On behalf of University of California (UC) librarians, the American Federation of Teachers' negotiation for higher wages is now at a standstill as UC officials have opposed salary increases due to budget shortfalls.
"(UC) essentially refused to bargain at all by saying there is no money. Their 'offer' was zero percent increase in salary," said Science Library Reference Librarian Stephen Mitch. "Moreover, they actually told us that we simply 'are not a priority.' This is amazing considering that inflation last year alone in the LA region was around six percent."
Mitch said that UC could choose to pay librarians easily from that 80 percent of the UC budget generated from their profits, endowments and investments if librarians were a higher priority to officials.
"The irony with all of this from our perspective is that UC has hundreds of millions of dollars in unallocated net assets from profits, endowments and investments, and though these have suffered from the economy, they still represent huge reserves, with which they could choose to pay our requested increases," Mitch said. "Instead they have chosen to pay us from the less than 20 percent of the whole UC budget that is state budget dependent. But this is a choice they make."
Librarians said that the UC's failure to match the salaries of their librarians to that of their peers in public, community college and state university libraries is unfair. UC librarians said that UC starting salary was 17.5 percent lower than Cal State University (CSU)'s starting salary six years ago. Now, UC salary is 23.2 percent lower than CSU salary.
"It takes expert librarians and research staff and, of course, faculty, to provide the top level of education and research expected of our institution by our students and the public," Mitch said. "The union librarians at UCD[avis] have a phrase that our Chancellor has picked up and has been repeating, but not backing up when it comes to actual budget allocations for the Library and its librarians. And that phrase is 'A world class university requires a world class Library.' Both the librarians and the Library, in this Information Age, need to be much more highly prioritized within the UC."
Mitch said that librarians are now in the process of building student, faculty, staff and regional community awareness around the issue.
"Our first effort, a petition this fall, was successful beyond our dreams. In just a handful of lunch hours we gathered over 2050 signatures of support from deans, faculty, students and staff," Mitch said. "Most people signing were in fact outraged that we receive 15 percent less than librarians in the other two California state institutions of higher education. We are also very concerned that though the campus library user population has doubled since 1991 at UCR, the number of librarians has not significantly increased."
The UC officials were unavailable to comment last week.
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