UC Workers United

4 weeks ago

A militant Zionist group threatens activists online with a ‘deport list’
“It’s ironic that a Jewish organization is putting together lists.”

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/29/zionist-palestinians-deportations-x/

A century-old Zionist group has resurfaced in the U.S. with a list of pro-Palestinian activists it wants arrested.

March 29, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

People protest Thursday near Columbia University against the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and graduate student. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
By Will Oremus
Almost six weeks before federal immigration officials detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a group called Betar US said on its X account that it had put the pro-Palestinian activist on “our deport list.”

“It’s 10 p.m. and ICE is aware of his home address and whereabouts,” the group posted on Jan. 29 under a video of CNN interviewing Khalil at a campus protest, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We have provided all his information to multiple contacts.”
Khalil, a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was detained on March 8. Three days later, Betar shared with The Washington Post a list of potential next targets it said it had recently flagged to Trump administration officials. At the top was Momodou Taal, a Cornell University graduate student who was suspended twice last year for his role in pro-Palestinian protests there.
Now Taal, too, is fighting to stay in the country. Betar US, the newly revived and rapidly growing U.S. chapter of a century-old militant Zionist group, is claiming a share of the credit and moving on to the next names on its list.
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The Post couldn’t determine whether the group played a role in the Trump administration’s decision to target Khalil and Taal for deportation. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE “is not working with or received any tips through the ICE Tip Line from the group identified as Betar.”
But the Zionist group claims the government is listening, and so do attorneys for Khalil and Taal, whose student visa has been revoked: Both cited Betar in their respective lawsuits alleging that their clients are being targeted as part of an illegal crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
“We provided hundreds of names to the Trump administration of visa holders and naturalized Middle Easterners and foreigners,” said Daniel Levy, a spokesman for Betar. “These jihadis who oppose America and Israel have no place in our great country.”
Last fall, Betar was banned from Meta’s platforms after it made veiled death threats to pro-Palestinian lawmakers and college students. Now the group’s social media presence is unrestrained as it aligns itself with the Trump administration’s enforcement of executive orders calling for the expulsion of foreign nationals who engage in antisemitism or support terrorism.
Betar’s rising profile shows how Trump’s policies and rhetoric have emboldened a new crop of uncompromising Zionist groups that use social media to target individuals they view as antisemitic or sympathetic to Hamas — including some Jews.
In November, a stranger approached Taal in person at a protest in New York and handed him an electronic pager — a nod to Israel’s exploding-pager attack in September that killed or maimed scores of suspected Hezbollah members.
Handing pagers to pro-Palestinian activists, and calling on X for its supporters to do the same, has become Betar’s signature tactic. Its targets consider it a death threat; the group says it’s just an edgy joke.
On March 13, Betar published on X what it called a “deport alert” for Taal, noting his Cornell affiliation and visa status and quoting from his past X posts that the group said show his support for Hamas, which the United States has deemed a terrorist organization. The group quoted Taal as saying “glory to the resistance” after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people.
Responding to a question about whether he supported the group, Taal told The Post: “It is absurd to say that attending protests against the genocide makes someone a member of Hamas. I categorically reject this effort to conflate free speech with terrorism.”
Taal and two others filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York on March 15 asking a judge to block the Trump administration from enforcing its executive orders against Taal and others in similar situations. The suit attributed his “growing fear that he will be the target of an ICE removal operation” to “a pattern of escalating attention” from Betar and other Zionist groups “with the power to influence immigration enforcement decisions.”
The fear turned out to be well-founded. On March 19, officials from the Department of Homeland Security visited Taal’s residence in Ithaca, New York. Two days later, his attorneys received an email from Justice Department attorneys inviting Taal to surrender to ICE custody. A judge heard Taal’s request for an injunction and temporary restraining order Tuesday and could rule at any time.
Both Taal and Khalil had high-profile run-ins with authorities at their respective campuses before Betar began campaigning for their removal, and there’s no direct evidence that Betar influenced the government’s decision to pursue either of them. Nor is Betar the only pro-Israel actor claiming credit for helping the administration identify alleged Hamas sympathizers.
The day after Khalil was detained, a group called Shirion Collective posted a memorandum on X that it had sent to DHS on Jan. 27, laying out the “legal basis” for the Syrian-born Algerian’s “immediate detention and removal.” Shirion didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Another X account, called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, had posted about Khalil the day before his arrest, calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revoke his visa, not realizing that he was in the U.S. on a green card.
And after the government’s detention last week of Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University fellow from India, the conservative think tank Middle East Forum linked his arrest to a February article in which it reported on Suri’s ties to a Hamas official.
Following ICE’s request for Taal to turn himself in, Betar spokesman Levy told The Post that the group has “more and more reason to believe” that others on its list would soon be detained and deported as well.
“We want to say Shalom to many more Mahmouds and many more Momodous,” Levy said.
An Israeli flag flies in May near an encampment of protesters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology condemning Israel’s war effort in Gaza. (Steven Senne/AP)
‘Hand them a pager’
