SACRAMENTO – A union representing nearly 20,000 University of California workers vowed yesterday to press ahead with plans to strike the system campuses next week in defiance of a court order issued earlier in the day.
If they walk out, the strikers and their picket lines could disrupt a UC board of regents meeting scheduled next week at the Santa Barbara campus. It will be the first regents meeting for new UC President Mark Yudof.
“We believe the strike is legal, and we're going to be on strike Monday morning,” said Lakesha Harrison, a UCLA nurse and president of Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Just a few hours earlier, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Patrick J. Mahoney issued a temporary restraining order barring the union from “calling, engaging in” or otherwise sanctioning a strike of either its 8,500 service employees or an additional 11,000 patient-care workers.
Service workers include custodians, cafeteria employees, groundskeepers, parking-lot attendants and security guards. Those in patient care include respiratory therapists, lab and pharmacy technicians and operating-room assistants.
Frustrated after a year of negotiations on new contracts for both groups, the union called a five-day strike of just the service workers. But many health care workers probably would not cross picket lines at the UC system's 10 campuses and five medical centers.
The state Public Employment Relations Board had sued on behalf of the university, alleging that the union had not given adequate notice of a strike that could endanger the public's safety.
“Hopefully, today's court ruling and the recent complaint (by the state labor board) will motivate the union to refocus its attention on settling these negotiations,” Howard Pripas, UC's executive director of labor relations, said in a statement.
The university and representatives of the patient-care workers are still making progress in negotiations. UC officials say they have offered those employees a package that includes a minimum wage increase of 26 percent over five years.
But the union said talks on a new contract for service employees have been at a standstill since late May. UC officials say they have offered service workers increases that would push minimum hourly wages from $10.28 to $11.50 or $12, depending on location. But a union spokesman said the university has offered no across-the-board increases to service workers.
The union has complained that many of the UC's lowest-paid workers continue to live in poverty after the system squandered millions of dollars in an executive-pay scandal. More recently, the UC Berkeley police chief was rehired at a higher salary after she retired and took a $2.1 million, lump-sum payout of her benefits in the UC pension plan.
