For the past seven years, Jeffrey Calhoun, an Information Technology Services (ITS) employee, has seen his team shrink from eight, to four, to three people. When ITS employees experienced a new round of layoffs in early August, Calhoun was all too familiar with the fallout.
“This has not been my first round of layoffs,” said Calhoun, an Audio Visual Engineer at ITS. “Every time we experience layoffs, we see teams shrink and they never grow back.”
This round of layoffs comes as a result of UC Santa Cruz’s structural budget deficit, which was first announced in February by Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer. However, layoffs were never publicly discussed as part of the budget relief effort until recently.
Lookout Santa Cruz published an article on Aug. 6 where Chief Financial Officer Ed Reiskin first mentioned UCSC’s need for layoffs. That same day, Reiskin provided an update to the university via email and the UCSC Newscenter website, informing the campus community that “reductions in positions” are necessary to address the budget gap, which sat at a $107 million deficit as of Aug. 20.
Across campus, people are preparing for what the “reductions” could mean for their futures. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has been fighting for more job security and better working conditions long before the announcement of these fiscal policies was made.
“Top level administrators are not feeling the brunt of these supposed budget cuts,” said Alex Santiago, an AFSCME 3299 student organizing intern. “It feels like the crisis is being pushed on to us, the students, the workers, the lower level staff.”
AFSCME 3299 represents service workers at the UC’s 10 campuses. They do not represent ITS, but represent various departments that provide services to the UCSC campus community.
“People only find out about these things by word of mouth. It tends to create a mysterious air of anxiety,” Calhoun said. “That sort of uncertainty just contributes to this overall destabilizing effect among the staff.”
ITS is responsible for a majority of the university’s digital operations. This includes managing internal networks, servers, and software systems utilized by the university. ITS has positions ranging from administrative, to career staff and faculty, to student workers.
In his seven years at ITS, Calhoun has experienced the effects of layoffs and unfilled positions personally: Employees are laid off, their positions remain vacant, and the tasks previously delegated to those roles are absorbed into others’ workloads.
“We lost this person from our team. That person left a year ago and I’ve been doing somebody else’s job for a whole year and not getting any extra compensation,” Calhoun said.
While layoffs offer a path to reducing yearly budgets, they can also come with the cost of losing unique or institutional knowledge and experience — much of which is not recoverable.
“It is supposed to be the newest [employees] cut, unless they otherwise demonstrate a valuable skill,” Calhoun said. “This has led to up-and-coming employees losing their position because they didn’t have seniority. It’s also resulted in some long-serving people here losing their employment because they did not bring those modern skills to the workplace that put a younger person ahead of them.”
Calhoun is also a lead representative for Technical Employees (TX), a subunit within the University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119 (UPTE) union. TX represents employees in technical positions at the university, such as Electronic Technicians or Lab Assistants. Although UPTE represents some of Calhoun’s colleagues, not all positions in ITS fall under the Technical Employee classification, and therefore are not eligible for union representation.
Dan Russell, the local-wide president of UPTE, provided his own statement to City on a Hill Press regarding the IT layoffs via email:
“These layoffs are yet another example of misplaced priorities in a year where UCSC’s Chancellor got a nearly 30 percent raise. There aren’t fewer IT needs on campus. Students, professors, and other workers will have to wait longer for support and that remaining workers may leave. For too long, UC has taken advantage of IT workers by denying us the benefits of union representation,” Russell wrote, referring to the positions. “Now, we are demanding that UC end its practices of using non-union work and provide meaningful job security by considering seniority on a campus-wide basis and offering workers facing layoff vacant positions that they are qualified for.”
In an email to City on a Hill Press, assistant vice chancellor and University spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason provided the following statement when asked for an interview:
“UC Santa Cruz is working hard to ensure long-term financial sustainability for the campus and we recognize our role as an anchor employer in the region,” Hernandez-Jason wrote. “We are a people first organization and every effort is being made to mitigate the need to reduce filled positions. Every organization manages the size and composition of its workforce, and we anticipate that there will continue to be new hires, reorganizations, and separations for a range of operational reasons.”
When City on a Hill Press reached out to Chief Financial Officer Ed Reiskin for comment, Hernandez-Jason replied and referred to the above statement on behalf of Reiskin and campus leadership.
Reiskin has made no further announcements regarding where further layoffs will be taking place since his Aug. 6 announcement. The exact positions threatened by budgetary layoffs are still uncertain, but it is likely that ITS will not be the only student services department affected.
“I see the layoffs as a continuation of a trend that has been true of the university the entire time that I’ve been here,” Calhoun said. “Things have been different at various points in the past, but, as long as I’ve known it, we have been in a crisis mode that will always somehow create opportunity for management to make the labor and personnel changes that they see as advantageous to them.”