NUHW members at Children’s Hospital Oakland are ready to go on strike to stop UCSF Health from cancelling their union contracts, leaving them with significantly less take-home pay, and, for some workers, no union at all.
More than 70 percent of the 1,300 NUHW members at the private nonprofit hospital and its satellite clinics signed a strike petition in May authorizing a work stoppage in protest of a cynical maneuver by UCSF Health to take millions of dollars out of the pockets of their East Bay workers and transfer the money into UC coffers.
“This is wage theft and illegal subcontracting by the University of California, and we’re not going to let it happen,” said Jackie Schalit, a mental health therapist at a Children’s Hospital Oakland early intervention program. “We care for East Bay kids, and that care will not be as good if UCSF can get away with cutting our take-home pay, eliminating our union and assigning some of us to work in San Francisco.”
UCSF affiliated with Children’s Hospital Oakland in 2014, running it as a private non-profit entity separate from UCSF Health. That would not change under UCSF’s “Integration Plan,” scheduled to take effect on July 6.
The plan is not a merger. Unlike St. Francis and St. Mary’s hospitals in San Francisco, which UCSF recently purchased and merged into its health system, Children’s Hospital Oakland would remain separate from UCSF Health under the “Integration Plan.” There would be no changes to the hospital’s ownership structure, funding or license.
However, in violation of the contractual provision against subcontracting in the workers’ NUHW contracts, UCSF Health would effectively require Children’s Hospital Oakland to terminate its employees and rehire them as direct UCSF employees to do the same jobs at the same facilities for significantly less take-home pay.
This arrangement would allow the hospital to continue qualifying for valuable federal grants as a private Federally Qualified Health Center, while allowing UCSF Health to enrich itself by cutting take-home pay by an average of $10,000 per worker, primarily by requiring workers to pay substantially more for their retirement and health benefits. Several dozen NUHW members, whose job classifications aren’t covered by UC unions, would lose their union status and become at-will employees.
“The University of California is taking a page out of President Trump’s playbook, and our patients are the ones who will suffer most,” said Jackki Patrick, a patient care assistant, who has worked at the hospital for over 30 years. “We’re already struggling to fill critical caregiver jobs, and the staffing shortfall will only get worse if UCSF takes away our union and our hard-earned money.”
NUHW members have already taken their fight against the “integration plan” to the streets with two rallies outside the hospital and to the UC Board of Regents, where workers called on the regents to stop UC from violating their contracts.
“Having our own union is our democratic right,” Marques Williams, an impatient pharmacy tech, told the Regents. “What UCSF Health is doing is actively seeking to silence our voices so it can dismantle our collective power. We demand that UCSF Health keeps its paws off our union and what’s rightfully owed to our members.”
NUHW members are able to strike over the move because the contract for most of its members at Children’s Hospital Oakland expired in April. The agreement, which remains in effect even after the expiration date, secured better pay as well as provisions that make it harder for UCSF to subcontract out jobs or shift services from the East Bay to San Francisco.
