UC Workers United

1 month ago

Unite UC Workers for a Contract and for Palestine
Stop the War on Workers! Stop the Genocide and War Profiteering!

The UC Regents and UC management are at war with their workers. While the university is spending billions on buying new hospitals and a massive construction binge, UC workers cannot afford the exploding cost of living.

The UC Regents and management are spending tens of millions on union busting lawyers to prevent UC workers from striking, protecting their right to free speech, and protecting the health and safety of UC workers, who are being pushed to the limit by understaffing. Workers are also opposing privatization of more and more of the university through “joint public-private partnerships” that have personally benefited the university regents. Former UC Regent Richard Blum actually was allowed to use university pension funds to profit through his own private equity firm. [1]

The university is also the largest owner of apartments in California and has been part of the massive rental increases for working people and the poor [2, 3, 4]. At the same time, they are now taking part in the capitalist healthcare system and are driving down workers’ wages in order to compete against Kaiser, Sutter, and other supposedly “non-profit” healthcare insurance companies. [5]

The regents and ex-officio board members selected by Gavin Newsom are a collection of multi-millionaire corporate executives and well-connected political operatives. They do not speak for the people of California or the workers who make the university work and they do not act in our interests. We need an elected board of regents, controlled by the workers, students, staff, and public—not the billionaires.

The way to defeat these union busters and privatizers is to unite all the unions at the UC and beyond, and prepare for statewide strike action of all the unions to shut down the university and bust the union busters. All UC workers need a COLA that will protect against inflation, not just this year but in the future. We must go to the public and legislature and demand that UC stop spending millions on union busting lawyers to fight our unions.

The three major unions at the UC—AFSCME 3299, UAW 4811, and UPTE CWA 9119—together have more than 100,000 members, but they are currently divided. They negotiate their contracts with university management separately, they strike separately, and for the most part, they do not even support each other on the picket lines. We need to unite these fights, which are against the same administrators, the same regents, and the same union busting law firms. If the UC’s unions went out together, the university would be completely shut down and would have no choice but to accede to workers’ demands for a living wage.

We call on rank and file members to demand that their unions start to have joint union rallies with workers from all unions.
We must also unify the fight against the privatization of the UC with the fight against the increasing repression and militarization of the university, which is directly connected to the support of the military industrial complex by the regents and management. The UC receives some $400 million per year in military-tied funding, holds some $3.3 billion in investments linked to defense contractors, another $2.1 billion managed by war profiteer BlackRock, and $8.6 billion tied to Blackstone, the biggest corporate slumlord in the world. [6, 7, 8, 9]

Over the course of the last year, the UC has spent tens of millions of dollars repressing students, staff, and faculty who have opposed the genocide in Gaza and who have taken a principled stand in calling for the UC to divest from war profiteers. [10] Rather than condemning the genocide, the UC Regents have spent the last year condemning student protesters as “hateful,” “despicable,” and “reprehensible.” [11] By vilifying and smearing the student protests, they have deliberately tried to poison public opinion and lay the groundwork for violent repression. They bear direct responsibility for allowing a chain of violent attacks on the student encampments, culminating in the fascistic mob attack on the UCLA encampment on April 30. While a mob attacked students with pipes, pepper spray, fireworks, and teargas, seriously injuring 25, the UC police were (for once!) stood down. [12] Across the UC, some 500 students were arrested for participating in peaceful protests, and many were injured during the numerous police assaults on the protests, which made liberal use of rubber bullets, flash bangs, and other “less-lethal” weaponry.

While the university refuses to pay its workers a living wage, it has found the money to raise the salaries of the UC Chancellors to around $1 million per year. [13] This is on top of the tens of millions spent on the steadily expanding bureaucracy of UC administrators. The UC Regents also recently approved the purchase of millions of dollars of military-grade hardware, including pepper bullets, projectile launchers, and drones, and many millions more to fund a permanent garrison of police and private security on our campuses. [14]

While UC workers cannot afford to live in California, the Democrat-run California government supports the trillions of dollars spent on war and supports the genocide in Gaza, which would be impossible without tens of billions of dollars of US-supplied weapons. The UC Regents, which are essentially a sub-committee of the Democratic Party for running the UC, back these policies to the hilt.

The profiteers who own and run the military industrial complex are the same people running the UC. The same forces pushing through rules and regulations that take away democratic rights on our campuses—banning protests, restricting speech, arresting and retaliating against students and faculty—are implicated in pursuing imperialist wars abroad. The UC Regents are helping to set the stage for massive purges and retaliatory firings and union busting.

The wars abroad are also a war on UC workers and all working people in California and the US. The methods of repression, surveillance, and terror used against the civilian population in Gaza will increasingly be brought home to this country. If it takes power, the fascist movement centered on Donald Trump will launch mass deportations, enact sweeping attacks on democratic rights, deploy the police against protests, and shut down unions and organizing across the country. Project 2025 is a blueprint for the crushing of all democratic and union rights.