Betar was founded as a paramilitary Zionist youth movement in Latvia in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who believed a Jewish state in British-held Palestine could only be established by force. Among its alumni were conservative Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and the group still boasts strong ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party.
Though Betar faded from political relevance once Israel was established, “the movement’s historical image is one of aggressive right-wing nationalist and militant activism,” said Guy Fiennes, a researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
The revival of its U.S.-based chapter came only after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, said Ross Glick, who joined the resurgent group last year as its executive director, a role from which he stepped down in January.
Glick, an entrepreneur and marketing consultant in New York City, said he was “devastated” by the attack. When he saw pro-Palestinian demonstrators celebrating it on the streets of New York, “a switch flipped” and he became enraged. He began trying to document the demonstrators’ identities for potential investigation by law enforcement.
He linked up in 2024 with Ronn Torossian, a politically connectedpublic relations executive with a colorful past who shared Glick’s penchant for confronting activists. Torossian was working to resurrect Betar in the U.S. as a hard-line Zionist movement.
Before a visit to the University of Pittsburgh last fall, Glick announced on Instagram his plan to hand out pagers to members of the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine. That group reported Glick’s post to law enforcement as a bomb threat, and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, banned him and Betar from its platforms.
Undeterred, Betar refocused its social media efforts on X, which has generally dialed back content moderation while taking a more restrictive line against anti-Israeli slogans. There, on its verified account, it has challenged numerous pro-Palestinian activists, often exhorting its followers to “hand them a pager.”
In January, Betar posted on X that it aimed to raise $1,800 to hand a pager to a prominent Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani. The post linked to a GoFundMe page for the group, where it said it was a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
That irked Jenin Younes, a D.C.-based First Amendment lawyer whose father is Palestinian and who considers herself a supporter of the Palestinian cause, though not of Hamas. Younes is no advocate of online censorship: She represented some of the conservative plaintiffs in a 2023 Supreme Court case that accused the Biden administration of pressuring social media platforms to censor conservative speech that it deemed misinformation. But she drew the line at what she considered to be a threat on Kiswani’s life.
Younes responded to Kiswani’s post on X and said it was criminal conduct that neither X nor GoFundMe should allow. Betar quickly turned the tables, suggesting that its supporters give her a pager, too.
Younes said she reported the posts to X but received no response. Within hours, she said, she began receiving dozens of calls a day from an unknown number. On at least one occasion when she picked up, the caller began cursing and telling her to go back to her “Islamic s—hole.”
“I think when a group like this is making open death threats or threats of violence and nobody’s doing anything about it, that emboldens them,” Younes said.
X didn’t respond to a request for comment. GoFundMe said Betar’s efforts had been reviewed and found “in compliance with our terms of service.”
In February, Al Jazeera journalist Laila al-Arian posted what she said was a list of names of “Palestinian babies Israel killed before they reached their first birthday.” Betar responded, “Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!” The post was removed, but Betar has since reposted screenshots of it.
Betar has also gone after Jewish people who criticize Israel, such as the liberal commentator and City University of New York journalism professor Peter Beinart. In February, Betar told its X followers that if they see Beinart on New York’s Upper West Side, they should give him a pager.
“Oppose my ideas all you want,” Beinart responded on X. “But when you urge people in my neighborhood to give me a pager — in the wake of Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon — that sounds like a death threat.”
In a phone interview, Beinart said: “It’s probably not coincidental that in a moment of enormous political thuggishness, in which Donald Trump sets the tone, there are a lot more people and groups that might be inclined to speak in that tone.”
In February, the Jewish civil rights group Anti-Defamation League added Betar to its glossary of extremism and hate, reporting that the group “openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.” Betar is the only Jewish group on the list.
New York City police officers take people into custody near Columbia University in New York on April 30, 2024. (Craig Ruttle/AP)
Glick said he has met with both administration officials and lawmakers who welcome his input, including Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and James Lankford (Oklahoma) and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania). He has posted selfies and a video of himself interacting with Fetterman in a Capitol hallway in November, with Fetterman saying “I love it” when Glick described the “pager stunt.”
Neither Cruz nor Lankford returned requests for comment on their relationship with Betar. A spokesperson for Fetterman said the senator “strenuously denies any involvement whatsoever” and has never interacted with Glick or Betar beyond a single, incidental hallway run-in.
Glick stepped down as executive director of Betar in January after critics of the group resurfaced a scandal from his past, and Levy said Glick no longer speaks for Betar. Torossian declined to comment for this story.
Since the run-in with SJP in Pittsburgh, the tables have turned in Betar’s favor. Meta has reinstated Betar to its platforms, and earlier this month the University of Pittsburgh temporarily suspended SJP from its campus.
On Thursday, Betar posted on X a video of ICE officers arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey. “She was on our list,” the group said, adding that it plans to send ICE a new list Monday of “approximately 1800 more jihadis.”
Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who is one of the attorneys representing Taal, said the degree to which Betar sets or merely aligns with the Trump administration’s agenda is immaterial.
“They’re still chilling speech, they’re still intimidating, they’re still creating a climate of fear,” he said, adding: “It’s ironic that a Jewish organization is putting together lists.” … See MoreSee Less

