in futility. This dispute is not about economics; it’s about breaking the unions. The new general manager and the negotiator that she hired for $400,000 has a history in transit labor relations that does not bode well for the unions.

Still, there is purity in the way that they are coming at us. They simply do not care. Our strength is our ability to withhold labor, so they respond by creating an untenable situation,and forcing us out on strike. They know that a successful strike takes planning and organization,and that due to the steady decline of organized labor in the private sector, the pressure will be heavily upon the unions.

The theory is this: If we go out on strike, we will lose money. BART will continue to beat us up in the press in order to break our resolve. When the workers come back, they will be angry.  It is management’s plan that that anger should be directed toward the union. To bolster the plan, they will blatantly violate the contract. They will retaliate and disrespect any union leader who showed any kind of backbone during the strike. They will resolve issues only with sycophants and toadies and will seek to exhaust the union’s resources by tying it up in grievances, arbitrations and court actions.

Brothers and sisters, on midnight of June 30, we, the BART workers, were a force to reckon with. We rose up in defense of all working people against capitalism. As the strongest, most powerful transit union in the United States, on Independence Day of 2013, we had our boot on the neck of the dragon, but we didn’t finish the job. For various reasons (to be discussed over a beer later), we let up.

The BART unions still do not have a contract; we have another deadline of midnight, August 4, and recent history is repeating itself. If and when we go out on strike again, it has to be different. Working people and youth are under attack everywhere. We need to join forces to protect and improve the standard of living for all working people in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

Please join the BART unions and the ILWU for All Out August 1 in Oakland for a labor solidarity rally to stop attacks on BART transit workers and all employer attacks on unions.

Rhea Davis is a 16-year BART electronic technician and the BART chapter vice president of SEIU 1021.

The post We need to hold inept managers accountable for BART impasse appeared first on The Daily Californian.

To no one’s surprise, the negativity came from right-wing, conservative, heavily pro-Israel groups who very clearly used the vote as a way to exercise their Islamophobic and racist agendas. Students at UC Berkeley and throughout the UC system should stand united in supporting Saifuddin, whose actions exemplify a student leader who remains committed to defending higher education and the University of California.

All the pressure came from groups and individuals with little to no affiliation with the University of California. Rather than assessing Saifuddin’s entire track record at the ASUC and her time working to register voters, champion Proposition 30 and stand up for all students in the UC system, the likes of David Horowitz and the pro-Israel group StandwithUs only focused on the smallest of issues, which have zero relevance to the UC’s mission.

Saifuddin has worked tirelessly to advance the UC mission. This past fall, students around the UC system worked tirelessly to register more than 50,000 voters and ensure the passage of Prop. 30. As the ASUC external affairs vice president at this time, I worked closely with the ASUC Senate for this cause. I can say without a doubt that Saifuddin was among the hardest-working, most committed student leaders on campus. She understands the importance of grassroots work; she would consistently take voter registration forms to different classes, meetings and even to extended family, ensuring that everyone understood the importance of civic engagement. When election time came, she phone-banked hundreds of friends, family and strangers to relay the importance of Prop. 30. This alone speaks volumes about how much Saifuddin cares about the university.

Her efforts didn’t end there, however. As soon as the election was done, she went on to advocate for various communities at Cal. In the spring, she secured $30,000 to create a food pantry in Berkeley in order to help students struggling to make ends meet. At the same time, she stood up to the administration to secure a meditation space on campus. These efforts were coupled with constant town halls and conversations with members of various campus communities in order to find solutions that would benefit the entire student body — Saifuddin is a firm believer in the power of dialogue and consensus. The critics, including UC Regent Richard Blum, cited her allegedly “divisive” nature on campus. I beg to differ. Her work to improve the campus climate was exemplary. She helped organize various events to foster interfaith dialogue so that people could start cultivating real relationships with fellow students of all faiths instead of being divided by different backgrounds and identities. And when divestment came around, I personally witnessed Saifuddin sitting down with her friends who had different views on SB 160 and explaining her reasoning in a gentle and poised manner. Even those who disagree with Saifuddin would agree that she was anything but divisive in her approach.

These traits remain with her as she champions the mission of the UC system through her work on campus. Freedom of speech and the embrace of diversity are long-standing traditions at the university. A true leader does not stand down in times of controversy but expresses his or her views and fights for what he or she believes in. And what Saifuddin believes in are principles that align with the UC mission. This belief, coupled with her passion for higher education and strong track record of making change, is clearly indicative of her strength as the student regent-designate.