Our unions must connect these urgent issues in their contract fights. The business unionist ideology of the US labor movement says that we should not connect the wars abroad with the war at home but that is wrong and dangerous. Other unions around the world, including the UK TUC, are holding national days of action against the genocide, but in the US most of our union leaderships ignore the genocide and war, or at best issue a noncommittal statement, and do nothing, worried that it will undermine their contract negotiations, or alienate their Democratic Party patrons. The union bureaucracy does not care to see that every penny and dollar spent abroad for genocide and war is coming out of education, healthcare, and housing here.

The UC should become an institution that is run by the working people for the working people and not the billionaires, who have twisted the goal of public education into another money-making scheme and who are forcing the students to go into debt to pay for their education. California, with over 190 billionaires, should not be forcing workers to sleep in their cars and having to go deep in debt just to go to university.

We support the UC People’s Tribunal On Palestine that will be taking place in Oakland and the UCSF Mission campus on November 11th and 12th and a Tribunal in Southern California. We urge that all unions, chapters and other organizations at UC support these important events and actions.
ucpeoplestribunal.org

NOW is the Time to Unite and Win the Fight. UC Workers Need to Unite for Action. … See MoreSee Less

UC People's Tribunal

ucpeoplestribunal.org

The people charge the UC Regents, UC President Michael Drake, and Governor Gavin Newsom with complicity in genocide and ongoing Nakba. Learn more The UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine Understanding…

UC Workers United

1 month ago

To Voice the Unspeakable – Rupa Marya

rupamarya.substack.com/p/to-voice-the-unspeakable?publication_id=2272492&utm_campaign=email-post-…

To Voice the Unspeakable

RUPA MARYA
OCT 15, 2024

23

8

On the Fall Equinox 2024, I was suspended from my faculty position as a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) because of my support for the liberation of Palestinians who are suffering genocide. This week the university made moves that could have long lasting impacts to my ability to practice medicine in the future. Powerful donors of our public university likely began another targeted harassment campaign against me which included sending mass emails to people within my institution demanding that I get fired and lose my medical license and waves of death and rape threats–the first such attack was in November 2023.
Across the academy in the US, there is a coordinated set of attacks on people of color, our allies and our collective scholarship that centers liberation of all people in all circumstances. In healthcare education,this repression has devastating consequences. The gains of the Civil Rights movement–specifically Title VI–are being weaponized to silence us, defame us and threaten our livelihoods. By framing the demonstration of support for Palestinians or the criticism of Israel as threats to Jewish safety, campuses are effectively silencing advocacy for people of color facing genocide. This weaponization of fragility to silence marginalized people in the academy became evident after the historic response to George Floyd’s murder. We must understand what we are living through to respond in the correct collective manner, to reclaim the ground gained in the Civil Rights struggle. Because we are not going back.
What is most concerning about my particular situation is that those behind the attacks against me appear to work in collaboration with administration in my university, California State Senator Scott Wiener, an online doxxing organization which threatens students and faculty who support Palestinians and which has ties with the Israeli state–The Canary Mission–and the largest donor to the university, who just happens to support rightwing anti-Arab individuals and organizations. My suspension follows an eerily similar path of Professor of Anthropology at Muhlenberg College Maura Finkelstein, the first tenured professor to be fired in the US for supporting equal rights for Palestinians.
Since October 7, 2023, the UCSF administration has become a repressive force against anyone who opposes the genocide against Palestinians or who criticizes Israel. It seeks to quash any critical discussion of its institutional and financial relationships that support this repression. This has resulted in an environment where differing views about violence in the Middle East are suppressed. Those expressing support for Palestinians have been threatened and harmed reputationally and through the loss of livelihood. This pattern of repression is ubiquitous across the University of California and has led to faculty across 7 campuses filing Unfair Labor Practices actions, with more joining.

