AFSCME took its fight for a contract to the streets for the week

Striking whether it’s legal or not

The University of California has been paying its service workers 25 percent less than their colleagues at community colleges, forming the central rallying point for the contract renegotiation between UC and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). While a campus strike during summer session, when most workers are on furlough, might sound redundant, the contract also includes medical workers at university hospitals, which has led to two court-ordered injunctions against a strike in the past two months.

UC Santa Cruz has very few medical workers, but its service workers branch—which includes custodians, dining hall workers, security, shuttle drivers, grounds crew and maintenance—has rallied hard to increase the $10 an hour starting wage, an impossible figure in California’s most expensive county, and one that’s seeming especially absurd given rising gasoline and food costs.

 “It’s not just gas prices,” says Nicolas Gutierrez, a custodian for 14 years at UCSC and a member of the AFSCME bargaining team. “We’re paying more for groceries, and sooner or later, utility bills are going up. Everything in the community goes up, and our wages stay the same.” Gutierrez’s wife is also a custodian on campus, and he holds a second job on Sundays. He says they are barely making ends meet with two children (one attending Cabrillo College), and an increasingly expensive commute from Watsonville. “It’s not like we go out three nights to have dinner at a fancy place. Our version of a fancy place is McDonald’s.”

The contract has been under negotiation for 11 months, and an earlier two-day strike was planned for June 4 and 5, only to be called off at the last second due to a court order to return to the bargaining table. That round yielded a set of matching offers that were not quite acceptable to AFSCME. Both sides agreed to an 18 percent across the board wage rise during the next five years (though the first year’s increase was retroactive to December in UC’s proposal, and October in AFSCME’s), and a basic $14.50 minimum wage for service workers, rising to $15 an hour by the end of the contract. However, UC wanted the right to keep Irvine’s campus at $13.50 an hour.

There are other sticking points about healthcare costs, overtime, and parking fees as well. But the main reasons the union rejected the latest proposal on June 27 (and once again voted to strike) was the shortage of backpay, the singling out of Irvine, and UC wanting the flexibility to hire new workers at any of the first three pay scales, instead of automatically starting all workers at the bottom scale and giving raises by seniority.

The current strike, which will run through Friday, July 18, was technically squashed by a restraining order issued by Judge Patrick Mahoney of the San Francisco Superior Court on July 11. UC’s press office in Berkeley issued a statement that day saying, “The university expects AFSCME members to obey the court order and report to work as scheduled.”

What happened as scheduled instead was a sea of green shirts at the UCSC entrance on Bay Street and High Street. The pickets go on from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., and feature rallies at noon and 5 p.m. During the rallies, the entrance is physically blocked by striking workers. On the first day of the strike, there were two Santa Cruz police on scene, but neither one seemed interested in enforcing the San Francisco County restraining order. Cars driving into campus honked in solidarity, even as they crossed the picket.

Where’s the Beef?

Alison Sirny-Guevara, an organizer with the Santa Cruz chapter of AFSCME, says, “We don’t agree with the restraining order. We believe we’re within our legal rights. We will sue the university. We will sue the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) if we have to. I think it’s really sad that the university pursues all these anti-worker legal strategies and spends all these funds fighting us.”

The university’s position is that its hands are tied in negotiations by the lack of a state budget. UC spokesperson Nicole Savickas says, “It’s simply our ability to pay wages. The medical center employees are funded by the medical centers, but the service employees are funded by the state. We don’t have a final state budget. We’ve proposed that when the budget is finalized, we’ll reopen negotiations. That was presented back on May 23.”

When asked if the policy of paying medical workers with university revenues and service workers with state funding was a matter of state law or university policy, Savickas responds, “I’m not certain. It might be a mixture of both. What that comes from is us trying to be consistent with California State University and the state itself.”

The Department of Finance has the governor’s latest budget proposal online, and the Assembly is also providing its subcommittee counter-proposals as they are updated. Neither current proposal includes a cut to code 40 of the university budget, “Operation and Maintenance of Plant,” which is where service worker funds would come from, according to a Department of Finance employee. That budget was $464 million in 2006-2007, and is proposed to be $594 million in the governor’s 2008-2009 budget, an increase of 28 percent. The university budget overall is expected to increase from $18 billion to $19 billion. According to those close to the negotiations, UC funding is not one of the controversies being debated right now, and is a stable part of the projected budget.

By contrast, the community college budget (which includes Cabrillo College, where a custodian starts at $14.45 an hour) is facing a 10 percent reduction in physical plant and instructional support, and is being strongly debated.

“The issue as I understand it,” says Savickas, “is we have a number of employee groups who are funded from the same pool of money. We have to consider all of those groups.”

Gutierrez doesn’t buy the state budget excuse. “They’re telling us we’re all state dependent and we know that’s not true. It’s only 20 percent from the state budget and the rest is from university profits. It’s just a matter of priorities.”

He adds, “They just figure that service workers aren’t that valuable and can be replaced on any given notice and it wouldn’t make a hell of a difference. We’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

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Robert   |Registered |07-17-2008 15:54 Fire them all for the illegal walkout, and hire contractors. Reply | Quote 0   0

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