On one hand, last week’s massive two-day strike by nearly 40,000 University of California workers was exactly what it appeared to be. Employees are falling further behind the skyrocketing cost of living in many areas where UC campuses are located, and they are pressuring UC officials to resolve months-long contract negotiations.
But behind that basic negotiating tactic lies a harder truth: Across multiple unions over the past several years, bargaining sessions with the massive University of California system have consistently reached toxic levels of conflict before they’ve really moved. And there’s no sense that that system is about to change.
The walkout was called by workers affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME. AFSCME Local 3299 says it represents more than 37,000 University of California workers in the service and patient care sectors.
The union and UC have been in talks for nearly a year on new contracts. The hospital group’s most current deal expired July 31, while the service sector — including custodial, transportation, food and other workers — saw its contract end Oct. 31.
But an unfair labor practice charge filed by the union in October with the state Public Employment Relations Board claims the university has taken a baffling approach to negotiating that has stymied talks for months. University officials dismiss the charge as meritless.
The labor practice charge is illuminating. It lays out a pattern of delay and obfuscation by the university, everything from slow-walking the sharing of critical negotiating information — such as job vacancy numbers — to the University of California abruptly changing its lead negotiator after months of talks and functionally trying to re-start them from the beginning.
Further, the union’s filing said, the university announced unilateral increases in health care costs for all union employees in the UC system beginning next year. (By the university’s own count, that would take in roughly 138,000 workers.) The AFSCME said the hikes, including 9%-11% raises in monthly premiums, along with increased co-pays and pharmacy costs, are being implemented “without advance notice or opportunity to bargain.”
Such a filing isn’t proof in itself, and the Public Employment Relations Board is ultimately tasked with deciding whether the union’s claims amount to unfair labor practice by the University of California. But the union holds up the examples as proof that the university is trying to squeeze workers in the middle of a negotiation — one definition of bad-faith bargaining.
“Instead of being a constructive and transparent partner seeking to bring us closer to agreement, UC has sought to drive us farther apart by withholding critical information,” AFSCME Local 3299 president Michael Avant said in a statement. Avant accused the university’s negotiators of “showing up unprepared and without authority to compromise, and seeking to unilaterally impose healthcare cost increases that will function as a wage cut on workers already struggling to survive.”
In a statement, the university said it has had “a robust economic proposal on the table for months,” noting that the union hasn’t made a counterproposal to UC since May. Coincidentally, that was the month that the University of California replaced its original lead negotiator, David Tuttle, with current chief negotiator Guillermo Santucci, according to the union’s unfair labor practice filing. Santucci, the union said, began by attempting to establish new ground rules for the negotiations — even though they’d been ongoing since January.
University of California officials say they’ve offered a deal that would give union workers an average 26% pay raise spread over five years. The union counters with research showing a decline in real wages and a rapid increase in the percentage of UC workers who would qualify as “low” or “very low” income earners as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with inadequate construction of affordable housing for campus workers.
In the meantime, jobs continue to go unfilled. In an appearance before the University of California Board of Regents last year, the system’s chief financial officer noted that staff vacancy rates had tripled since the pandemic, meaning that “even though we are running paper deficits, oftentimes we have a cash surplus” because jobs haven’t been filled. (AFSCME says the university repeatedly ducked the union’s request to know more about the number of vacant jobs throughout the UC system.)
If this grinding negotiation feels familiar, it should. Just two years ago, 48,000 academic workers, most of them student graduate assistants, slogged through a 40-day strike before reaching agreement with University of California negotiators. Their new contract raised wages for the workers, some of whom made as little as $24,000 while trying to live near UC campuses in cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Berkeley. The agreement expires next year, setting the stage for another battle.
AFSCME’s own members staged a three-day strike in 2018 over many of these same issues. The UC system’s librarians, meanwhile, needed 22 bargaining sessions spread over 12 months to come to recent agreement on a new contract after years of budget cuts and crippling staff reductions.
Whether last week’s action by AFSCME alters the course of negotiations remains to be seen. The university’s missives so far have been strident in tone. “Negotiations require both sides to work together,” the UC said in one statement. “We are disappointed it seems that AFSCME remains unwilling to do so.”
That is on brand for a university system that, increasingly, appears to prefer war to peace when it comes to its employees. What it doesn’t do is get UC any closer to agreement with tens of thousands of workers — and it’s not the first time.