The UCSF’s Chancellor’s office was quick to decry the violence of October 7, and correctly affirmed the value of Israeli lives. Unfortunately, similar condemnations against the killings of Palestinians in Gaza have not been made. Instead, we are met with a chilling silence from the administration, as the genocide in Gaza unfolded, where over two million Palestinians are being starved and well over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of which comprise women and children. The international peer-reviewed medical journal,The Lancet, has placed the toll of the violence in Gaza since October 7 at just over 180,000 people; a shocking 5 to 7 percent of Gaza’s population. The International Court of Justice has affirmed there is a plausible case of Israel committing genocide in Gaza.
Since October 7, Palestinian paramedics and doctorshave been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Israeli army and prison guards, and Israel has destroyed almost the entirety of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. Today, they are targeting Lebanon’s healthcare system. Over 1,100 of our healthcare colleagues have been killed. Hundreds of letters from faculty, students, trainees, staff and local community have been sent to the university, pleading to take a stand against Israel’s violence in Gaza and affirm the value of Palestinian lives. All of these entreaties have been met with silence and repression.
My role as a physician over the last 22 years, in the communities I serve and at UCSF, has been to speak up for those at the margins of society, whose inferior social position often leads to poor health outcomes. How dynamics of power sediment in the body is the subject of my scholarly work. I raise my voice to uncomfortable truths, highlighting ways in which power entrenches sickness or ensures unnecessarily early disability or deaths for those who lack power. My words at times provoke discomfort and sometimes, embarrassment for some, including my supervisors, the university administration, the City of San Francisco and politicians in California who advance policies which harm the most vulnerable people of our state. My intention has never been to cause harm, but rather, the opposite. I seek to expose the pathology at play, and to invite course correction, so that all may have an opportunity to thrive. The feelings of those who exert power are at times offended by my words, resulting in attempts to police or censor my speech.
The critical connection between protected speech and protected life cannot be overstated. In her foundational essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak examines the role of the voice in the context of imperialism and colonial capitalist realities. These realities are behind the creation of the University of California, through the brutal dispossession and genocide of the Indigenous people who lived here for over 10,000 years. These socioeconomic arrangements of power persist today, dictating who lives, how well they live, and who dies. Some California Native people who live an hour away from our health campus still do not have access to running water, which posed challenges as the tribe faced the spread of Covid-19.

The subaltern are the people who are pushed to the margins of society. They include the Natives in the colonial context and the people who receive orders, but do not give them. In summary, those on the losing end of power. To allow them a voice is to endow them with subjectivity, which complicates the project of exerting power over them. In order to bypass innate human qualities of empathy and care, their subjectivity must be denied. It is easier to subjugate, displace and murder people when you do not have to consider their humanity.
This dehumanization is a prelude to all sorts of debased human behavior, exemplified by genocide. Dehumanization has characterized the Israeli government vis-á-vis Palestinians since October 8. Israeli genocide scholar and former Israeli soldier Omer Bartov expresses alarm about the societal devolution in Israel, where most Israelis lack the ability to feel empathy for Palestinians, and today, the people of Lebanon too. To speak up for the rights of Palestinians at this moment is to humanize them; to insist upon their subjectivity. This upends a logic where the founders of Israel framed Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land,” in one statement rendering Palestinians not only speechless, but also nonexistent. Instead of examining this narrative of erasure, my university took part in it by ensuring that those who speak out against the genocide of Palestinians will be met with censorship and repression.
At UCSF, those who are marginalized includes students, staff, faculty and patients from marginalized communities and identities: working class Arabs, Muslims, SWANA, Palestinians, Asians, including South Asians, Sikhs, Indigenous people, Black people, Irish people, women, transgender people, people with disabilities, Anti-Zionist Jews, Queers, Pinay people, Neurodivergent/Autistic people, allies and more. In my two decades of working at this institution, I have never seen so many different people afraid to speak. And it makes sense, because when you peruse the 581-page Unfair Labor Practices filing you can see the whole suite of repressive tactics that are making people expressing support for Palestinians scared to speak up.
Staff at my university have been disciplined and even stalked for displaying visible support for Palestinians. Nurses have been instructed to remove cultural articles of clothing, or sent home for wearing watermelon pins. Some who refused have been suspended. A chief resident who presents as white revealed his Palestinian heritage during his Grand Rounds lecture, where he spoke on the health crisis in Gaza. Following this lecture, pro-Israeli faculty attempted to have him fired, a few weeks from completing a grueling seven-year residency program. His crime? “Pro-Israel faculty said they felt the resident was calling them baby killers,” reports one who was present at the lecture and who chooses to remain anonymous, for fear of repercussions. This chief resident was bringing attention to the health circumstances of his people during a genocide. At our institution, some faculty and staff have lost 60 family members. Others have lost almost 100. Their grief is rendered invisible and unspeakable at UCSF.
Physicians who have spoken on the harm to children in Gaza–where over 16,750 children have been killed since October 7–have been threatened, shamed or have had their rights to make educational content banned. Health Equity scholars have had their roles limited when mentioning the impact of violence in Palestine, with salary support removed from their activities that were once lauded as critical to the advancement of equity in medicine. Leaked emails show leadership at the Office of Diversity and Outreach harassing people advocating for Palestinians. These so-called ambassadors for diversity shut down all support for anti-Zionist Jewish students who screened Israelism, a documentary by two Jewish directors who expose the indoctrination of American Jews to the supremacist and apartheid ideology of the Israeli state. This same diversity leadership has fired staff advocating for critical dialogue around the impact of Jewish supremacy.
For my advocacy, I have been harassed online, slandered and defamed as a racist, bombarded with racist death and rape threats through my social media accounts and work email, have had a plain clothes police officer show up to my lecture where he intimidated students who came to hear me speak, have been placed under investigation, and now, have been suspended indefinitely. What they seem to want is silence, reputational damage and career destruction. This week our only Palestinian faculty member was silenced; the lecture he planned for six months–at the request of students–was abruptly canceled.

