At its meeting this past weekend, the UC Student Association passed a resolution demanding the $15 minimum wage for UC employees be extended to those who work fewer than 20 hours and a resolution opposing the UC Office of the President’s continued coordinated monitoring of UC networks.
During the meeting, held at UCLA, members of the board also passed a resolution urging the university to commit to insourcing all labor and a resolution in support of implementing an automatic voter registration program for college students.
“(There is a) certain degree of lack of privacy that employees … are expected to understand, but students are not employees,” said Rebecca Ora, a UCSA board member who sponsored the resolution in opposition of UC network monitoring.
The resolution in opposition of the monitoring of various campus’s network data calls for more transparency of the costs of monitoring and the ways in which data gathered by the implemented devices are used.
Ora seeks to implement student representation on the Cyber Risk Governance Committee, which oversees coordinated monitoring activities. The committee currently includes one member of the systemwide Academic Senate and does not include a student representative.
UC spokesperson Kate Moser said a faculty committee has evaluated the cybersecurity measures the university has taken and decided that the university took appropriate measures to protect all UC campuses from cyberattacks.
“There is and has been ongoing faculty and campus consultation regarding steps taken to counter cyber threats to locations across the UC system,” Moser said in an email.
UC President Janet Napolitano announced in July 2015 that the minimum wage for UC workers will climb to $15 by October 2017. The UCSA resolution addressing this new minimum wage dubs the measure as a “deceptive exclusion” of employees working fewer than 20 hours.
UCSA President Kevin Sabo said the resolution, if realized, would have a positive effect on students’ lives. He added that the board also discussed food security, sustainable food practices and systemwide labor insourcing.
“Insourcing would not only ensure fairer treatment of laborers, but it would compel the UC to be transparent about its labor practices, save the UC money in the long term, and clarify the labor needs of our educational system,” said UCSA labor relations officer Timothy Irvine in an email.
The board additionally adopted support of an automatic student voter-registration program — an opt-out system that would automatically register enrolled students in the UC system, California State University and California Community College systems to vote when they register for classes.
“Not having to spend our efforts and limited resources on registering students means that we can dedicate all of our time and human resources to have a strong student voter turnout at the upcoming elections,” said UCSA vice chair Yanira Pineda in an email.
The UCSA board will next meet April 15.
