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Third-year theater student Iliana Carter speaks at an AFSCME meeting advocating full employment f

It’s a routine morning in Lot 8, where several workers are busy directing drivers to double park into two parallel lines along the cars already parked.

Because of the parking crunch at the university, which was exacerbated by the construction of the new medical center, several parking lots double-park cars – or stack park them.

To mitigate the parking problem, 65 workers in the lots work eight hour days, year-round, directing traffic and moving cars.

Though many of these workers work full time and have been here longer than most undergraduate students, the university does not hire them directly, but through a subcontractor.

For the university, this means hiring an outside company to take care of what officials call a temporary parking crisis. For the workers, it means a full-time, near minimum-wage job with no benefits.

UCLA can support and approve the decision to contract out for services only when it is “consistent with protecting the core teaching, research, and patient care functions of the individual campus or medical center; is in response to a demonstrated, sound business need; and minimizes to the extent possible the impact on University staff,” according to the University Guidelines on Contracting for Services.

The university has traditionally hired subcontracted workers for expertise. For instance, an outside law firm is heading the litigation on the UC’s suit against Enron.

At UCLA, work is typically subcontracted out when it is considered “seasonal or irregular” or when the university doesn’t have the expertise or financial resources to put its own workers on a job, according to Lubbe Levin, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Campus Human Resources.

But there are a lot of gray areas, particularly in the situation of the stack parking workers. The issue has fueled debate between the university and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – the union seeking to represent the workers as hired university employees.

“It is difficult to generalize,” Levin said. “Each circumstance is unique, we do a careful analysis of what our core business needs are.”

While the university says the workers will only be here until new lots are opened, AFSCME members say the workers are providing an ongoing core service and should be hired directly by the university, even if their services will only be necessary for a limited time.

“When folks have been here for three, four, even five years – then it’s not temporary anymore,” said AFSCME organizer Brian Rudiger. “If it is nine months from now that stack parking is no longer needed, then we will deal with that as it comes.”

If the university determines stack parking to be a core, ongoing service – the way several students and union leaders already see it – then the workers could be hired directly by the university instead of going through a subcontractor.

The transportation services Web site says that there is stack parking on campus because, “simply put, the demand for parking at UCLA outnumbers the available spaces on campus.”

There are currently over 54,000 students, faculty and staff on campus, in addition to numerous daily visitors – approximately 121,000 vehicle trips to the university – which are counted by an electronic monitoring system.

Even though the university will grow by 4,000 students over the next few years – in addition to the faculty and staff to serve them – the university does not plan on going beyond its parking cap of approximately 21,000 parking spaces on campus.

According to the university’s Long Range Development Plan, the additional undergraduate housing that will be built will allow for the same number of parking spaces up through 2010. One of UCLA’s goals is to transfer the university from a commuter to a residential campus.

In addition to considering upcoming parking problems, the university also has to take a critical look at its finances to see what is more financially reasonable to do when deciding to subcontract out, Levin said.

“If you think about the current contracts, it is important to keep in mind that we have certain budget requirements with the budget these days, it is virtually in everything we do,” Levin said. “It would probably be more expensive to do all of the work by the university, but again, I am saying that in a very general way.”

The university also subcontracts the work of the people who clean the parking structures at night – an ongoing core service – because it would cost too much for the university to buy the cleaning supplies on its own, according to Associate Director of Transportation Services, Renee Fortier.

But because cleaning the lots is an ongoing service, the university should hire the workers cleaning directly, Rudiger said.