A militant Zionist group threatens activists online with a ‘deport list’

www.washingtonpost.com

As the Trump administration cracks down on antisemitism, Zionist group Betar has emerged as an ally, volunteering names of activists it wants detained next.

UC Workers United

2 months ago

UC workers will strike this week. Here’s what that means for students and patients
laist.com/news/education/upte-uc-researchers-technical-workers-strike-begin-patients
By Julia Barajas
Published Feb 25, 2025 9:33 AM
Dozens of workers, many clad in clear plastic rain jackets, march down a college campus. At the front of the line, four workers, all wearing hats, carry a sky blue banner that reads: "UPTE CWA 9119. For our patients. For our research. For our students."
The UPTE-CWA Local 9119 includes about 6,000 healthcare, research, and technical employees in Greater L.A.
(Andrew Baker/UPTE-CWA Local 9119 )
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
What do the UC workers want?
How might the UPTE strike impact patient care?
Some 20,000 University of California employees — including clinical researchers, IT analysts, mental health counselors and nurse case managers — are set to launch a three-day strike on Wednesday. The move could disrupt patient care, research and other campus functions statewide. That includes about 6,000 workers from UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Riverside.

UC workers will strike this week. Here’s what that means for students and patients
The UC workers are represented by University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) Local 9119. The union is currently in the middle of strained contract negotiations with the university system.

UPTE leadership says its goal is to fix a staffing and retention crisis that harms research and patients. The university maintains there is no such crisis.

In a statement, UC spokesperson Heather Hansen said the system has been hiring more staff and that turnover is improving among UPTE-represented employees.

UPTE and UC have accused each other of bargaining in bad faith. The union also charged the university with unfair labor practices before the California Public Employment Relations Board. Those charges, which include instituting restrictions that limit free speech, undergird the upcoming strike.

What do the UC workers want?

UPTE has proposed a number of changes to worker pay, career advancement and work/life balance. These demands include:

A 5% raise and $25 minimum wage, retroactive to July 2023.
A 9% raise in 2025 and an 8% raise in 2026 and 2027.
The ability to work remotely two days a week.
“Clear, objective criteria and [an] enforceable process” for promotions.
So far, the university has proposed:

A 5% across-the-board pay increase beginning July 1.
A 3% wage increase during the second and third years of the contract.
A $25 hourly wage by July 1.
A "streamlined reclassification and appeals processes to facilitate career growth."
Max Belasco, a UCLA graduate, is now an IT worker at his alma mater’s law school. On top of his work on campus, he provides technical support for the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic at several community schools in the Koreatown/Pico Union area.

Belasco told LAist that colleagues often feel the need to apply for external positions to gain leverage when attempting to advance in their UC careers.

“That opens us up to [potentially] losing a lot of institutional knowledge, which is very specialized inside of IT,” he said.

How might the UPTE strike impact patient care?

UPTE executive vice president Matias Campos, a staff pharmacist at UC San Francisco, said core emergency services will remain available at university hospitals.

“We ask that patients contact their provider to suss out what will be impact[ed],” he added. “We anticipate that procedures will need to be rescheduled,” along with “non-urgent clinic patient visits, to accommodate the large number of workers that will be striking.”

