UCSF medical center’s CEO gets pay boost to $1 million-plus

University of California regents have boosted the annual pay of UCSF Medical Center’s chief executive past the $1 million mark, a move criticized by advocates for janitors who became embroiled in a labor dispute with the hospital after their pay was cut nearly in half.

At their health committee meeting Thursday, the regents awarded Mark Laret a 5 percent pay hike, a $50,000 increase that raised his base salary to $1,041,543.

“You’d think that an institution like UCSF would have a sensitivity to those issues,” said San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, who in February supported the supervisors’ resolution calling on UCSF to “rectify serious breaches of workers’ rights” in the janitors dispute.

“I don’t think UCSF has any inkling of what social justice means, and you can’t separate the regents from UCSF,” said Yee, who visited UCSF last week with Board of Supervisors President London Breed to urge Chancellor Sam Hawgood to drop the probation requirement.

“Laret’s raise is probably peanuts to him, but it is far more than many of his own employees and thousands of low-wage, MediCal-reliant UC contract workers make in a year,” said Todd Stenhouse, a spokesman for the union representing the janitors, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

UC’s tone deafness to the plight of these workers (and) contempt for basic standards of public accountability ... seems to know no bounds.