These acts occur at the same time that the UC police department received approval for military grade weapons they requested. Students nervously watch as their tuition and our tax dollars are used to buy weapons to be deployed against them for protesting the university’s complicity with Israel’s genocide. This comes in tandem with the university’s increasingly repressive policies. UCLA students understand these weapons are not to protect them, because police stood by and let a violent pro-Israeli mob assault them for hours on campus in April, sending dozens to the hospital. The students understand their safety is not considered by both the police and the university. Their safety and right to protest have been systematically denied.
It is in this context that I wish to share the concerns of those who are afraid and silenced at every level in our institution. I do not claim my words are perfect, but maintain they are never to harass, target, exclude or discriminate. I voice the impact of these patterns of repressive harm and to ask questions of their origins, reach and their long-lasting traces. Every institutional avenue to raise concerns has been turned against us, or removed, since October 2023. There is nowhere for us to go. So we speak and attempt to describe this repression, and the uncomfortable and unsafe positions we are placed in because of these gaps. The administration’s gross negligence to secure the safety of all members is harmful to everyone. My questions seek to correct our course, so we can be in an environment where everyone’s voice and experience is honored.
At the center of this drive to silence me since November 2023 is California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also busy working to dismantle California’s Ethnic Studies public school curriculum. That curriculum is based on scholarly work that gives voice to the subaltern here in California, including California’s Native communities, Japanese Americans who had their farmland expropriated while interred in concentration camps across California’s Central Valley, undocumented immigrants who keep our economy running, and refugees of the Nakba in 1948, who fled here after Israel ethnically-cleansed hundreds of Palestinian villages. Policing voices of the marginalized in the field of Ethnic Studies is how Wiener hopes to bolster the dominant structures which reinforce his position, while perpetuating dynamics of harm, and consequently, poor health outcomes for marginalized people.
Wiener has a pattern of lashing out at Asian women who threaten his positionality by cynically casting us as racist. During the 2018 senate race, Wiener smeared the Asian candidate Jane Kim asdisrespectful of the Chinese community in San Francisco. Kim positioned her platform against the interests of Wiener’s biggest donors; corporate real estate developers such as UCSF’s largest donor, the pro-Israeli Diller Foundation, which has funded multiple rightwing and Islamophobic organizations. The Dillers support Wiener and are also the largest donor to the entire UC system. They make their money through their for profit Prometheus Real Estate Group, a corporate landlord which inflates local rents, displacing poor and working people in the process. In a case of unfortunate symmetry, the Dillers also donate to Regavim, a rightwing Israeli nonprofit that funds Jewish settlers working to evict Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank. The Dillers are behind the latest round of enclosing People’s Park in Berkeley, sending sheltering unhoused people packing. They literally put people in tents from Frisco to Palestine. The family’s toxic behavior has earned them the ire of California rapper No$hu–Wiener gets a special shout out “Even politicians do get bought/You can ask that f**king wiener, Scott”–and the status of a boycott target by local Jewish artists and allied activists.

