Your Choice in Reading This Blog

As is standard practice on this blog, we give you a choice as to how to read it.

1) You can read it online, as you are now doing.

2) You can read and/or download it as a pdf file - i.e., book style - on a quarterly basis. For the third quarter of 2020 (July 1 - September 30), that option is now available. If you choose it, however, all the audios, videos, and animated gifs are omitted, although you may see links to some of them.

To choose option #2 for the third quarter of 2020, go to:

https://issuu.com/danieljbmitchell/docs/ucla_faculty_association_blog_3rd_quarter_2020 (read online as a book only)

Read and/or download as a pdf file:

https://archive.org/details/ucla-faculty-association-blog-3rd-quarter-2020

or:

https://ia801502.us.archive.org/18/items/ucla-faculty-association-blog-3rd-quarter-2020/UCLA%20Faculty%20Association%20Blog%203rd%20quarter%202020.pdf

Unfortunately, Blogger has a new format that no longer seems to permit direct embedding of book-type documents. You must use one of the links above.

Recovery Slowdown

[Click on image to enlarge and clarify.]

The latest monthly national news release on labor market conditions is out. (State level data are not yet available.) As of September, the official unemployment rate is still falling but shows some deceleration. Growth in payroll jobs continued but, again, at a declining rate. In the background is the failure of an agreement to be reached on further federal "stimulus" assistance.

The most recent news release is at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.

New Law Will Allow More Lawsuits in Heaps Case

From the Bruin:

A new California law will give people who were sexually assaulted at University of California medical clinics more time to file civil charges.

CA Assembly Bill 3092 will give sexual assault survivors until the end of 2021 to file charges against former UCLA doctor James Heaps. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law, according to a Tuesday press release from the governor’s office.

Under California law, survivors of sexual assault can only file lawsuits up to 10 years after the incident happened, or three years after they discovered their injury from the assault. AB 3092 provides an exception for people who were sexually assaulted at UC medical clinics, who can now file for civil action until Dec. 31, 2021. The bill only applies to sexual assault claims that occurred between Jan. 1, 1983 and Jan. 1, 2019...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2020/09/30/gov-newsom-signs-ab-3092-allowing-heaps-survivors-more-time-to-file-civil-charges

The DA Election Contest

Today's LA Times carries an article about the election contest for district attorney between incumbent DA Jackie Lacey and George Gascón.* It may be hard to focus on local races given the attention to the national scene. However, from time to time, we have reminded blog readers about Lacey's role in a case involving UCLA. Below is a summary slightly modified from an earlier posting.**

LA County DA Jackie Lacey is running for re-election and has a significant opponent in George Gascón. Lacey's predecessor as DA brought a criminal case against a UC faculty member for a tragic lab accident that should have been dealt with as a civil case. It was hoped that when Lacey was first elected she would take a different approach to that matter which she inherited, rather than pursue the criminal case, which at one point sought to charge the entire Board of Regents. Instead, she went ahead with the case as it stood. UCLA defended the faculty member and eventually the case largely dissipated and was settled. But in the course of the DA's efforts, another faculty member was charged in a totally-unrelated case on spurious grounds that were eventually dropped. It appeared that the DA's strategy at the time was somehow to hold the second faculty member as a kind of hostage to push for some kind of deal on the lab case. If that was the strategy, it failed. The bottom line here is that you might want to consider this history in making your choice in the DA race. 
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*https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-district-attorney-race-top-donors/

**http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-da-contest-will-likely-continue.html

Afraid to Come

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Few of the roughly 5,700 undergraduates who moved into UC San Diego dorms over the past 10 days tested positive for COVID-19. But about 1,800 students with reservations have yet to show up, underscoring lingering health safety concerns. UCSD said that 10 students tested positive, and that a few more are likely to do so during a second round of testing over the next two weeks. The numbers are slightly lower than campus predictions...

Last spring, UCSD became one of the first major American research universities to test large numbers of students for COVID-19. The testing became the basis for Return to Learn, an effort to house many of students on campus and to offer a limited number of in-person courses to the entire student body. The rest of the classes are being offered online...

UCSD also is phasing in a system where it tests waste water for the presence of the novel coronavirus. The school has already proven that it can identify and track down infected people using this technique...

Full story at:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2020-09-30/uc-san-diego-students-covid-19-tests

Guess they remember being safer at home:

Could money possibly be a consideration?

From California Today of the NY Times:

Pac-12 football is coming back, or so the league hopes. The conference, which includes Stanford, Southern California, Cal and U.C.L.A., announced last week that it would try to play football beginning Nov. 6, a reversal of its Aug. 11 decision not to compete this autumn. Alan Blinder, a sports reporter for The Times, talked with Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, on Wednesday. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation...

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...Cal’s athletic director said that playing football could help the school avoid a $20 million loan. Why should we believe Pac-12 leaders when they say the decision has nothing to do with money?

I think everyone understands that, regardless of whether we play sports or not, this is a significant financial crisis for athletic departments. The decisions that are being made are based on health and safety, well-being and other related issues, and the delta between how much you’re going to lose is just not a significant factor in the discussion. There’s a major loss regardless.

How much will Pac-12 schools collect because of football?

We are going to play a little bit more than half of the games we normally play. We’ll satisfy most of our obligations to ESPN and Fox, which provide the lion’s share of our television revenues, so we’ll be receiving significant amounts. But there will still be significant shortfalls because we won’t have all of the games and we won’t have a lot of football games for the Pac-12 Network.

But it sounds like you all haven’t settled on an exact figure.

Correct.

The league considered playing early in 2021. Why this fall?

It’s obviously advantageous for us to play when the rest of college football is playing. There were also two health and safety components as we thought about playing post-January. Playing any significant number of games, there were some concerns about how it might affect the preparedness and health and safety for the student-athletes for the 2021 season. How many football games are you going to play in one calendar year?

The other, as we talked to our university leadership and health and safety experts, while no one’s got a crystal ball, there were certainly strong voices saying there’s nothing to suggest there’s anything about the pandemic that’s going to be any better in January than it is now. We continue to learn with every week that goes by, but with flu season coming, with what we’re seeing, there’s no data to suggest that things are going to be safer or better then. Once we got comfort on the gating issues, everything kind of lined up to suggest we play now...

Full story at https://tinyurl.com/yadzq4yw

What do we know about California from new claims data?

Every Thursday, we have been tracking new claims for unemployment insurance at the state and national level for clues as to how the economy (of both) is going. But although you may see some headlines about new claims today, California has closed the window for new claims for two weeks in order to catch up with the backlog of unprocessed claims from the past. As a result, the state just lists the prior week's total. Since California is a big piece of the workforce, the US figures are distorted by the freeze.

In effect, to answer the headline of this posting, we know nothing. For info on the California freeze, see: https://www.edd.ca.gov/About_EDD/pdf/news-20-49.pdf