“This has been a hard choice,” said Michael McGlenn, a clinical psychologist at UC San Diego. He and his colleagues support the mental health of over 45,000 students.

“We care very much about our patients,” he added. “I will be honest: [I] don't love the idea of leaving them with delayed care.”

But according to McGlenn, students already “have to wait weeks, if not longer, to see a provider for their first appointment.” Then they have to wait “more weeks” for follow-up appointments. In his view, students are already being harmed by the status quo.

“The only way we can make sure that our clinics are appropriately staffed and that they have the resources we need is if we do go on strike,” he said. … See MoreSee Less

UC workers will strike this week. Here’s what that means for students and patients

laist.com

Core emergency services will remain available, but some appointments will be delayed as 20,000 employees walk off the job, including many healthcare workers.

UC Workers United

2 months ago

Lab workers key to California’s bird flu response are poised to strike
Chronic staff shortages have left the lab struggling to protect the state’s food chain from bird flu, the workers said.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/19/bird-flu-california-lab-strike/
February 19, 2025 at 12:00 p.m. ESTToday at 12:00 p.m. EST

Alyssa Laxamana, left; Amy Fletcher, center; and Kayla Dollar are members of the union representing workers at the University of California at Davis laboratory that does testing for the bird flu virus. (Marissa Leshnov/For The Washington Post)

By Hannah Ziegler
Workers at the only lab in California with the authority to confirm high-risk bird flu cases will go on a brief strike next week, claiming that years of understaffing, poor training and burnout have left them struggling to protect the state’s food chain from the rampant virus.
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Amid a statewide outbreak that has killed 23 million birds and infected hundreds of cattle herds and dozens of humans, workers say the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System at the University of California at Davis is struggling. Limited career advancement and poor management prompted a staff exodus early last year, former lab workers said, and chronic staffing shortages have since increased errors and left remaining workers ill-equipped to handle virus testing.
“Management has made it clear that they prioritize getting results out fast because we have such a high sample load over ensuring that our results are accurate and pass our quality control program,” said Alyssa Laxamana, a biotech worker at the lab. “That has been really tough.”

The University Professional and Technical Employees-CWA Local 9119 union, which represents Laxamana and nearly 20,000 other laboratory and medical facility workers across the University of California system,voted last week to authorize a three-day strike beginning Feb. 26, citing chronic staff shortages as well as recruitment and retention issues.

Those problems have “real impacts not just on our workers, but for Californians,” Amy Fletcher, UC-Davis co-chair for the union, told The Washington Post. “We are all now aware of the impacts of avian influenza, and if we could listen to workers, it would be much easier to address these concerns.”
Shortly before the strike was announced, Bill Kisliuk, a spokesperson for UC-Davis, told The Post in a two-page email on behalf of the lab that it has met “unprecedented” demand for bird flu testing during the outbreak and “distributed the work broadly among qualified and certified team members.” The union has been negotiating a new contract with the University of California for several months, and at times, “the rhetoric can become heated,” he said.

The lab has brought in temporary workers from other universities, outsourced some testing and hired technicians after last year’s staff departures, Kisliuk said. It also formed a task force last year to ensure “meaningful consideration” of workers’ concerns, he added.
‘A sink-or-swim situation’

Dairy cows at the University of California at Davis, on Feb. 11. Exposure to the bird flu virus is not a death sentence for cows, but the virus can reduce milk output in herds. (Marissa Leshnov/For The Washington Post)
California’s farms are concentrated in a few key regions, such as the Central Valley, making those areas a hotbed for bird flu, said John Korslund, a former staff veterinary epidemiologist for the Agriculture Department. And thanks to a ballot measure passed in 2018 and gradually implemented over subsequent years, egg-laying hens can’t be confined to cages, giving them greater exposure to the wild birds that transmit the virus.
The virus’s severity has exploited cracks in the country’s agricultural and veterinary response systems, and bird flu cases have recently “exploded” in California, said Meghan Davis, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

“This is a system that’s dealing with a very complex issue which impacts not just dairy cows and not just poultry, but also humans and cats and other species,” Davis said. “Here, you’ve got a system that’s actually primed, and when you overwhelm that system, that gives you a sense of the scale or magnitude” of the outbreak.
Consumers have felt the outbreak’s impact through skyrocketing egg prices. The average price of a dozen large, Grade A eggs in U.S. cities was $4.95 in January, nearly double their price in January 2024, according to federal data. That spike is expected to continue this year.
Since the virus jumped to cattle last year, economists have watched California, which is the country’s 11th-largest egg producer but is by far its biggest milk producer. Bird flu exposure is not a death sentence for cows, unlike for chickens, but the virus has decimated milk output in some affected dairy herds.

