UC is being a Grinch, so workers went on strike

OPINION – Nearly 40,000 frontline service and patient care workers at the University of California are ringing in the holiday season without a contract. For full-time workers who are struggling just to pay the rent and keep food on the table, it means uncertainty and tough choices. For some, it means no presents under the tree, and a visit to a food bank on Christmas day. And after a full year of bargaining with the third largest employer in California, it begs the question why?

There’s a simple answer. Because the University keeps getting in its own way.

That’s why workers (including nearly 10,000 at UCSF) made the difficult choice to go on strike last month—effectively shutting UC campuses and hospitals down for two days.

It’s important to understand that workers didn’t strike over their reasonable demands for pay that keeps pace with the cost of living, or allows them to live near their jobs. They didn’t strike over rising healthcare costs, or the staffing crisis that has seen UC’s staff vacancy rate triple since the COVID 19 Pandemic.

They went on strike because their employer has refused to negotiate over these and other key issues in good faith. In a scathing Unfair Labor Practice Charge filed with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board in October, workers detailed how UC routinely comes to bargaining sessions unprepared, without authority to make compromises, and without providing critical information that’s needed to forge agreements.

Indeed, they detailed how UC has seemingly gone out of its way to sabotage these sessions—with public pronouncements about plans to unilaterally impose drastic increases to healthcare costs, including raising the price of diabetes and cancer medicines by hundreds of dollars each month, even though it is legally required to bargain such changes.

To use an appropriate seasonal analogy—it’s been as if UC mistook the Grinch who stole Christmas for the Elf on a Shelf, and put him in charge of their labor relations department.

So workers were left with a choice. Negotiate against themselves, or stand up and demand that their employer stop breaking the law and treat the folks it lauded as heroes back in 2020 with basic respect.

They chose the latter, and they were joined by thousands of students, patients, elected officials, and others on picket lines across the state.

For its part, UC has made choices too.  In addition to its failure to bargain in good faith it has brought to collective bargaining with the low paid workers who clean its facilities, serve food, and answer the call button in hospitals, it’s chosen a path of rapid expansion that ignores impacts on local housing markets, or the imperative of competing in local labor markets.

One group of workers that UC has chosen prioritize is its Chancellors and highest paid executives. They just got another round of massive raises, plus free housing and access to low-interest loans for the purchase of second homes, even as the frontline workers who make the institution run are forced to sleep in their cars. The university has also chosen to hand over billions of dollars, including worker pension funds, to speculative real estate investment funds that rely on raising worker rents, constraining housing supply or skimping on basic maintenance in order to deliver returns for shareholders. All the while, it’s chosen to let billions of dollars in unrestricted cash reserves and excess land to sit idle – even though both could immediately be purposed to address the housing affordability, cost of living, and staff vacancy crises that are actively undermining the quality of the services its students and patients deserve.

Every one of these choices—refusing to bargain in good faith, prioritizing investment in ivory tower elites over frontline workers, and the shortchanging of students, patients and communities caught in the crosshairs are avoidable and unnecessary.

And just as the Grinch himself saw, they haven’t dampened the spirit of those fighting for dignity and fairness. If anything, it deepened our resolve and our willingness to stand together.

It’s why on cold, rainy picket lines in November, the sound wasn’t sad. It was determined.

Because the callous indifference that has plagued UC, truly does affect us all. And solidarity is the best cure for a heart that is two sizes too small.

Liz Perlman is the Executive Director of AFSCME Local 3299, which represents more than 37,000 University of California Service and Patient Care Technical Workers.