UC Service and Patient Care Workers To Mount ULP Strikes at UC San Diego on July 22 and at UC San Francisco on July 25th
For Immediate Release: July 8, 2025 | CONTACT: Todd Stenhouse, toddstenhouse@gmail.com, 916-397-1131
UC Patient Care Workers To Mount ULP Strikes at UCSD on July 22 and UCSF on July 25th; Service Workers to Strike in Sympathy
Union Files Charges against UC over Imposition of Hospital Staff Layoffs
CALIFORNIA –AFSCME Local 3299 represented UC Patient Care and Service workers announced today that they will mount one-day Unfair Labor Practice and Sympathy Strikes at UC San Diego on July 22nd and at UC San Francisco on July 25th. The action comes after UC imposed approximately 140 frontline patient care staff layoffs across both campuses. The union has filed ULP charges with the State’s Public Employment Relations Board, detailing how UC broke the law by failing to provide advance notice or bargain over its layoff plans, which will further strain the university’s already short-staffed frontline workforce. All told, the strikes will affect nearly 10,000 AFSCME-represented UC workers.
“The University’s layoff scheme is not only illegal, it is financially unnecessary and will ultimately harm workers and erode patient care quality,” said AFSCME Local 3299 President and UCSD Patient Transporter Michael Avant. “UC’s rapidly expanding and chronically understaffed hospitals are extremely profitable. Layoffs will only serve to jeopardize the quality care our patients rely on, by putting new burdens on remaining staff and extending the university’s reliance on less-experienced private contractors who cost more than employees and which is already the subject of litigation.”
In its Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charge that was filed with the Public Employment Relations Board this week, Local 3299 detailed the university’s failure to notify or bargain with union officials over the patient care layoffs, and the university’s failure to seek cost saving alternatives: such as challenging the Trump Administration’s cancellation of federal grants in court, cancelling its plans to hire more high priced hospital executives, foregoing additional hospital and campus acquisitions, or cancelling vendor contracts who perform the same jobs as UC employees at higher cost.
“UC has a legal, financial, and moral obligation to consider alternatives to layoffs—especially when they could undermine the quality of patient care,” Avant continued. “Cutting the lowest-paid frontline patient care positions out of the hospitals’ labor budgets and adding their duties to remaining staff was the option with the greatest human toll, but it was the only option UC considered. That is why we have filed charges with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board, and why our members will exercise their legally protected right to strike.”
AFSCME Local 3299 has been working to negotiate successor contracts for nearly 40,000 service and patient care workers for more than a year. The existing contract for Patient Care workers expired on July 31st, and the contract for Service workers expired on October 31st. During this process, the university has faced numerous labor disruptions due to repeated acts of illegal bad faith bargaining—including limiting employee speech rights, making unilateral changes to employee health plans, enacting a systemwide hiring freeze, and most recently, imposing new contract terms on workers that leave them worse off financially than they were in 2017.
Background:
In 2023, the UC CFO Nathan Brostrom told the UC Board of Regents that the university’s staff vacancy rate had tripled since the COVID 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 these workers that are income eligible for limited government housing subsidies has nearly tripled since 2017. The weight of short staffing and uncompetitive job quality has led more than 13,000 AFSCME 3299 represented UC service and patient care technical workers—or more than a third of these vital workforce segments–to voluntarily leave their jobs in the past three years.
“Instead of engaging constructively with frontline workers over their well-founded staffing and cost of living concerns, UC keeps choosing to bypass bargaining and make things worse,” Avant added. “No serious person believes that an employer who hands out 40% raises to Executives, keeps buying new facilities, and sits on billions in unrestricted reserves should be abandoning its legal obligation to bargain in good faith with the custodians, food service workers, and the hospital technicians who make UC facilities run.”
Picket times and locations for the July 22nd and 25th ULP and Sympathy Strikes will be announced in days leading up to the actions.
