BY MARINA DUNDJERSKI
UCLA Today Staff
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Campus Human
Resources Lubbe Levin shared details of the new voluntary Staff
and Academic Reduction in Time (START) program, which the University
of California is implementing to achieve temporary salary savings,
with more than 200 employees attending a Staff Assembly presentation
April 23.
As part of her talk on human resource strategies,
Levin also outlined other programs aimed to help the university
and its employees navigate through these tough fiscal times.
“The key objective with START is to help
the university as a whole cope with the need to generate more
salary savings and hopefully, in turn, reduce the number of
layoffs that might be necessary to deal with the budget crisis,”
Levin said. “That’s the primary objective.”
As an incentive, staff who volunteer to work
less for reduced pay would not lose benefits, such as retirement,
service credit, vacation and sick leave accruals. All full-time
and part-time career staff would be eligible to reduce their
time. However, participation in the program would require the
approval of an employee’s department head.
The UCLA Medical Center decided not to participate
in the plan because many of its services run on a 24-hour basis,
Levin said. And faculty are ineligible for the program.
Here’s how it works: Eligible employees
would volunteer to reduce their time from a minimum of 10% to
a maximum of 50% of full-time.
They would continue to accrue vacation, sick
leave credits and UCRP service credits at the rate prior to
START. And they would continue to earn UCRP pension, death and/or
disability income based on the unreduced salary.
Staff who sign up for START will also be protected
from any mandatory salary reduction plan during the time they
are in START, should such a plan become necessary. Levin stressed
that at this time there is no indication such a plan is being
considered.
Levin announced another new proposal under
review: severance pay. If an employee is laid off, he or she
could request severance pay: one week of severance pay for every
year of university service, up to 16 weeks. Under this proposal,
a laid-off employee would need to select either severance pay
or the long-held practice of preferential-rehire status.
Other services that CHR offers employees include
the Staff and Faculty Counseling Center, employment assistance,
such as resume preparation and interviewing skills, and professional
development programs, where employees can “grow”
their careers in a proactive way, Levin said.
“A very big challenge for all of us who
supervise or manage others is to find ways to motivate people
and to continuously encourage them to do their best work, even
in an economic environment where funding for salary increases
or other tangible measures is limited,” Levin said. “Some
of these less tangible measures become just as important, if
not more important, in the current environment.”
More information on START will be available
at: www.chr.ucla.edu/chr/updatesnews_chr.
html.