What is so threatening to Wiener that he launches his internet attack-dogs on me? Is he really concerned that a physician and public university professor who dedicates her life to anti-racism and ensuring good care of all members of our communities–including the dispossessed–is a closet hater of the Jewish people? The progressive Jewish community in the Bay Area contested his framing vehemently, and repeatedly. This issue is about power, not identity, ancestry or heritage.
This is not the first time Wiener has attacked me. In January 2024, he publicly targeted me, framed me as a Jew hater, tagged UCSF and later thanked them when they amplified his words in their coordinated social media posts. In a flurry of tweets and online death threats spurred by Wiener’s posts, the Canary Mission was tagged, after which I was placed on their website, leading to months of online harassment. The Canary Mission is also funded by the Diller Foundation. In January 2024, The Center for Protest Law and Litigation took notice of this public communication between a state senator, a university and the Canary Mission and issued a Public Records Act request for the email communications between these groups. UCSF failed to produce the emails and in August, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation sued UCSF to get access to them.
This is also not the first time my university has collaborated–including with politicians, the media and even lawyers–to attempt to silence me. The first time was after Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police shot and killed my former patient, Charles Hill, on July 3rd, 2011. I had taken care of Hill in my medical training, when I rotated as a resident in the San Francisco General Hospital Emergency Room. Over the years of training, I would run into Hill on the sidewalks of the Mission on my walks home from the hospital after overnight shifts. I would check if he had his medications and made sure he was as good as he could be in the challenging circumstances of being poor and unhoused in San Francisco.
I saw the brutal footage showing police gunning down Hill–who was clearly in a mental crisis—within two minutes of the cop stepping onto the train platform. Shocked, I wrote an open letter to my city decrying police brutality. The letter was circulated by the “hacktivist” group, Anonymous, and reached tens of thousands of people. It gained such attention because as protests erupted to denounce Charles Hills’ murder, cell phone use in the area was cut so protestors could not communicate with each other, or to the outside world. Silencing is how power maintains its violence, uninterrogated.
After the letter reached over 10,000 shares, the university’s lawyers called me, telling me I was in big trouble for violating HIPAA patient privacy laws by publicly stating Charles had been a patient of mine and for disclosing his mental health issues. I asked who would press charges against me. The lawyer said, “Well, technically the family.” I replied, “We don’t know his family. He is unhoused and has been living on the streets for years. Do you think his family would be upset that I disclosed my relationship and his vulnerable status as I publicly advocated for him to not get shot by the police?” We now know Charles’ brother tried and failed to get justice for the homicide.
In that moment, the lawyer replied, “I guess not.” I continued, “Was I adhering to my duty as a physician to advocate for my patient who experienced harm and to advocate for vulnerable people like him in our community?”
“I guess so.”
“So, please help me understand the problem.”
The lawyer responded that I was mandated to refresh my knowledge of HIPAA law and retake a training module. So I did. And I continued to speak out. Each time I spoke, I came closer to articulating and exposing how structures of power in medicine—and in society at large—predetermine health outcomes for our patients and ourselves, the marginalized people working in a field whose limits of healing are circumscribed by the power that seeks to silence us.
Since 2011, whenever I have spoken up for my patients neglected within the institution, I have been accused of being “a bully,” “unprofessional” and “aggressive” by the university’s internal reporting processes. When I was called to the office with a faculty coach, the coach reflected that each instance involved me advocating for a Black patient, as a woman of color. They invited the question: who is aggressive? Me, or the system where such practices of harm were occurring? Me, or the system attempting to silence me for speaking up? The naming of the problem was couched as the problem. It continues to be the focus, where statutes around protection at the university are used to silence real concern about vulnerable people’s safety and wellness.
When naming dynamics of power that harm are viewed as more harmful than the dynamics of power causing the harm, we see power entrench itself in an attempt to render marginalized people silent. To evolve our society into one where all may have the opportunity to be healthy, we must confront and discredit this manipulation. We must insist on the right of all to speak freely about repression, oppression and violence, so that we can move to stop violence against all people.
I can introspect on my words, perhaps the awkwardness of them, that inability to convey depth and nuance on social media, or the foolishness of attempting to reduce what has now taken me some 3400 words down to 120 characters. While my language may invite criticism, it does not detract from the impetus that compels me to speak.
I have been a witness and support for countless faculty, staff, students and patients from marginalized backgrounds over the past 20 years at UCSF. Repression against us has never been as oppressive as over the past year. Instead of shifting the approach, the university continues to barrel down this path of harm. Many members of our community express a lack of safety in an institution that seeks to silence us, while characterizing our defense of Palestinian human rights and criticism of Israel’s violation of them, as racist, threatening, harassment and harmful. Defending the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and with equality is none of these things. I do not excuse my language, but seek to humanize myself, as someone serving a system not built for me, a system which today, harms people like me for standing with the oppressed.
When a woman from a marginalized background speaks, if she can be heard, it is only through the noise of obfuscation. Thus, her concerns are sidelined or rendered moot. The dynamics of power that created the violent separation of humanity, expressed through colonial domination, are intact and unwilling to be contested. But when there is a genocide, we must redouble our efforts and discover the courage we did not know we possessed. To push against the silencing is a struggle we all must carry. This struggle is not only for the people harmed by genocide but also for the offenders who must be invited back from the edge of human depravity to a place of seeing and experiencing our shared humanity.
Recognizing the impact of this strain, I am reminded of the most common question I have been asked by medical students over the last two decades. After considered hesitation, those who have found their voice manage to eek out:
“How do you survive in such a racist institution?”
I have survived because I struggle against the racist structures seeking to silence me, and others like me. I struggle against those who want to hide the voices of those who say NEVER AGAIN, and who–most cynically –defame us as racist or harmful as we speak up for those experiencing racialized harm, including ourselves. The tools that were developed during the Civil Rights era are being manipulated by people of great privilege to silence marginalized people here as those around the world are murdered. Our struggle must be understood through the lens of power–not simply identity–which is what defines this as a decolonial struggle. Our scope has always been global, because these projects of colonial terror have always been global. I engage in this struggle with people from similar backgrounds, because I know it is fundamental in our duty as healthcare workers, as we collectively strive to achieve health for all. For all.
To progress as a community sharing a university and planet together, we must find the courage to resist the reactionary forces that seek to silence us and insist on the humanity of those deprived of it. We must demand our right to speak against these forces that seek to repress us, and for our concerns to be addressed, now more than ever. When doctors do not speak in times such as these, people die. It is a matter of life and death that we must continue to raise our voices. We must take up the collective burden from the elders who moved the needle forward in the 1960s and push forward in this next chapter of Civil Rights to secure the possibility of all people to live a life of health.
Sign and share this statement of supoprt for UCSF Faculty, Students and Staff facing repression for advocacy for their advocacy for Palestine liberation. … See MoreSee Less

