Year: 2013

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    Limited Order Bars Only About 50 Workers from UC One-Day Strike Today

    Byuclafaculty

    Westwood demonstration during prior 2-day strike We noted yesterday that UC sought an order through PERB barring certain critical workers from the one-day strike today. According to the State Worker blog of the Sacramento Bee: …A judge has banned a relative handful of employees who provide patient care at University of California medical facilities from participating in a statewide strike set for Wednesday.  Sacramento County Superior Court Judge David I. Brown said that a strike by about 50 AFSCME-covered employees, mostly respiratory theratpists, would “create a substantial and imminent threat to the health and safety of the public and patients…

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    Listen to Regents Meeting of Nov. 14, 2013

    Byuclafaculty

    The November 14 meeting of the Regents opened with public comments.  These included concerns over staffing and safety at UC hospitals, a Berkeley city councilman who called for pension caps on high-paid UC executives, students advocating fossil fuel divestment, concerns about student costs and debt, and spending on “amenities” for students at UC. The Committee on Finance approved budgets for operations and capital after extensive discussion and back-and-forth with Governor Brown who said that UC was asking for $120 million more than it was going to get.  There was a bit more push back from Regents and administrators with regard…

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    Possible Order Limiting Hospital Strike Participation Tomorrow

    Byuclafaculty

    Westwood demonstration as part of prior 2-day strike The State Worker blog of the Sacramento Bee is reporting that the Public Employment Relations Board is seeking to limit the number of AFSCME employees at UC who can participate in tomorrow’s hospital strike for safety reasons.  [An earlier posting on this blog noted that a tentative settlement with nurses indicated nurses would not participate.]  TAs who might participate would presumably be unaffected by the PERB action. The Bee article is at:http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/19/5924205/uc-medical-centers-bracing-for.html

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    UCLA History: Extension – May 1931

    Byuclafaculty

    This contemporary photo shows the location of the UC Extension office in downtown LA in 1931.  As is evident, the original office building is no longer there.  But if you click on the link below, you can read the extension catalog for May 1931 which featured a variety of courses on business, languages, history, and “Radio Telephony and Talking Moving Pictures.”  At the time, the extension service was run out of Berkeley with representation for the LA programs from UCLA. We had earlier posted similar catalogs:http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/05/ucla-history-extension-in-1930.html http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-earlier-posts-scroll-to-bottom-we.html http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/06/ucla-history-uc-extension-in-september.html Link below to the May 1931 edition:

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    Noted UCLA Sociologist Suzanne Bianchi Dies

    Byuclafaculty

    Suzanne M. Bianchi, a UCLA sociologist who helped alter perceptions of working mothers during three decades investigating changes in American family life, died Nov. 4 at her home in Santa Monica. She was 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her daughter Jennifer Browning. An expert on gender, work and families, Bianchi was best known for her research examining the amount of time mothers spent with their children. Most surprising was the finding she reported in 2000 that despite a dramatic influx of women into the workforce, the amount of time spent with children was relatively unchanged… She began her…

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    Listen to Regents Discuss Retiree Health on Nov. 14, 2013

    Byuclafaculty

    We’ll post the audio for the entire Nov. 14 Regents meeting subsequently.  However, below is a link just to a discussion of the issue of retiree health.  As blog readers will likely know, as part of the open enrollment, UC retirees who are out of state are being dropped from UC programs and given a flat dollar contribution to buy their own policies from local exchanges.  An external contractor – Extend Health – has been engaged to provide counseling for out-of-state retirees. According to the back and forth between regents and UC administrators, this change will drop the liability to…

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    New Nurse Contract Said to Avert Participation in Nov. 20 Strike

    Byuclafaculty

    Nurses at UCLA Hospital, 1955 From the LA Now blog of the LA Times: The University of California reached a tentative contract agreement with unionized nurses at its medical and student-health facilities, averting a one-day walkout that had been scheduled for Wednesday. The four-year agreement still needs to be voted on by the 11,700 UC nurses who belong to the California Nurses Assn., or CNA. Contract highlights released by UC call for annual 4% pay increases through 2017. The nurses have agreed not to join in a one-day strike on Wednesday in sympathy with a walkout still scheduled by the…

  • FYI

    Byuclafaculty

    [Neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric R.] Kandel, a professor at Columbia University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was in Southern California for the recent Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego and the Leo Rangell Lecture at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, where he is a visiting scholar. He sat down to talk about his books, his work and the state of neuroscience… Q: Is there anything being lost in the effort to map the brain, as proposed by the Obama administration?A: There was a worry in the beginning, when terms like this were being…

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    Info Needed on Open Enrollment Issues

    Byuclafaculty

    We are getting anecdotal reports of problems encountered during the UC open enrollment period for the various health plans.  If you are having problems at any UC campus, either with the actual plans that are now available or with the process of obtaining information and enrollment, let us know.  We are aware of problems with access to hospitals at Santa Barbara and Riverside and with out-of-California retirees who are being bumped off UC plans and given the phone number of an external consultant.  But if you have more detailed points on any of those issues, we would like to know….