UC Service and Patient Care Workers Will Mount Statewide Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Strike, May 1st
Union Files Charges against UC over its Hiring Freeze & denial of certain employee benefits to workers some of its newly acquired hospitals
For Immediate Release: April 15, 2025
CONTACT: Todd Stenhouse, [email protected], 916-397-1131
CALIFORNIA –In the wake of the University of California’s recent decision to impose a systemwide hiring freeze on its frontline workforce, AFSCME Local 3299 represented UC Service and Patient Care workers have announced that they will mount an Unfair Labor Practice Strike on May 1st. The strike will affect nearly 40,000 AFSCME-represented UC workers, with pickets planned at all ten university campuses and five medical centers.
The union has filed two new charges with the State’s Public Employment Relations Board. The first alleges that UC’s failure to provide notice or bargain over the hiring freeze and its effects on already short-staffed frontline workers violates state law and long-standing legal precedent. Additionally, the union has also filed a charge around the University’s recent decision to deny certain employee benefits to workers who were absorbed by the university’s recent acquisition of six southern California hospitals—even as these benefits were offered to workers at other newly acquired UC facilities.
“The University has publicly acknowledged that staff vacancies have tripled since the Pandemic, which has also fueled an exodus of thousands more frontline UC employees from their jobs due to burnout, uncompetitive job quality, and chronic understaffing,” said AFSCME Local 3299 President Michael Avant. “Amidst UC’s buying spree of new hospitals, its illegal hiring freeze and denial of certain benefits to workers at newly acquired facilities, will only serve to make these problem worse, and will jeopardize the quality of services our patients and students depend on in the bargain. Ultimately, UC is trying to save money in all the wrong ways—by taking away resources from workers—and that’s why our members will exercise their legal right to strike on May 1st.”
AFSCME Local 3299 has been working to negotiate successor contracts for nearly 40,000 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 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 this workforce that is 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 illegally impose burdens that will make things worse,” Avant added. “While no one wants to see cuts to Medicaid, Medicare or vital research initiatives, no serious person believes that an employer who just handed out 40% raises to Executives, added 2,000 new hospital beds, and sits on billions in unrestricted reserves should be abandoning its legal obligation to bargain in good faith and treat the custodians, food service workers, and hospital technicians who make these facilities run fairly.”
Alongside AFSCME 3299, 20,000 Research and Professional workers represented by UPTE-CWA Local 9119 have also filed charges against UC, and will join the May 1st ULP Strike. Picket times and locations for the action will be announced in days leading up to the action.
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AFSCME Local 3299 represents nearly 40,000 Service and Patient Care Technical workers at UC’s 10 campuses, 5 medical centers, numerous clinics, & research laboratories.