Before StandwithUs was attempting to promote its Islamophobic agenda, Saifuddin was standing with the university. Before Horowitz was meddling in issues that didn’t affect him, Saifuddin was fighting for students. And before the folks at the Simon Wiesenthal Center were trying to silence campus advocacy and block Saifuddin’s nomination, Saifuddin was championing higher education. It’s unfortunate that individuals and groups filled with such clear hatred are trying to divide the university into a dichotomy where the Israel-Palestine issue defines a student’s identity. If Horowitz, StandwithUs and other groups actually care about the students of the UC system, I call upon them to go out and do just one thing to help the university, fight for just one policy to help students struggling to make ends meet because of high tuition or advocate for just one issue that will foster dialogue and understanding rather than spread hatred. It’s extremely disheartening to see individuals like David Horowitz make false allegations, make bigoted statements and promote racist tendencies rather than do something to improve the lives of students.

Fortunately, most of the board was not influenced by this Islamophobic agenda, although Regent Blum’s abstention is extremely disappointing. While he has every right to abstain, someone who is allegedly so
committed to the principles of the university should be able to look past disagreements on controversial political issues and look at Saifuddin’s comprehensive track record of fighting for students.

As a new wave of UC leadership starts, I urge UC students, alumni and faculty to stand up for freedom of speech and to stand behind Saifuddin — not because of her identity but because of her vast qualifications and experience defending the university. As for me, I have no doubt that she will perform excellently and, as her character has shown, will not stand down in the face of hatred. Neither should we.

Shahryar Abbasi was the 2012-2013 ASUC external affairs vice president.

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Virtually no one thinks “public servants” should be receiving taxpayer-subsidized payouts as large as $300,000 per year for life when they are no longer working. That’s because the money must be diverted from critical health and welfare programs, classrooms and public hospitals.

This is why — in the wake of deep cuts to schools and other public services — Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Legislature enacted the Public Employees Pension Reform Act of 2013. The centerpiece of that legislation was a cap on pensionable compensation for the highest-paid state workers. The current cap applies to new hires making more than $113,700 per year.

At the University of California, where skyrocketing tuition and dangerously understaffed hospitals have become the new norm, state pension reform doesn’t apply.

According to the AP, as of May 2012, there were 2,129 UC retirees drawing annual pensions of more than $100,000 — 57 exceeding $200,000 and three with pensions greater than $300,000. Many more will soon follow. Approximately 22,000 of the system’s nearly 200,000 employees receive salaries in excess of the new state pension cap. In 2011, almost 7,000 UC employees received bigger paychecks than Brown, and almost 600 received bigger paychecks than President Barack Obama.

To be clear, state pension reform would demand more of every UC employee. But the cap on pensions for the system’s highest-paid employees alone could eventually save as much as $130 million per year.

Let’s put that in perspective.

California just approved a historic tax increase to support the UC system, preventing a $125 million cut in state funding during fiscal year 2013-14.  Over time, the state pension cap would enable the UC system to save more than that every year in perpetuity.

It’s important to remember that the university is facing a pension crisis of its own making. For 20 years, administrators failed to make the required employer contributions to the UC retirement system — even as they dramatically increased the number of executives who will be draining the system in the coming decades.  In UC hospitals alone, annual management payroll has grown by more than $100 million since 2008.

So with all these golden handshake commitments, how is the university balancing its books?

First, it is demanding that its lowest-wage workers — including custodians and food service workers who make so little that they qualify for public assistance programs — contribute more and work longer in order to qualify for retirement benefits.

Second, it is asking students to pay more. In-state tuition and fees have tripled since 2002. Faculty hires have been deferred. Thousands of frontline campus and hospital workers have lost their jobs.

Third, it is shortchanging its patients and cutting corners on care. In fact, as more patients enter the UC health system, the providers they are entrusting with their lives are being asked to do more with less if they are lucky — and being laid off if they are not.

Patients are paying an especially heavy price. Just last month, a man admitted with a severe head injury at the UCSD medical center walked out of the hospital in his gown, only to be found dead in a canyon four days later. Sadly, UCSD has been trying to save money by monitoring such patients on video instead of having adequate numbers of around the clock, in-room nursing staff members to protect those who might be a danger to themselves or others.

This last incident prompted AFSCME to call the university back to the bargaining table. We offered a compromise that included a higher retirement age and higher pension contributions in exchange for safe staffing measures that could help prevent the next tragedy.  UC refused, doubling down on the insistence that golden handshakes for its growing legions of executives are more important than the safety of our patients, basic fairness to frontline workers or more access for the historic number of California students who are qualified to enroll in the UC system.

Such tone deafness is the single greatest threat to the UC system today.

That’s why we are now joining with a bippartisan group of state legislators in supporting State Constitutional Amendment 15, authored by Sen. Leland Yee. This common sense measure would finally apply state pension reform to the UC system.

By reigning in the most outrageous public pensions in California, SCA 15 would restore the trust of California taxpayers and bring fairness to UC workers, students and patients. It would put the university’s retirement system back on a financially sustainable path. And most importantly, it would end the absurd practice of diverting the UC system’s vital academic and health delivery resources into the already overstuffed pockets of its executives.

