UC’s lowest-paid workers strike to protest outsourcing, saying it undermines patient care
The University of California’s lowest-paid employees — 25,000 janitors, patient billers, medical transcribers, cooks and other workers — picketed Wednesday at Sacramento’s UC Davis Medical Center and at other UC hospitals and campuses around the state over their employer’s use of contract workers.
Mohammed Akbar, an operating room assistant at UC Davis Medical Center, was out protesting in front of the hospital Wednesday as part of the job action by his union, AFSCME 3299. He’s concerned not only about his job security but about patient care, he said, because temporary workers don’t have the same experience or familiarity with the hospital’s procedures and policies.
“They’ve brought in workers to do our jobs for less money and (are) not providing the benefits as well,” said Akbar, who’s a legal guardian for his late sister’s three children. “My concern is patient safety and patient care. I do my job because I’m passionate about it. ... If you bring in somebody who doesn’t have the same passion, let alone the same pay as me, there’s going to be differences in the type of patient care we give and in patient safety.”
Steve Telliano, assistant vice chancellor of strategic communications at UC Davis Health, said the UC has offered AFSCME workers a cumulative wage increase of 27 percent over five years and excellent health and pension benefits. Under the proposed package, he said, union custodians would earn an average of $52,000 a year.
Telliano said the UC also is regularly adding good-paying union jobs.
“Over the last five years, we’ve actually hired 400 additional, brand-new AFSCME members into new jobs,” he said. “We’re continuing to create new jobs all the time here at the medical center for UC employees, and AFSCME is one of those unions that benefits. It’s just not true that we’re contracting those jobs out. In fact, the labor contract specifically says we can’t contract jobs out.”
AFSCME 3299’s leader and rank-and-file members have told The Sacramento Bee that the UC is using illegal tactics to outsource work that should be performed university employees. Wednesday’s job action was AFSCME’s sixth strike in the last 2½ years.
At UC Davis, Akbar said, workers are particularly concerned about a contract the university entered to allow Kindred Healthcare to operate a new in-patient rehabilitation hospital that will bear the UC Davis name. Kindred would do the hiring, and the workers there would not be union employees.
“We’ve seen growth in outsourcing accelerating,” said Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME Local 3299 and a lead gardener at UC Berkeley. “What that means is there are career workers, full-time, directly employed workers in UC’s hospitals and campuses who now carry an extra burden, having to attempt to train up people who don’t have the familiarity or the experience with the work or the worksite. It’s stressful because we’re trying to actually do a good job for the public and the patients and the students, and the UC policies and practices only make it that much harder.”
She and other UC workers say it’s unfair that people doing the same work, so-called temporary workers who often work for many years beside full-time UC employees, don’t get the same pay, benefits or opportunities.
The number of middle-class union jobs would be growing at a higher rate, Lybarger said, if the UC was not expanded its outsourcing. She pointed to a 2017 California state auditor’s report that not only detailed that trend but cited ways that the UC violated rules on employee displacement after contracting out work. The union also has cited contracting data that the UC supplied to state legislators, showing substantial growth in contracting.
AFSCME 3299 filed a half-dozen unfair labor practice complaints with the California Public Employment Relations Board in late October, detailing contracts the university had extended or entered without bargaining over them with the union.
In a statement issued Wednesday, the UC Office of the President said: “Despite union concerns about contracting, the number of AFSCME-represented employees has actually grown by double digits in the past five years. UC’s contracts with AFSCME protect employees from displacement due to contracting, and no employee can be terminated as a result of a subcontracting decision.”
The UC also said it hopes that, after the strike, AFSCME representatives will return to the bargaining table to negotiate a contract. Leaders also noted that the university has reached agreements with seven other unions in the past two years.
UCD Health’s Telliano said that, despite all the hubbub outside the hospital, everything was running smoothly inside.
“It’s a little noisy outside the hospital here,” Telliano said. “Everything is business as usual inside. All patients should be keeping their appointments. We haven’t canceled or rescheduled any appointments. We haven’t canceled or rescheduled any surgeries. So, (for) anyone who needs health care today, we are open for business and ready to help them out.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 1:36 PM.