So far, bird flu has had a limited impact on California’s dairy industry because most cows have fully recovered after exposure, said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural and resource economics professor at UC-Davis. Still, more than 75 percent of the 950 infected dairy herds in the United States are in California, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to declare a state of emergency in December to “streamline and expedite” its bird flu response.
The UC-Davis lab, which focuses on identifying new areas of infection, is critical to controlling the outbreak. A positive result can prompt farmers to kill thousands of birds, meaning a mistake can critically harm someone’s livelihood. Meanwhile, a false negative result risks exposing more animals and humans to the virus, and further affecting the state’s food chain.
When Laxamana, 25, first tested milk samples for bird flu last September, she had only watched the process twice. She recalled how she had to don scrubs, two sets of surgical gloves, a mask, medical goggles, a lab coat, a hairnet and two sets of medical booties to enter the area where suspect samples are stored. Workers must submit fingerprints and undergo a background check. Daily access also requires an iris scan, and workers must shower before they exit.

“I didn’t even get to practice,” Laxamana said of the complex work, which involves handling highly contagious material. “I didn’t even know if I was doing things correctly.”
The bird flu’s explosiveness has required workers at the UC-Davis lab to test up to 600 samples a day, spending four to six hours per shift sealed in protective gear. Normally, five members of the biotech team would split the work, often aided by a lab assistant and supervisor. But last summer, Laxamana and a colleague, Victoria Ontiveros, were the only people testing samples for avian influenza.

A California law forbids confining egg-laying hens to cages, which gives them greater exposure to the wild birds that transmit the virus. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
By then, the lab had lost decades of expertise, Ontiveros said, including a veteran supervisor who had worked there a dozen years. “We lost all of that institutional knowledge, so that role was put on me with only two years here,” she said. “It’s very much a sink-or-swim situation.”

Before that, workers had raised concerns about inadequate training and persistent burnout due to the bird flu outbreak, according to emails reviewed by The Post. In May 2023, biotech workers delivered a petition asking management to address retention, training and pay equity issues. Later that year, workers wrote in a follow-up letter that their workload had “measurably increased” since another California lab flooded in March 2023.
“We operate with the mindset that the next outbreak is right around the corner, and we need proper training opportunities and competitive salary to remain adequately staffed for that eventuality,” they wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post.
Kisliuk, the UC-Davis spokesperson, said the task force established last year is “actively pursuing initiatives” identified by staff members and is in “productive conversations” with those who have raised concerns. Workers in the biotech lab must have “exceptional qualifications” and undergo “extensive training,” Kisliuk wrote. The lab is “part of a national system designed to handle surges in testing demand” and has also adopted new sampling protocols to address the outbreak’s severity, he added.
‘This job was killing me’

The lab at UC-Davis is the only lab in California with the authority to confirm high-risk bird flu cases. (Marissa Leshnov/For The Washington Post)
The bird flu outbreak, which began in 2022, exacerbated tensions in the lab and triggered the staff exodus, current and former lab workers told The Post.

Kayla Dollar, 29, left in May 2024 after spending two years as a lab assistant for the biotech section. She worked closely with technicians like Laxamana and Ontiveros but needed a promotion and additional training to help with testing.
In January 2024, Dollar applied to a job with testing duties. Others in the lab, including her supervisor, encouraged her, and she volunteered to train outside of work hours to avoid disrupting the outbreak response. But senior management denied her the chance to compete for the job, saying she lacked experience and her colleagues didn’t have time to train her.
Dollar, who has a degree in lab sciences and two years of outbreak experience, now works in veterinary genetics at another UC-Davis lab, the same job she was previously deemed unqualified to work.
“I stepped up when they needed me,” Dollar said. “It didn’t matter.”

