Tens of Thousands of UC Workers Set to Strike as Nurses Secure Tentative Agreement

Tens of thousands of University of California workers plan to go on a two-day strike across the state, nearly two years after they began negotiating a contract.

The strike, set for Monday and Tuesday, will be led by AFSCME 3299, which represents more than 40,000 custodians, food service workers, patient care assistants and hospital technicians. They had expected to be joined by roughly 25,000 nurses with the California Nurses Association, who had planned to strike in solidarity.

Registered nurses reached a tentative agreement with the university, prompting the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United to cancel the sympathy strike with AFSCME Local 3299. The agreement covered more than 25,000 nurses across 19 UC-operated facilities, who had been bargaining since June. Thousands of nurses still planned to join AFSCME picket lines while off duty, and UC nurses will vote on the tentative agreement later this week.

Negotiations began in January of 2024 but reached a deadlock in April, with AFSCME and university blaming each other for failing to make meaningful compromises, particularly on wages.

The university recently reached a deal with another union, UPTE-CWA, prompting its roughly 21,000 members to withdraw from the strike.

But UC and AFSCME last met at the bargaining table on April 16 and currently have no sessions scheduled, leaving little hope that the strike can be averted.

“It’s been hell,” said Kathreen Bedford, a member of the AFSCME 3299’s executive board, describing her time sitting across the bargaining table from university representatives. “We have members pouring their heart out. We have members that are living in their car and we’re telling them these stories across the table and they just bluntly ignore us.

“We’re telling them how we’re getting hurt at work because we don’t have enough [staff] and they haven’t listened. It’s like they don’t care.”

Bedford has worked in the UC system for nearly three decades, first as a bus driver and for the past 15 years as a groundskeeper at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Bedford said wages have failed to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Despite growing up in Oakland and spending most of her adult life in the Bay Area, Bedford said she moved to Stockton in 2020 because she felt she could no longer afford to stay.

“It kind of just uprooted me from my family, my comfortability… I went from 15 minutes to get to work to an hour and a half. It’s frustrating,” Bedford said.

In April, the university issued its “last, best and final offer,” a five-year contract including wage increases of 5% in 2025; 4% in 2026; and 3% in 2027, 2028 and 2029. In the last posted bargaining update, the union said it was seeking a three-year contract with increases of 8.5% in 2025 and 7.5% in 2026 and 2027.

“In a time of potentially catastrophic state and federal funding cuts, we have increased our last best and final offer to support UC’s workforce,” Associate Vice President for Systemwide Labor and Employee Relations Missy Matella said in April.

University officials said in a statement they implemented other parts of their offer this summer, including a $25 minimum wage, “to ensure these employees receive meaningful and immediate pay and benefit increases.” The union had sought to make that minimum wage retroactive to 2023.

Liz Perlman, AFSCME 3299’s executive director, said the university’s offer failed to account for post-pandemic inflation and that the union’s demands are meant to keep up with rising costs. She also questioned the university’s claims of financial strain.

“They literally just bought and acquired two new hospitals here in the Bay Area, six hospitals down in Southern California,” Perlman said. “If you’re broke, you don’t go on a shopping spree.”

Perlman also said uncompetitive wages and persistent short staffing have driven high turnover, with more than 13,000 workers leaving voluntarily over the past three years.

Bedford said she believes short staffing in her department is partially responsible for a rotator cuff injury that she suffered earlier this year. The injury has put her out of work — and created more work for her colleagues.

She described the physical strain of hauling weedwackers across the lab’s hilly terrain.

“We don’t have enough people to cover all the areas, so we’re doubling back to do another area and another area, repetitive with the same heavy equipment. So it takes a wear and tear on your body,” Bedford said.

Nurses who had planned to join the strike in solidarity said the impacts of short staffing and turnover are clear.

Maggie Ming, an intensive care unit nurse in the float pool — meaning they are assigned wherever ICUs are short-staffed — said an ongoing hiring freeze means people are quitting faster than the positions can be filled.

“You get one respiratory therapist in an ICU to 16 patients, like there’s gonna be such a high amount of burnout and such an amount of moral distress that you can’t take care of everyone, that, of course, people are quitting,” Ming said. “Add on top the fact that the benefits aren’t really that amazing and that the pay isn’t really great. They’re not making it very competitive for people to want to work at UC.”

Ming said they hoped that nurses joining in a sympathy strike would underscore the importance of the technical workers they rely on.

“Their struggle is our struggle,” Ming said. “I can’t work unless the respiratory therapists are working, unless the nurses’ aides are here. I need them and they need me, and we work together to hopefully create a good patient experience.”

Despite being out of work recovering from her shoulder injury, Bedford said she still plans to commute from Stockton to join the picket line.

“In a sling and all, I am going to be on a picket line because enough is enough,” Bedford said.