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Rita Kern, UPTE local president and a staff researcher was laid off last year because her positio

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Rita Kern now works in a lab in the medical school. Her current job has no security, unlike her p

Researcher Rita Kern’s relationship with UCLA, her employer of over two decades, is an embodiment of the good and the tough, the rewarding and the disappointing.

Her projects, colleagues and supervisors grew to become important parts of her life as she worked in the same Neuropsychiatric Institute laboratory for 24 years.

When California’s budget took a hit in the 1990s and the impact trickled down to the University of California, Kern took a pay cut while putting her children through college and coping with divorce.

But the biggest letdown came last November, when the unexpected was abruptly realized: the state funding that paid Kern’s salary for over 20 years dried up, and the university gave her 60 days notice to find a new job.

Kern, president of the University Professional & Technical Employees’ local union branch, said her feeling was one of lasting shock.

“Panic. Terrified. Was I going to get another job?” she said. “I hadn’t looked for a job in 20 years.”

At a university the size of UCLA, where bureaucracy spans all levels, the nature of layoffs is at once impersonal and intimate.

To legislators and administrators whose budget decisions lead to dismissals, the names and faces of those left hunting for new jobs remain largely a distant mystery.

But to managers who spend years alongside their workers, parting with longtime staff is a painful process. Kern’s supervisor of 24 years, Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Human Genetics Professor Stephen Cederbaum, said he felt Kern worked with him, not for him.

So when he found out her position would be cut, he took her aside to tell her in person.

“We had become friends, and I was devastated by the necessity of having to do that,” Cederbaum said.

“It’s not the university feeling a personal sense of responsibility,” he added. “That generally falls to the smaller unit, so I took a huge sense of responsibility.”

To Kern, losing her job meant parting with her research on hyperargininemia, a genetic disorder that leads to symptoms including mental and physical retardation. She started at UCLA doing basic research and developing models for gene therapy, and later took on management duties like purchasing equipment and ensuring laboratory safety.

“When you work on a project for a long time ... it becomes your project, to some extent. I mean, it really does,” she said. “There’s ownership of it.”

UCLA laid off 33 workers in the 2004-2005 fiscal year, down from 66 in 2002-2003, when the state’s most recent budget crisis began pinching the university, said Lubbe Levin, assistant vice chancellor of Campus Human Resources.

Those numbers do not include entities like parking and housing services, which keep separate tallies. In the medical sciences sector where Kern worked and has since found another job, UCLA let go of 109 employees the 2003-2004 fiscal year, according to statistics Levin provided. A large portion of funding in the sciences depends on grants limited by time and amount, so layoffs in that area tend to be more frequent, she added.

Facing grim financial prospects a few years ago, campus administrators asked departments to cooperate in cost-saving measures designed partly to prevent layoffs. Most notable was the university’s call to keep new vacancies unfilled unless hiring was necessary to continue operations.

Attrition kept the number of layoffs low, and Levin said UCLA lets go of about 35 to 60 employees any year.

And while administrators may not be directly acquainted with each employee laid off, Levin said they work hard to ease the job search for career staff. The campus provides counseling, help building resumes, and options for severance pay and preferential treatment in hiring.

Many departments reshuffle resources, asking employees to fill new roles, instead of letting them go. UCLA also encourages laid off workers to look into campus postings, Levin said.

“It’s really an investment in the talent that we have,” she said.

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Despite the university’s efforts to retain and improve conditions for employees, Kern said she feels the UC’s appreciation for staff has diminished over time.

“When I started out, I was pretty much straight out of college,” said Kern, whose first position was at UC San Francisco. “Working in the UC system in research was a career job.”

That meant employees were well-paid, with great benefits and stability, she said. State money covered much of UC research then, as well as education for students, who paid a $600 annual fee.

But since that time, reductions in government funding have left the UC operating increasingly like a private enterprise. A decade-long fund-raising campaign that ends next year has more than doubled UCLA’s annual intake of private donations.

Kern believes the university has become a more “corporate” environment, valuing workers less and focusing on the bottom line. She said while she can’t blame the university for California’s problems, working at UCLA is less rewarding than it was before.

“It’s been a slow erosion. ... We used to get regular raises, and now we have to fight for raises,” Kern said.

A major blow came in the early 1990s, when the state and UC went through a financial crisis and Kern and her colleagues were forced to absorb pay cuts.

Levin, who has worked at the university for about 25 years, said because retirement benefits came out of a fund unaffected by the budget situation, UCLA was able to compensate workers for lost salary by putting money in the amount of the cuts into workers’ retirement accounts.

But Kern said without immediate access to the pay, she was living off her credit cards. Going through divorce shrank her income pool, making it difficult to cover her children’s college tuitions.

“It was just the hardest time in my life to have a pay cut,” she said.

That experience attuned her to what she viewed as the UC’s problematic impersonal atmosphere, and was a defining moment in her decision to become active in her union.

Though Kern was aware that state funding was on the decline, she didn’t believe her own job would be slashed.

The devastation and emotions of being laid off seem fresh over a year later, as she shakes her head, recounting what she lost and the process she went through to find another job.

Kern said her first reaction was to seek funding in her department to pay her salary. She said she found nothing – it wasn’t the first round of cuts, and UCLA was tight on resources.

With a resume updated with her published papers and acquired skills, Kern applied for jobs as far away as the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center near Watts.

She explored the uncomfortable possibility of using her seniority to take someone else’s position.

Colleagues and family reassured her she would quickly find employment, but Kern said she remained doubtful.

“I busted my butt. I worked really hard,” she said. “I did everything I could to find a job here at the university.”

Cederbaum also went to work, making personal inquiries and providing recommendations. He also extended Kern’s stay in the department, finding funding to support her job until she found a new one after about two-and-a-half months.

“People took very seriously the fact that someone who was here for 24 years was being laid off,” he said.

Kern got a position at the Geffen School of Medicine, and secured a deal with the university that allows her to spend 20 percent of her work time on UPTE activities, for which the union pays.

Still, taking the job meant accepting a demotion and a roughly 20 percent pay cut from UCLA, and perhaps most damaging, there is no security. Kern’s position researching a lung development gene is dependent on grant money, and it is uncertain whether funding for the project will continue.

If not, she will be laid off again, likely within the next year, she said.

Considering her future again, Kern said she will ponder entering the private sphere for the first time if she loses her job. Her penchant is for genetics and bioengineering, areas where pharmaceutical companies offer career options that were rare when she graduated from Santa Clara University about 30 years ago.

Kern said she would like to stay at UCLA, emphasizing the value of research at a public institution.

But she also believes the UC no longer offers the promise of stability she once knew it for, and she is torn because she doesn’t view the university with the same admiration as she once did.

“You used to feel, how do I explain this? I just remember feeling like I was part of something important, that I was contributing. ... I don’t have the same feeling for the university that I used to have,” she said. “I used to have a lot of pride.”

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