Thousands of University of California healthcare, research and technology employees voted to authorize strikes, citing systemic and ongoing staff shortages that undermine patient care and undermine research actions.
The strike mandate was amid intense negotiations between the university and the university’s professional and technical staff, CWA Local 9119, which represents nearly 20,000 employees in various research laboratories and medical facilities in the 10-campus UC system.
Union workers include nurse case managers, mental health consultants, optometrists, pharmacists, physical therapists, clinical researchers, IT analysts and animal health technicians.
The union said it plans to conduct a three-day strike starting on February 26.
The strike could impact hospitals and clinic operations and UC’s research on cancer, food safety, virology, climate change and other issues. Among the union members are lab technicians who are lab technicians at the University of California, Davis, which is crucial for California’s efforts to track and prevent influenza as cattle spreads.
The union, known as Upte, said it requested a strike vote because the university failed to sincerely bargain for negotiations that began last June. It accused the University of California of “harsh” restrictions on where workers can picket measures and retaliate against some employees, who participated in a two-day work shutdown in November.
Union officials said the university has improperly raised health care costs and refused to meaningfully participate in discussing staff vacancies and recruitment and promotion issues.
“We hope this will send a message to the UC that our members are bored by these unfair labor practices,” Upte President Dan Russell said in a statement. “We hope this will change UC.” behavior.”
Union members on Friday said union members supported the strike mandate with an overwhelming vote, with 98% of them voted in favor. The union refused to provide the total number of votes, although it said it submitted at least 9,000 votes in the first week.
The university denied that it faced a staffing crisis and said it had provided strong wages and benefits, and accused of leaving the negotiation form too early.
“It is frustrating that upte continues to talk about compelling and insistence that UC returns to the bargaining table when it is not attending the last scheduled negotiation meeting and then declares the negotiations deadlock before responding to UC’s previous offer,” UC said man,” Heather Hansen said in an email.
Hansen said UC “has and is still ready to resolve these contracts.”
If a strike occurs, Hansen said: [system] Be prepared to make every effort to ensure that critical operations of the university system, including patient care, continue to be at the level of excellence expected by UC patients, students, faculty and staff. ”
Upte-CWA Local 9119 member phone bank on Tuesday called the bank in Westwood’s office, calling workers to vote in a strike authorization vote. (Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
(Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
The university proposes to raise the full salary by 5% starting July 1 and raise the salary for the second and third years of the contract by 3%. It also proposed to raise all low-paying employees to pay at least $25 per hour from July 1 to the time of the year.
The union believes that the salary offer is lower than the wages that the university agrees to pay for other employees such as nurses and will leave utte uspertertermentpermentpermentpermentper because of inflation.
Several workers in the interview pointed out that high workload and burnout were the reasons for the vote to approve the strike.
Amelia Cutten, 40, a behavioral health consultant at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said she and more than a dozen other counselors and psychologists at the Cowell Student Health Center. Trying to keep up with big cases.
“It’s really hard when we try to do our job and come to our students for a really critical period,” Carten said. “We want our students to be best cared for.”
Maryam Azizadah, assistant clinical research coordinator at UCLA who works with cancer patients, said her work requires a high level of attention and expertise to understand the picky protocols of various clinical trials. She described a juggling request, eager to order tissue samples to determine the eligibility of approximately 70 patients.
“I was overwhelmed by the slam of emails, requests and responsibilities, and I just couldn’t do it,” Azizadah said. “I found myself making these mistakes and lacking emails because I was a job for two people, I’m really introverted.”