To Voice the Unspeakable

rupamarya.substack.com

On the Fall Equinox 2024, I was suspended from my faculty position as a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) because of my support for the liberation of Palestin…

UC Workers United

1 month ago

UC’s unfair pay scales undermine crucial mental health treatment
A two-tiered system for clinical social workers leads to overwork, burnout, and worse outcomes for patients.
48hills.org/2024/10/ucs-unfair-pay-scales-undermine-crucial-mental-health-treatment/
Jillian McCoy
By JILLIAN MCCOY
OCTOBER 13, 2024

I’m a clinical social worker employed by the University of California San Francisco—a public university—which partners with public agencies to address a public health crisis. But what kind of public accountability is my employer subject to?

I believe UCSF is operating a two-tiered mental health care system in SF that is contributing to the crisis we see in our city. It turns out there’s very little that state and local governments and regulators can do about it, although last month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a nonbinding resolution calling this disparity out.

UCSF workers have had to hit the picket lines in the past, and may again soon.
I’m a Black woman and mother who came to social work motivated by first-hand experience with community violence. I work on the frontlines of our city’s mental health crisis at the Trauma Recovery Center in a role UCSF calls “Campus CSW.” I provide trauma-informed care to acute survivors of violent crimes like sexual assault, domestic violence, and shootings. I often meet clients right after these incidents in the emergency room, the community, or our clinic.

I provide therapy and help survivors navigate the many hurdles survivors face, like filing police reports, applying for restraining orders, relocating, and securing emergency financial resources. For many, this isn’t their first experience with violence.

I am exhausted to find myself fighting systems of oppression within UCSF while simultaneously fighting the systemic inequality that oppresses our clients.

“Campus CSWs” like me are largely funded by federal, state, and local grants. Our clients often come from underserved populations. Between 2001 and 2018, about two-thirds of the people we served at the TRC were from communities of color. Data show that the disparities in outcomes that often exist based on survivors’ age, education, and housing status are eliminated or greatly reduced by access to care at a TRC.

“Medical Center CSWs,” on the other hand, work at UCSF facilities like Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, or the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, primarily treating admitted patients who are more likely to be white and privately insured, and assisting with discharge planning and coordination of ongoing care.

Despite similar experience, education, and licensure requirements, Campus CSWs earn 32 percent less on average than Medical Center CSWs, leading to high turnover and chronic understaffing for Campus CSWs and delayed care for our most vulnerable patients. These pay inequities are also corrosive to morale and trust and exacerbate burnout.

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That’s not only unfair, it’s making it much harder for us to do the job the city and the community expect from us on the frontlines of San Francisco’s mental health crisis.

Earlier this year, I was unsurprised to learn that other UC workers face similar problems when optometrists, represented by the Union of Professional and Technical Employees at UC, held an unfair labor practice strike in February, which highlighted UC’s disregard for the rights of employees as well as burnout, chronic vacancies, and life-threatening delays for patients.

It isn’t that UC can’t afford to address this issue—we entrust them with tremendous public resources. The university also generates enormous profits which have allowed it to accumulate roughly $26.9 billion in reserves and billions more in long-term investments, while going on a spending spree this year to acquire nearly a dozen new hospitals.

While we deeply appreciate the supervisors who passed a resolution condemning this two-tier system of care earlier this week, we also understand what we are up against. On our side we now have a non-binding resolution of the City and County of San Francisco. The University, on the other hand, can call upon the Constitution of the State of California, which exempts it—by name—from public oversight.

So what can we do? Negotiations are underway between UC and thousands of its healthcare, research, and technical staff who belong to our union, including here at UCSF. My fellow union members and I are pushing UC to reinvest their profits back into our services, yet dozens of unfair labor practices are pending against UC for the same bad-faith negotiations that led to this year’s optometrist strike.

In the meantime, turnover and vacancies continue to impact the delivery of care to the most vulnerable members of our community.

