RELEASE: University of California Service and Patient Care Workers will STRIKE over Unfair Labor Practices on 11/20 and 11/21
For Immediate Release: November 8, 2024
CONTACT: Todd Stenhouse, [email protected], 916-397-1131
UC Service and Patient Care Workers Will Mount Statewide Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Strike, November 20th-21st
CALIFORNIA –After voting to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Strike against the University of California with 99% support last week, AFSCME Local 3299 represented UC Service and Patient Care workers have announced that they will mount a statewide ULP Strike on November 20-21st. The strike affects more than 37,000 UC workers, and will occur at all ten university campuses and five medical centers. It comes just weeks after Local 3299 filed formal charges with the State’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) alleging that the university has engaged in illegal bad faith bargaining.
“By refusing to bargain in good faith, the University has made it clear that it does not value the frontline workers who clean its facilities, serve students food, and treat patients,” said AFSCME Local 3299 President Michael Avant. “If UC refuses to meet its most basic legal responsibilities to employees, we will hold them accountable by exercising our legal right to strike.”
AFSCME Local 3299 has been working to negotiate successor contracts for more than 37,000 service and patient care workers for nearly a year. The existing contract for Patient Care workers expired on July 31st, and the contract for Service workers expired on October 31st. In its ULP charge, Local 3299 alleges that the university failed to bargain over recently announced plans to unilaterally increase employee healthcare costs by hundreds of dollars every month, refused to provide critical staff vacancy and financial information relevant to the bargaining process, and detailed a pattern of UC representatives repeatedly coming to bargaining sessions unprepared and without authority to negotiate.
“For the past year, we have worked to engage in good-faith bargaining over the job quality needs of our members, and the growing staff vacancy crisis that is eroding the quality of services at UC campuses and hospitals,” Avant added. “Instead of being a constructive and transparent partner seeking to bring us closer to agreement, UC has sought to drive us farther apart by consistently being unprepared, unresponsive, and by announcing plans to sidestep the bargaining process altogether and unilaterally impose huge increases in employee healthcare costs.”
Last year, the UC CFO Nathan Brostrom told the UC Board of Regents that the university’s staff vacancy rate had tripled since before the pandemic. Research has since detailed a decline in real wages and a growing housing affordability crisis plaguing the university’s frontline health and service workforce, leaving many to endure multi-hour commutes, or sleep in their cars. The share of this workforce that would be income eligible for limited government housing subsidies has nearly tripled since 2017
“UC’s unlawful actions hurt both the workers it routinely praised as ‘heroes’ during the pandemic, and the students and patients we are here to serve,” added Local 3299’s ULP Committee Chair Monica Martinez. “It is past time for the university to change course, and to treat the frontline workers who make this institution run with the respect they have earned and deserve.”
AFSCME Local 3299 will be detailing, picket times, rallies and locations for its November 20-21st systemwide ULP strike over the coming week. Another UC union, UPTE-CWA has also announced that it will mount a ULP strike on November 20-21st at UCSF Medical Center.
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AFSCME Local 3299 represents more than 37,000 Service and Patient Care Technical workers at UC’s 10 campuses, 5 medical centers, numerous clinics, & research laboratories.
