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“Our members are exercising their legal right to strike because the University’s illegal layoff scheme is both financially unjustified and will hurt patients,” said AFSCME Local 3299 President Michael Avant. Indeed, they will make the existing staffing shortages plaguing UC’s rapidly expanding and highly profitable hospitals even worse. Workers and patients at UCSF and UCSD have already begun voicing concerns about the impact of UC's layoff scheme. "UCSF laid off dedicated workers who are struggling to get by, while hiring two new executives that will cost the Medical Center $2 million dollars per year," said UCSF Hospital Unit Service Coordinator Aggie Bolos. "That's not right." "For the past four years, I made a difference in people's recovery," said Melanie Zuk-Maya, a Physical Therapist Assistant who received a layoff notice from UCSF. "Now all that has stopped, and I worry and wonder if my patients will get timely rehab visits now." “I’m not just a worker, but I’m also a patient who is working to recover from an accident,” said UCSD Respiratory Care Practitioner Bianca Brown. “These layoffs have stopped my recovery journey in its tracks, and it is now taking several weeks to schedule routine appointments. Cuts like these can dramatically change our health outcomes for the worse.” In its Unfair Labor Practice charge that was filed with the Public Employment Relations Board earlier this month, Local 3299 detailed the university’s failure to notify or bargain with union officials over the layoffs. Most affected workers were placed on immediate involuntary leave pending separation from employment, depriving the union of any opportunity to bargain over any aspect of the layoffs, let alone persuade the University to consider alternatives. AFSCME faults the University for having the wrong financial priorities: UC is laying off workers while wasting money on contract vendors who perform the same jobs as UC employees at higher cost; it is choosing not to challenge the Trump Administration’s termination of federal grants in court; UCSF Health is hiring for two newly created million dollar executive positions; and UCSD Health is hoping to acquire two additional hospitals which would bring the number of new hospitals in the system to ten. “UC has a legal, financial, and moral obligation to consider alternatives to layoffs—especially when layoffs 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.” Though UC is responsible for creating staffing contingencies to support its operations during this legally protected strike activity, AFSCME Local 3299 has voluntarily exempted a small number of critical care workers from strike participation and created a patient protection task force---a line of communication with UC hospitals--that will enable certain striking workers to support emergencies during the work stoppage if UC’s contingency plans are insufficient to meet patient needs. Background: In 2023, the UC CFO Nathan Brostrom told the UC Board of Regents that the university’s staff vacancy rate had tripledsince 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. 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. “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 laying off workers, nor abandoning its legal obligation to bargain in good faith with them.” ####
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