Kathryn Lybarger is the President of AFSCME Local 3299, which represents more than 22,000 Patient Care Technical Workers and Service Workers at the University of California’s 10 campuses and five medical centers. Read their UC Patient Care Whistleblower Report at www.afscme3299.org/putpatientsfirst.

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Dillon Bowman/Courtesy

If someone gave you 140 characters to share one message with the world, what would you tell people? Really — think about that for a second. Would it be a message of hope, of freedom? Would you share your words of wisdom or maybe give caution to the coming generation?

If I had to share a message, it would be a warning against ignorance. In this day and age, it’s hard to think critically — not due to any personal shortcomings but as a byproduct of the massive information flood surrounding us. Between rampant jokes about credibility of CNN and FOX news, many of us read The Onion because it’s a relief from the mental exhaustion of discerning what to believe.

To discuss the Middle East is almost always to fall victim to this trend. In fact, after living in Egypt for the past year and witnessing the revolution (twice!), it has become apparent that America’s perception of the Middle East is based largely on mass media misconception.

On the wall of Cairo’s famous Egyptian Antiquities Museum, which was briefly ransacked during the first protests, a message in graffiti carries the popular sentiment about the revolution–love is at its core. Love for each other, love rooted in pride of Egypt’s national history, and love aimed at giving all Egyptians a brighter future. Dillon Bowman/Courtesy

Yet if I tell you all about these misconceptions, I’m doing exactly what I caution against — asking you to read the opinion of one person and accept it as truth. I mean, what truth can I really share that isn’t just a regurgitation of my own worldview?

What can I share that isn’t inevitably formed through and tainted by my own lens of perspective? Yes, I lived and walked the streets of Cairo for a year. Yes, my stories are sometimes charming and funny, are sometimes intense and frightening and always make interesting conversation. But what I can do, though, is to connect you to the Egyptian people — not my impression of what they want you to know, but from their minds, unfiltered, directly to yours.

I asked them exactly the question I asked you at the beginning of this article: If you had three sentences or less to share a message with the American people, what would you tell them? I asked real people from all walks of life. Some were friends; some strangers.

This is what they told me:

Messages of friendship

Ahmed El Fiky:  “I may have some problems with your administration, but I totally love you and wish you the best. Many of my friends are American, and I don’t feel any hatred towards them. We can live in peace; we can stop fighting each other. We just need to say it out loud and build that needed bridge between us.”

Amin Abu Hashem: “Egypt does not view its relationship with the U.S. with animosity, not at all! Most Egyptians have a very positive outlook of the American people — just not the American government. We would love to continue on a path of mutual understanding and benefits for both our peoples. We’d just prefer if the U.S. government left us to handle our problems on our own.”

I made friends in Egypt that I’ll keep for life.

Messages of Inspiration and Clarification

At a pro-Army protest this spring, a young girl carries the cross and the Qur’an to remind the protesters that the issue is an Egyptian issue, and not one of religion. She is walking on a massive Egyptian flag, which had ripped and is being sewn out of frame. Dillon Bowman/Courtesy

Noah Kubacki: “Egypt has not and is not losing sight of the democratic process. In fact, they are leading the world in transforming what it means to be a citizen, to be heard and how to keep their governments accountable for the will of the people — something that may affect countries around the world.”

Ahmed Mousa: “Egyptians don’t hate Americans or America — any anti-U.S. sentiments expressed are, in my experience, more related to associating corruption to outside foreign policy.”

I watched a modern revolution materialize from the ground up.

Messages of Warning

Ahmed Mahmoud: “I would say, the standards you Americans apply to yourself and your country will not work for other people and countries, and it’s best if America stops meddling in the world’s affairs. I don’t see any reason why the U.S. secretary has to issue a statement of the USA’s opinion whenever anything happens anywhere in the world.”

Ali Wael: “People stood up for you before they thought you were the enemy. Now they believe you are destroying Islamic countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya — and you are trying to break down Egypt and Tunisia. I would suggest America keeps its distance.”

Nabil Khalifa: “I hope your government can understand and stop supporting Morsi’s regime, because he is never coming back.”

In conclusion

I left Egypt shortly before the evacuation of American citizens.

If you Google “Egypt,” “Egyptian News” or “Egyptian Revolution,” you’ll uncover the spout of reckless misinformation serving only the cause of ignorance. This lightning-quick spread of falsehood and pontificating ego-writing has come to represent the dark side of the Internet and mass media. One article will say that the Muslim Brotherhood is anti-democracy and harmful to global security; another will say that elections in Egypt mark the long-awaited beginning of a legitimate Middle East peace process. The truth is that nobody knows what’s going to happen to Egypt. I lived there for the past year, one of the most tumultuous in Egypt’s storied history, and I don’t know either.