Samantha Hale, 28, joined the lab’s virology team in June 2023 but was eventually pulled into biotech support. She recalled how weekly lab meetings would devolve into arguments about understaffing and struggles to fix testing errors. Senior management discouraged technicians from working overtime, Hale said, but they found it impossible otherwise to keep up with the barrage of samples.
Management strictly monitored workers’ breaks, scheduled their lunches and moved their shifts, creating a “very tumultuous, emotionally fraught environment,” Hale said. She took medical leave last November, after the stress contributed to debilitating migraines. When her leave ended, she quit.
“I genuinely am worried about our lack of ability to do the testing properly and what that means for the public, both in terms of an increased potential for human-to-human transmission and how it affects food availability and pricing,” Hale said. But, “this job was killing me.”
Close calls on testing
Since last summer, senior managers have hired technicians, and scientists from the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University have completed rotations at the lab, Ontiveros said.
In addition, lower-priority testing — including for routine diseases, other foreign animal diseases and avian influenza in already-infected places — has been outsourced, allowing the biotech staff at UC-Davis to focus on “higher-priority H5N1 testing,” said Kisliuk, the UC-Davis spokesperson.
But concerns persist about training support and transparency, Ontiveros said. Senior technicians have faced extra pressure to manage new hires and catch mistakes, Laxamana added. She recalled several close calls when testing errors yielded incorrect results, requiring her or Ontiveros to intervene.
And so far, the workload changes haven’t curbed churn. The lab’s replacement supervisor, who arrived in the fall, quit in December, Ontiveros said.
“You can get bodies in there, but if you’re not training them properly, they’re not going to feel comfortable enough to work by themselves, and they’re going to feel defeated,” Ontiveros said.
Laxamana and Ontiveros have considered leaving as well. But they worry about the impact on California’s food chain if they abandon their bird flu battle stations.
“If we leave,” Laxamana said, “there’s really no one else who’s going to stay and do the job.” … See MoreSee Less

Lab workers key to California’s bird flu response are poised to strike

www.washingtonpost.com

Chronic staff shortages have left the California lab struggling to protect the state’s food chain from bird flu, the workers said.

UC Workers United

2 months ago

AFSCME Local 3299 announces strike against UC for Feb. 26, 27

dailybruin.com/2025/02/14/afscme-local-3299-announces-strike-against-uc-for-feb-26-27

Members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 – which represents service, patient care and skilled crafts workers – demonstrate on campus as part of a November strike. The union has called on its workers to strike again Feb. 26 and Feb. 27. (Edward Ho/Daily Bruin)
dylan.jpegBy Dylan Winward
Feb. 14, 2025 12:29 p.m.
A major UC union announced Friday that it will go on a two-day strike later this month.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 – which represents service, patient care and skilled crafts workers – called on its workers to strike Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 across all 10 University campuses. Around 37,000 workers are represented by the union, according to an AFSCME Local 3299 press release.

In the press release, the union alleged that the University has negotiated in bad faith on a new contract. The UC’s previous contracts with workers represented by the union expired in July and October 2024, and the two parties have not yet come to an agreement.

“By refusing to bargain in good faith, the University has made it clear that it does not value the frontline workers who clean its facilities, serve food, and treat patients,” said AFSCME Local 3299 President Michael Avant in the press release.

The union also alleged in new unfair labor practices charges filed Monday that the University used intimidation – including threats of disciplinary action following new speech rules and of arrest for protesting – to prevent workers from striking.

“UC’s actions directly attack AFSCME members’ ability to advocate for themselves as they demand that UC address the cost-of-living crisis and housing unaffordability at the University, and they are blatantly illegal,” the union said in the ULP charge it filed.

The ULP charge, which was filed with the Public Employment Relations Board, also alleged UCLA specifically has policies to prohibit leafleting on campus. The university announced new Time, Place and Manner protests governing protests in September, following several student and union protests in spring 2024.

“At UCLA, UC gave AFSCME a ‘final warning’ that its picketing activity violated access rules, because AFSCME used bullhorns without UC’s approval and did not secure advance approval from UC to picket in locations AFSCME has long used for protests,” the union said in the ULP charge.

UC Office of the President Media Relations spokespeople did not respond in time to a request for comment on the allegations.

AFSCME Local 3299 previously called for a strike in November, with thousands of workers demonstrating to call attention to what they saw as bad-faith bargaining practices from the University. In response to the strike, UCLA consolidated dining halls, leading to long lines for food on the Hill.

Protesters supporting the union also marched through campus buildings – including Bunche Hall, Boelter Hall and the Mathematical Sciences Building – while chanting as part of picketing demonstrations during the November strike.

[Related: AFSCME Local 3299 rallies together for 2-day strike against UC]

The union has not yet announced picket times and locations for the strike. UCLA Media Relations did not respond in time to requests for comment on how the university plans to mitigate the strike’s impact on students. … See MoreSee Less

AFSCME Local 3299 announces strike against UC for Feb. 26, 27 – Daily Bruin

dailybruin.com

A major UC union announced Friday that it will go on a two-day strike later this month. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 – which represents service, patien…