From Trevor Griffey, Vice President of Legislation, UC-AFT 1474
The longer that the UC system maintains a hard line against unions at the bargaining table, the more likely it is that a majority of UC’s unionized workforce will be out of contract by the end of the 2025-26 school year.
This may create a unique opportunity. UC has approximately 270,000 employees across its ten campuses and additional offices and centers. About 60 percent, or 160,000, are represented by labor unions. Last school year, AFSCME and UPTE, representing over 50,000 workers combined, went on four separate 1-2 day Unfair Labor Practice strikes, but still have been unable to bargain a fair contract. With CIR-SEIU now out of contract as of July 1, the total number of UC workers out of contract is over 60,000. The contract covering 24,000 employees represented by the California Nurses Association expires October 31, 2025. And on January 1, 2026, the contract expires for the 35,000 research assistants and academic student employees represented by the mighty UAW 4811—whose 2022 strike brought UC to its knees, and earned its members 50-80% wage increases over two years. UAW will also be bargaining the first contract for over 5,000 newly organized student services employees at the same time.
In other words, if UC doesn’t settle with UPTE and AFSCME in the next few months, it faces the prospect of having as many as 125,000 workers out of contract with a legally protected right to strike using ULP charges, and tens of thousands of workers possibly having the right (after fact-finding and mediation) to engage in economic strikes.
This means that campus unions could find greater cause for collaboration and solidarity. UC—terrified of sympathy strikes that connected graduate students, lecturers, and clerical workers from 1998-2003—successfully bargained with campus unions to prohibit “sympathy strikes” from 2003-6. No other public employees in California have such restrictive language in their contracts. In some ways, these clauses have made explicitly coordinated strikes illegal. This has helped UC pit unions against each other and made coordinated collective action rare the past two decades. In 2023, the state legislature passed a bill sponsored by AFT, Teamsters, and UAW to strip this odious language from our collective bargaining agreements, but Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it.
The more that UC unions find themselves frustrated by lack of progress at the bargaining table, the more potential there will be for overlapping strikes in 2025-26. When some of the economic shocks from changes to Medicare and federal student loans and grants hit research universities, the need for real shared governance—i.e. budget democracy—will be unmistakable. Hopefully the growing resistance to UC’s corporate mismanagement can connect workers together so that they’ll be better prepared for these shocks. Then our union work can evolve from separately protesting budget cuts to collectively demanding inclusion of students and workers in a process of reinventing our schools and medical centers when the status quo will no longer be possible.
Just recently, union members had a strong presence at the University of California Regents meetings July 15-17, 2025—dominating the public testimony, and kicking off what is likely to be an extremely contentious 2025-26 school year.
On Tuesday July 15, UC-AFT (non-senate faculty and librarians), UPTE-CWA (researchers and technical staff), and CIR-SEIU (Medical interns and residents) each had about a half dozen members who testified against layoffs, increasing workload, raises for executives who are imposing austerity on their workers, and bad faith bargaining by UC management. Laid off faculty called in by phone from UC Santa Cruz to talk about the devastating impact of budget cuts on the curriculum. Medical residents in their white coats testified that they were earning the equivalent of minimum wage. A lobbyist for Teamsters 2010 (clerical workers and skilled trades employees) complained that even though UC did not receive a cut from the state legislature this year, it’s still going forward with layoffs to pad its reserves. UPTE workers threatened to go out on a long strike this year if UC did not stop trying to engage in concession bargaining. The workers from different unions all then joined a rally outside the Regents meeting hosted by UC-AFT to share longer speeches and promote union solidarity.
On Wednesday July 16, members of NNU/CNA (nurses) and AFSCME 3299 (service employees) provided testimony about the rising costs of housing and health care in relation to their salaries. Hospital staff with multiple unions traveled from San Diego to the meeting in Los Angeles to provide heart-rending testimony against UCSD Medical Center laying off 220 employees—supposedly to boost UCSD’s credit rating for when it takes out a loan to buy more community hospitals.
To my knowledge, the workers from over half a dozen unions who attended the Regents meetings last week did not coordinate across unions, though their testimony touched on similar themes. Campus unions are not showing any willingness to accommodate UC’s demands for concessions—especially the increase or elimination of caps on health care premiums, no retroactive pay increases for time workers spent out of contract, and proposals that include zero percent wage increases for 2028.
Our unions did not plan to rally together as much as they came together spontaneously in the moment. However, in coming together, they signaled that there is a rising tide of resistance to budget austerity at UC that will grow in 2025-26 and could reach profound levels as the effects of Trump’s attacks on public higher education intensify.