Students, staff protest fees at UC Regents meeting

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

As the University of California Regents held their bimonthly meeting inside UC Santa Barbara’s Corwin Pavilion yesterday, more than 100 students, employees and supporters from throughout the state protested the possibility of money being taken out of employees’ paychecks, and used to fund pension plans.
Though the regents don’t currently have a solid plan to begin extracting money from paychecks, Nicole Savickas, human relations and communications coordinator for the University of California Office of the President, said it’s not a matter of if, but when.
“It’s something that the regents are considering,” Savickas said. “We’ve come to the realization that we will have to start employee and employer contributions to the plan.”

But Ken Rivas, field representative and organizer for the CUE (Coalition of University Employees), which represents 700 UCSB employees, said the pension is currently funded at 110 percent and the regents don’t need to gouge its employees to get more money.
“There doesn’t seem to be an urgent need to have employees contribute at this point,” Rivas said. “Why negatively impact employees’ finances and living by making them put money into the pension? There’s not an immediate need.”
Rivas did however acknowledge the possibility of the need to dip into employees’ paychecks in the future.
According to Savickas, the need will arise sooner than later because the UC pension fund hasn’t had a contribution for 15 years. She said it has survived on interest, but its total funding is projected to fall below 100 percent in the near future.
Savickas said she isn’t sure what the regents’ eventual plan will entail, but said a deadline was set for July 1 to begin diverting 2 percent of employees’ pay into the fund.
She said that date came and went when the state’s budget didn’t include allocating 2 percent of the UC budget to the pensions.
Savickas said the long term goals of the pension system have been set at taking 5 percent each year from employees and adding to the pension fund 11 percent from the UC’s budget.
But the protesters don’t think their paychecks can be tapped any further.
Robert Pinto, a laborer at UCSB for the past seven years, said $40 comes out of his paycheck each month for parking, plus taxes and healthcare. What’s left over goes to rent.
“Most of my paycheck goes to rent,” Pinto said. “There’s nothing left. I save nothing. I scrimp a lot.”
Pinto said he went four years without a raise before getting one last year.
With mostly stagnant wages and high costs of living, Pinto said he doesn’t know if he could make it if an additional 5 percent or even 2 percent was extracted from his paycheck.
Santa Barbara City Councilman Das Williams attended the protest and called pension funds “one of the most important and basic achievements” of the labor movement.
While earning his master’s degree at UCSB, Williams became a member of the United Auto Workers union, which represents teaching assistants at the school.
He said if pensions are attacked by employers in one segment of the workplace, then another segment will follow.
“If these workers lose their pensions, I think everyone should be afraid,” he told the crowd.
Jen Smith, president of the CUE, said taking even the smallest chunk of money from UC employees’ paychecks would be too much.
“We’re on the brink,” Smith said. “We just can’t afford to do so at this time.”