Solving San Francisco’s mental health crisis is an urgent priority. The Department of Public Health has entrusted UCSF with some of the most challenging parts of that work and my coworkers and I have the skills, experience and passion for the task. All that is missing is the adequate support and resources we need to be there for others on the worst days of their lives.

I want to focus my energy on the clients who need me. I’m passionate about improving their outcomes. I hope the University of California won’t force my coworkers and I onto the picket line, but if no one else can hold them accountable, we will.

Jillian McCoy is a clinical social worker at UCSF. … See MoreSee Less

UC's unfair pay scales undermine crucial mental health treatment – 48 hills

48hills.org

A two-tiered system for clinical social workers leads to overwork, burnout, and worse outcomes for patients.

UC Workers United

2 months ago

SIGN TODAY PLEASE!

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Letter in Support of Dr. Abdulhadi Talk
To add your name to the following letter, please complete
this form by end-of-day Tuesday, October 1, 2024. We are not accepting
anonymous signatures because, due to the University's email policy, we cannot guarantee anonymity.
We welcome signatories from outside of Wake Forest University, including other colleges and universities. Names will be included when sending the letter to President Wente and Provost Gillespie. The letter may be shared via newspapers and/or social media, in which case the number of signatures will be included but not the names. Thank you.
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Dear President Wente and Provost Gillespie,
We, the undersigned, are writing to express our deep concern over the cancellation of Professor Rabab Abdulhadi’s scheduled talk on October 7th. This decision not only compromises academic freedom but also signals an alarming precedent where external pressure and baseless accusations dictate the boundaries of discourse at Wake Forest University.
The role of any academic institution is to foster open, critical dialogue, especially on complex global issues. By canceling this event, Wake Forest has failed in its primary responsibility: defending academic freedom. Academic freedom is not optional—it is foundational. If scholars cannot present their perspectives without interference, the University risks becoming a platform only for sanitized or convenient viewpoints.
Professor Abdulhadi is a distinguished academic in Palestinian studies, and while not everyone may agree with her views, disagreement is not a valid reason to silence her. The decision to cancel her talk is a dangerous infringement on the rights of scholars to engage in public dialogue, especially on issues of human rights and justice.
The University’s own Faculty Handbook makes it clear: “The University cannot be content merely to tolerate inquiry and discussion; it has an obligation to protect them” (Faculty Handbook, 2023, p. 36). In canceling this event, the University has failed to uphold this obligation, contradicting its stated commitment to free inquiry and intellectual rigor.
The cancellation followed a concerted effort by external groups to silence Professor Abdulhadi. These efforts were fueled by false, Islamophobic, and racially charged accusations, labeling her and some faculty members as “terrorists.” The University’s capitulation to this pressure is deeply concerning. Institutions of higher learning must resist the influence of external forces that seek to shut down debate and discussion, especially when those efforts are grounded in bigotry and misinformation.
By yielding to these pressures, Wake Forest has reinforced the marginalization of Palestinian voices in academia. This silencing is part of a broader pattern where Palestinian scholars are denied platforms to share their perspectives. In an environment where open discussion is essential to the pursuit of knowledge, this kind of exclusion is not just harmful—it is unacceptable.
The cancellation of this event reflects a broader bias in how the University engages with controversial topics. While pro-Palestinian voices are being suppressed, more pro-Israel perspectives on the conflict continue to receive platforms without challenge. This imbalance stifles the ability to have a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the issue. It reduces the conflict to one-sided narratives, preventing a deeper, more informed engagement with the topic.
For Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and faculty, this decision is more than just a lost opportunity for discussion—it is a denial of their experiences and identity. The choice to cancel the event, especially on a day of significance for Palestinians, dismisses their history and struggles, reinforcing their marginalization in both the academic and broader political discourse.
Wake Forest claims to be committed to diversity and inclusion. However, the handling of this event exposes a contradiction between those stated values and the reality on campus. The Change.org petition that helped drive the cancellation was filled with racist and Islamophobic comments. The University’s failure to publicly condemn these statements or address their impact on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities on campus sends a clear message: not all communities are equally valued or protected.
This decision also undermines the work of the faculty who organized this event. The talk was part of a two-year faculty seminar on Genocide and Memory Studies, which was reviewed and approved based on its scholarly merit. By canceling the event, the University disregards the intellectual labor of its own faculty and devalues the importance of engaging with difficult and contested topics.
This was not just an academic event; it was an opportunity to engage in critical dialogue on an issue that is deeply relevant to global human rights. By canceling the event, the University has signaled that some topics are too controversial or politically inconvenient to be discussed within its walls. This is not the role of a university. A university’s purpose is to challenge, to provoke thought, and to create space for difficult conversations—not to shy away from them.
The decision to cancel Professor Abdulhadi’s talk is a failure of leadership and a betrayal of the University’s mission. Academic freedom is non-negotiable. By bowing to external pressure and silencing a Palestinian voice, the University has compromised its integrity and undermined its commitment to fostering open dialogue.
We urge the administration to reconsider its decision and how it handles such decisions in the future. The University must defend the principles of free speech and academic freedom, particularly when they are most under threat. Anything less is a dereliction of its duty to its students, faculty, and the broader academic community.
Sincerely,
[The Undersigned] … See MoreSee Less

