ORANGE : 100 Protest High-Level Raises by UC

Waving signs and chanting, about 100 rank-and-file UC Irvine employees Wednesday protested pay increases for UC hospital administrators, saying that hospital workers are suffering pay cuts and layoffs while bosses are getting an average 21% pay hike over the next two years.

The orderly demonstration, called “an informational picket,” was staged on the sidewalks at the main entrance to UCI Medical Center on The City Drive.

“The university is continuing to lay people off, yet it seems to find money to give pay raises to administrators,” said Karen Taber, president of a UCI local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The protest lasted about 90 minutes and drew attention to the UC Board of Regents’ Nov. 19 vote to give hospital administrators a two-phase pay raise, starting July 1. The majority of the regents had said hospital administrators in the UC system are underpaid, compared to other hospitals.

But the regents’ action and explanations have angered rank-and-file UC employees, many of whom had to take temporary pay cuts last summer.

“I had a 5% pay cut from July 1 until Oct. 31,” said one of the protesters, Susanne Freeland, a UCI clerk from Anaheim. “And there’s still the possibility of another 2.6% cut that would be retroactive. Here they’re cutting our wages and yet giving pay increases to executives.”

An Oakland-based spokesman for the UC system on Wednesday defended the pay raise. “The regents concluded that maintaining top business management is vital to the hospitals’ ability to remain economically viable in an increasingly competitive health-care marketplace,” said Mike Lassiter, a UC spokesman.

Lassiter added, “Even with the approved salary increase, the UC hospital administrators will earn only the average of what their counterparts at other institutions made in 1991.”

The protesters, however, said the pay raises for the administrators are exceedingly generous. Many of them were especially critical of the two-year pay raise going to UCI Medical Center Director Mary A. Piccione. Piccione’s $153,500 annual salary will rise to $176,500 next July 1 and to $192,000 the following year.

“The money the administrators are getting in pay raises is something I can only dream about,” said Louise Anderson of Mission Viejo, who was laid off in September from her position as a contracts administrator for UCI.