We did not make this decision lightly.
40,000 patient care technicians, food service workers, custodians, hospital support teams, maintenance crews and other essential workers at the University of California went on strike late last year.
We did so understanding what’s at stake for everyone we serve.
But more than a year since our last contract expired, our patience has not moved the University. Our loyalty has not moved the University. Showing up short staffed, underpaid and overlooked has not moved the University. So, we were left with the only lever working people have when every other door has closed.
We went on strike, because we cannot afford to live where we work.
UC workers are commuting hours each day, sleeping in cars between shifts, relying on public assistance or making the tough decision to leave our jobs altogether, because wages no longer cover basic survival. Our pay has lost purchasing power in recent years, while the cost of rents, groceries, gas and just about everything else has soared.
That’s why it’s hardly surprising that 13,000 of our coworkers – or one in three service and patient care workers across the UC system – have walked away from their jobs in the last three years.
These are not disposable roles. These are the workers who keep emergency rooms clean, transport patients safely, prepare meals for hospital floors, sanitize facilities to limit infection, repair infrastructure and keep campuses running at every hour of the day.
The UC depends on us – but it has also chosen to ignore our most basic needs.
The UC has two sets of rules: one for executives, and another for workers and students.
During the same stretch of time that wages for frontline workers have stagnated and the students have been asked to pay higher and higher tuition, analysis of UC financial data shows the university is prospering.
Specifically, it shows revenues have nearly doubled over the past decade. The University also banked another multi-billion dollar surplus last year. It details how the University has approved eight new hospital acquisitions in the past two years, expanded housing assistance for top executives (including helping its chancellors purchase second homes) and doubled their average pay to more than $1.2 million per year over the past decade. Meanwhile, frontline workers are falling further and further behind, and nearly half of all students experienced food insecurity, according to the UC’s own surveys.
The question now is obvious: why are UC’s most economically secure employees receiving so much extra support, while students are going hungry and the employees keeping hospitals clean and patients safe cannot make rent? Why are the people who depend on the system and keep it running asked to subsidize it with their own hardship?
UC’s misguided priorities aren’t just internal statistics — they are a concern for all of California.
When the UC loses 13,000 trained healthcare and service workers, the consequences land in ER units, on patient floors, in dining halls, in labs, in maintenance departments and anywhere one person is doing the work of three.
Patients wait longer. Care teams burn out faster. The system becomes more fragile. And every Californian who relies on UC hospitals, clinics and campuses ultimately pays the price.
This is why livable wages, affordable healthcare and access to housing near jobs are not just worker issues. They are public safety issues. They are healthcare access issues. They are quality of life issues for millions of people who depend on the UC and the communities where these facilities reside.
Our most recent strike was not a disruption of UC’s mission. It was a demand that the UC live up to it.
Like governments, public universities are meant to expand opportunity, strengthen communities and serve the public good. They are not meant to operate as economic engines for executives and well-connected elites, while the frontline workers who keep things running fall into poverty.
So, UC workers stood together. Countless students, patients and community leaders stood with us. Not simply to protest low wages, but to challenge a system that has normalized devaluing and dehumanizing the very workers who make our most vital institutions run.
Michael Avant is a Patient Transporter at UC San Diego Medical Center and the President of AFSCME Local 3299, which represents more than 33,000 UC Service and Patient Care Technical Workers across the state.
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