More than 20 labor leaders and University of California workers were arrested May 15 as they protested at a UC Board of Regents meeting at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. They were charged with willfully disturbing a meeting.
Demonstrators, who were protesting working conditions and calling for the university to engage in fair contract negotiations, were released after a few hours, said Liz Perlman, executive director of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299, which represents 35,000 employees across several UC campuses, medical centers, clinics and research labs. Perlman, who was arrested, said she was given a citation with a follow-up court date.
“The ‘business as usual’ is really coming at the harm of my members,” she said. “Our folks — who are mostly women, 80% Black and brown folks, who are cooking and cleaning and taking care of patients every day — we make the university what it is. It’s our work, it’s our labor. And we don’t feel respect from those people in that room.”
Many of the workers affected are frontline staff helping to address the city’s homelessness and behavioral health crises, such as emergency room physician assistants or social workers. The demonstrators denounced what they called unfair labor practices, including disparities in wages between social workers, as well as chronic understaffing and high turnover at UCSF. These conditions are harmful to employees, who struggle with burnout, but also can cause patients to suffer, said Robyn Miles, a clinical social worker at Citywide Case Management.
UC workers in the AFSCME Local 3299 and University Professional and Technical Employees Local 9119 unions have been without contracts for several months and have gone on strike four times. No one was arrested at previous protests.
On May 15, some 200 demonstrators had gathered early in the morning at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus, chanting and holding signs, before proceeding to a UC Board of Regents meeting at 9 a.m. As the board got ready to transition into a closed-door meeting, protesters, many of whom were clad in black shirts that read “Respect UC’s frontline workers,” were clapping and chanting, “Who runs UC? We run UC!”
When they refused to leave, police officers zip-tied the wrists of more than 20 people. Officers then took them to another location on campus, Perlman said.
Workers overextended
Employees say that there is a two-tiered system in which campus social workers are systematically hired at lower classifications than the hospital-based social workers, resulting in an average 32% pay disparity.
Miles, the social worker, also said that small caseloads can balloon when teams are understaffed, leading to more burnout among team members and negatively affecting patient care.
“We want to be able to support San Francisco in caring for these most vulnerable folks, and we’re not able to when we’re chronically understaffed and getting burnt out,” Miles said.
In a provided statement, the UC said it “supports our employees’ rights to engage in lawful protests and free speech activities. At the same time, all community members must abide by the University’s reasonable time, place and manner rules.”
Staff also suggested recent hiring freezes could be contributing to worker burnout. The school enacted a systemwide hiring freeze in March following President Donald Trump’s attacks on university and research funding. But workers noted that there are injunctions against National Institutes of Health funding cuts and said that the university had $28 billion in liquid capital in the latest estimates.
“Up until this year the university had never claimed financial inability to meet some of our contract demands,” said Matias Campos, a pharmacist, executive vice president of UPTE Local 9119 and faculty member at UCSF, noting Trump’s attacks and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 3% cut to UC funds in his recent May budget revision. But, Campos added, “they have the ability to weather that funding crisis.”
The university cited potential federal cuts in its statement, noting that “Given the continued threats to federal funding, the University is grateful it has been able to provide its UPTE and AFSCME-represented employees with fair and reasonable wage and health care offers.”
Dan Russell, UPTE Local 9119’s president and chief negotiator, called on university leaders to invest in frontline workers.
“It’s deeply disappointing that instead of committing to end its unfair labor practices and meaningfully engage with workers’ solutions to the staffing crisis, the UC Board of Regents chose to have peaceful protesters arrested,” Russell said.
UPTE Local 9119 workers are waiting for the university to respond with upcoming bargaining dates for a new contract. The union’s last bargaining date was May 9.