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UC Workers United

4 months ago

UC healthcare and service workers demand wage hike and housing aid
www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-01/uc-healthcare-and-service-workers-demand-wage-hike-an…
Demonstrators hold picket signs
Members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 3299, with support from other unions, picket in front of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. The union has been negotiating with UC since January, and both sides are at an impasse. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
By Veronica Roseborough
Aug. 1, 2024 3 AM PT
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Hundreds of UC healthcare and campus service workers converged in front of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to picket during their lunch break Wednesday, demanding higher wages and investment in affordable housing solutions.

The informational picket was one of five across the UC campuses organized by AFSCME Local 3299, which represents more than 30,000 workers, who are among the lowest-paid in the UC system. These union members are patient care technical workers, custodians, food service employees, security guards, secretaries and others who keep hospitals and campuses running behind the scenes,

The union has been bargaining with UC for new contracts for most of its members since January. Last week, the California Employment and Labor Relations Board declared bargaining to be at an impasse. On Thursday, the contract for patient care technical workers expires; the service worker contract ends in October.

“We are picketing because … the contract is expiring, and the university has still failed to address the fundamental problem that we’ve been raising to them, frankly, before the contract — the issue of housing,” said Liz Perlman, AFSCME 3299 executive director, who said many union members don’t make enough money to pay for the high cost of housing. In addition to higher wages, the union is pushing the university to include funds for housing aid in a new contract.

The university has offered a $25 minimum wage with 5% wage increases across the board by next July, among 25 other proposals, UC said in a July 30 news release.

However, a new report by AFSCME researchers took a closer look at the effect of the housing crisis on many union members and found that workers will need more than just those higher wages to find affordable housing close to campus.

With a median hourly wage of about $30, more than two-thirds of union employees meet the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s standard of “low” or “very low” income, double the number in 2017, according to the report.

Since 2017, the number of service and patient care workers who are eligible for federal housing vouchers has nearly tripled to 9,400, encompassing all workers at UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz and 76% at UC San Diego, the union report said. In a push to expand their contract beyond wage increases, the union wants the university to create housing assistance funds for low-wage employees.

Erika Djordjevic has experienced housing insecurity. A student and patient scheduler at UC San Diego, Djordjevic said she and her 7-year-old son had to move in with her parents after a divorce left her with an apartment she could not afford on her own. Before taxes, she makes less than $5000 a month.

“The market makes it unrealistic for a single-income person to be able to buy a house or rent an apartment at this day and age. It’s impossible,” Djordjevic said. “And it’s sad because we work for a great company but they’d rather build multimillion-dollar buildings than give us at least a good way of living.”

Djordjevic has applied to three different federal housing assistance programs — but at No. 168 on the wait list, she isn’t holding her breath.

On the flip side, UC San Francisco shuttle driver Carmen Lee has received a government housing voucher — but she applied 21 years ago, when she was unhoused, had a child and was fast-tracked past 15,000 others because of the “desperate” nature of her situation. She fears that if she lost her current housing, her circumstances would once again be precarious.

“With my salary at UC, and the high inflation right now, really, where would we go?” she asked.

Union members pointed to a program at UC Davis that helps union workers with housing near the university’s new satellite development and research hub, Aggie Square, as an example of the type of housing assistance they are seeking in their contract.

The $5-million fund was created in a partnership between the union, the university and the city and will support housing stability and eviction protections for eligible households, with AFSCME members receiving priority.

Months behind on rent and facing eviction, UC patient service representative Darian Garnett said the program gave her a one-time $5,000 grant to help with missed rent payments.

“That’s an example where there’s a precedent,” said AFSCME researcher Owen Li, adding that the university provided housing assistance to workers most in need.

In response, Missy Matella, associate vice president for systemwide employee and labor relations, said that by providing “generous wage increases,” UC gives employees agency over their money.

“The University is dedicated to supporting its employees and understands that many face concerns with the high cost of housing,” Matella said. “UC believes, however, that the best way to address those concerns is by providing its employees with wage increases and allowing them to choose how to use those funds best.” … See MoreSee Less

UC healthcare and service workers demand wage hike and housing aid

www.latimes.com

Hundreds of UC healthcare and campus service workers converged at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to picket, demanding higher wages and housing aid.