A recent discrepancy regarding payroll compensation has landed the University of California (UC) system in hot water. Thousands of UC employees, past and present, were underpaid slight quantities in each paycheck, totaling more than a million dollars in unpaid income.
According to the Sacramento Bee, the duration of under-compensation was between the years of 2014 and 2016. None of the affected employees were employed in academic positions but this failure to fully compensate employees affected all 10 of the UC system’s campuses.
In December of 2015, the UC system inquired the Department of Labor to investigate this matter, which occurred during a problematic transition to a new payroll setup. This consequently led to strain in computing workers for their overtime pay.
The UC made a resolution with the Labor Department in May with an official settlement of $1.3 million dollars.
More than 13,700 of the UC employees affected, who were undercompensated by at least $20 each, will obtain approximately $616,000 in damages, as well as $746,000 in back wages which will be compensated in order to cover for the three year loss. As The Sac Bee informs, this will average about $100 per individual.
Reimbursement is slated to start next month.
Kathryn Lybarger, President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299, the largest employee union of the University of California, addressed this matter in a statement last week.
“Working people living check to check have been waiting nearly three years for UC to pay back these stolen overtime wages,” Lybarger stated. “The University has deep pockets when it comes to bloated executive bureaucracy, but suddenly has tight pockets when it comes to paying front-line workers the wages they’ve earned.”
This incident comes after a months-long audit into the University of California, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, which revealed that UC President Janet Napolitano stockpiled $175 million in a secret reserve fund while simultaneously keeping it undisclosed from the public. She did so, as the audit reports, “by overestimating how much it needed to run the 10-campus university system — and then spending less than budgeted.”
The university system is moving to a single payroll system known as UCPath, which will be available for all employees. The University states this system change will lessen malfunctions embedded in the previous system. It also will utilize software that, as the university states, “pays in accordance with federal standards.”
The state of California ranks among the highest in the country in terms of tax burdens. Californians have the highest state-level sales tax, being at 7.5 percent and their state government has also established the highest marginal tax-rate in the country at 13.3 percent. The last thing that employees of the UC system needed was less money in their paycheck on behalf of an already dysfunctional, tax-payer funded educational system.
