During contract negotiations Sept. 24-25, our CX Unit Bargaining Team continued to push the University of California team to recognize that their workers are struggling to make ends meet paycheck-to-paycheck, while the UC has billions of dollars in income and reserves. If they receive a little less federal funding, they can and should take that money out of reserves or capital projects—not workers’ paychecks.
Teamsters cannot afford to pay higher costs for parking, healthcare or pension, and we must receive a substantial annual raise to keep up with California’s skyrocketing cost of groceries, gas, housing and utilities.
Our team also wants the UC to either guarantee parking will be available since employees are paying for it or reimburse employees who are forced to pay for parking in other public parking lots when their designated parking lot is full. The UC did not agree.
The most alarming proposal made by the UC during this bargaining session is for them to be able to reclassify bargaining unit work out of our CX Unit without mediation by the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB)—and they said we wouldn’t get an agreement from them without it.
 | “Our Union will continue to stand up to protect our work against UC’s attempts to misclassify workers to exploit them and deny them Union rights. Our team and our members are ready to fight for fair raises and to rein in parking increases that eat into our paychecks.” Jason Rabinowitz, Secretary-Treasurer Teamsters Local 2010 |
The two teams reached Tentative Agreements (TAs) on:
· Article 7 – Grievance Procedure
· Article 26 – Performance Evaluations
· Article 12 – Labor Management Meetings
We also agreed to current contract language (CCL) on Articles 4 – Catastrophic Leave, 8 – Health & Safety, 11 – Indemnification, and 15 – Management Rights. Our team tried to no avail to get the UC to agree to a systemwide program of catastrophic leave donation. Even though the UC PATH system is touted as “the University of California’s single payroll, benefits, human resources, and academic personnel solution serving all 265,000 employees of the University of California campuses and medical centers,” the UC Bargaining Team insisted that they do not have the infrastructure in place to accommodate catastrophic leave donations systemwide.
For Article 9 – Holidays, our CX team requested that newly accreted UC Health employees receive the Cesar Chavez holiday, and that employees be paid at the rate of one and one-half times regular pay for working on December 24 and New Year’s Eve day. The UC has not yet responded to this proposal.