If you really care about what’s happening in Egypt (and everywhere else in the world), take the advice of an Egyptian friend who wrote to me, “Watch international news channels every once in a while.” Don’t rely on one source of information, and don’t fully trust anything that isn’t a primary source. The world is a complicated place, and revolutions are massive, undulating and impossible to completely understand.

As I’ve traveled from one reality to another in my return to California, I can see that the distance between the status quo and mutual understanding still spans far. All I can hope to do is relay the voices of the people I came to know and help vanquish the specter of global ignorance in my own small way.

I’ll leave you with the best quote I received — one that reaches above conflict to see the world as one: “We are all humans, and one day, citizens’ voices will decide what happens with governments rather than vice versa.”

Winnie Cunningham is a UC Berkeley alumna. Andrew Seidman is a Dartmouth alum.

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Yi Zhong/Staff

Because I’ve just graduated, I know that I should be ecstatic. I’ve had a break from the seemingly endless schoolwork and the pressure to get good grades. Finally, too, I’ve gotten some sleep. And, fellow UC graduates, we’ve received a college degree from a system that “once again scored very well” among the world research universities, “with UC Berkeley and UCLA in the top 10,” according to the Times Higher Education magazine and as reported by the Los Angeles Times. So, naturally, I’m overjoyed, grateful and humbled — more than I can ever express. But I’m also scared about being in the real world. Really, really scared.

How, I ask myself, do I prepare for the challenges beyond school? Then I realize that after four years in the UC system, maybe I’ve already started to.

Before coming to UCLA, now my alma mater, I had a naive perception of college. I thought that surviving four years of honors and AP classes was adequate preparation for higher education. I also believed that my high school graduating class of 500 was the largest I’d ever seen, which, when I now imagine the nearly 30,000 undergraduates enrolled at UCLA, makes me feel, well, quite stupid.

Within my first days as a freshman, I began to understand the warning that “It’s one thing to get into UCLA — another to actually stay here.” Still, I never expected that I’d later be shopping for an inflatable neck pillow on Amazon and carrying a blanket so that I could nap in between writing essays in Night Powell, our library open practically all night. Worse, after what felt like endless studying and feeling pretty confident about my understanding of the material, I’d come out of a midterm or final no longer thinking about getting an A but just really hoping that I’d passed.

After experiencing this again and again, I felt really discouraged. At my most miserable state, I’d ask myself, “What’s the point? Why am I working so hard when I’m never going to use any of this in real life?” I became convinced that all I was learning, was that I was a failure. As a result, I started to feel very angry and very bitter about school, but most of all, I was just sad. I can still remember sitting in my dorm room Googling “What if you’re not meant for college?” in between emailing my parents, whom I didn’t want to disappoint, that I was having the time of my life at UCLA, as tears streamed down my face from behind my laptop screen.

Fortunately, after much adjustment and a change of perspective, my attitude shifted. I began to see that the UC system set high standards for us not because it wanted us to fail, but because it knew, well before we ourselves did, that we could do better. I learned that it gave us a tough academic environment not to make us doubt our sense of self but to help us figure out who we truly are — because it is in the hardest moments that we’re forced to ask ourselves, “Is this what I really want or what others expect of me?” Being in the UC system, too, has encouraged us to be more ambitious, because after all the sacrifices that we’ve had to make — the many sleepless nights, the overexerted brain cells, the tears — we finally understand just how much we’re worth and the incredible contributions that we can offer to the world. So even if we never remember any of the lessons from our classes (though it’d be nice if we do), I hope that the strong characters we’ve cultivated along the way will be invaluable to our futures.

Of course, I’m not as naive as before to suppose that the road ahead won’t be full of challenges and disappointments. My fellow bachelor of arts majors, get ready to keep defending your degrees against skeptical families, friends, employers, even strangers, who sadly don’t value our majors as much as we do. And to those with degrees in the sciences, engineering, technology and mathematics, many of you are aware of the cutthroat competition in your future pursuits, whether that’s in medical school, research or graduate school, among others. Add the continued after effects of the economic recession and the 9 percent unemployment rate in California alone, and it’s a wonder that I haven’t already hyperventilated as I write this.

Graduating from the UC system, as much as we would like to think otherwise, does not guarantee success. Nevertheless, I believe that the persistence, self-awareness, ambition and strength that we’ve gained will lead us closer to better lives than had we never been UC students at all. So, Class of 2013, let’s not only celebrate the fact that we’ve graduated but also our experiences in the UC system and, in particular, the difficulties that we’ve faced leading up to this moment. For only by never forgetting such challenges as UC students can we remember, especially in the toughest times ahead, just how resilient we really are.

Abbie Mendoza is a 2013 graduate of UCLA.

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