BY HANK REICHMAN
Two years ago state auditors rebuked the University of California (UC) for not following its own policy for outsourcing jobs. Now the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299, which represents some 26,000 university employees, has filed six charges with the California Public Employment Relations Board against UC’s regents, charging that UC issues secret contracts, conceals the amount of work it takes from university employees, ignores policies requiring competitive bidding and negotiation with employees, and farms out more and more work by amending and changing contracts without notice, the San Jose Mercury-News reports.
According to the union, documents filed with the California legislature reveal that UC increased spending on outsourcing of campus service and patient-care jobs by as much as 52 percent in the past three years. The union estimated that UC outsourced 7,000 to 10,000 full-time-equivalent positions in that time period. In 2016, UC provided information showing that it had spent $160.5 million on outsourcing contracts at its medical centers alone, but by 2019, in response to a separate query, the UC stated that general service contracts from its health-care centers totaled $296 million. That amounts to a roughly 84 percent increase in spending on contracts at UC medical centers, AFSCME leaders said. UC officials claim the figures cover different kinds of work.
“UC clearly knows what they’re doing is wrong, but they’re pushing the envelope, they’re trying to get away with it, but we’re talking about a practice of serial lawlessness to get that done,” said union spokesperson Todd Stenhouse. AFSCME is planning a November 13 strike over the issue at all ten campuses and five UC medical centers. The service workers’ contract expired in June 2017, and the patient care workers’ contract ended in December 2017. AFSCME 3299 has staged a number of walkouts since then. The union rejected UC’s last, best and final offers, which included 3 percent across-the-board wage increases and a prorated, lump-sum payment of $750. In separate contracts, the union represents service workers such as security guards, groundskeepers and custodians and patient-care technical workers such as respiratory therapists, nursing aides and MRI technologists.
Jobs affected by the improper outsourcing include tree trimmers, laundry-service, mail-service and food-service employees at UC Berkeley, health-care workers and landscapers at UC San Francisco, and medical-device technicians and office workers at UC Davis Medical Center.
At Davis, for example, AFSCME-represented workers and employees in other health-care unions have expressed dismay over plans to open an inpatient rehabilitation hospital in conjunction with privately owned Kindred Healthcare. Kindred is financing the project and will be in charge of hiring the hospital’s staff, who will not be members of AFSCME 3299 or other UC unions.
Liz Perlman, executive director of Local 3299, said that since the UC Davis name is on the Kindred facility, residents will expect that they are getting the highly rated care that UC employees provide at the UCD Medical Center and that these employees are receiving the same pay as their counterparts at the medical center. “We’re doing essentially the same job and serving the same people,” Perlman told The Sacramento Bee. “That’s what we’re seeing at UCSF, and that’s what we’re seeing now at UC Irvine and UCLA. It’s essentially the same services. It’s the same patients. It’s the same work.”
AFSCME’s Stenhouse says there are hundreds of examples of full-time contractors at UC schools applying for and being denied direct employment, and spending years working on campuses for wages much lower than those of UC employees. “It’s fundamentally shameful and hypocritical,” he said. “UC’s tendency to outsource has nothing to do with temporary or unplanned contingencies. This is about replacing more and more employees with lower-wage contractors.”
In 2017, the California State Auditor investigated thirty-one services contracts at six UC schools and found two contracts displaced university employees and nine may have led schools to avoid hiring employees. “Some of the university locations avoided competitive bidding by repeatedly amending contracts — one campus originally entered into an agreement with a food services vendor for a maximum term of 7 years and a cost of $74 million, amended the contract 24 times, and ultimately increased the term to 19 years at a cost of $237 million,” the State Auditor said.
In 2016, UC San Francisco, a medical school, laid off 97 information technology workers who were then compelled to train their replacements, lower-paid workers from an Indian outsourcing firm. The majority of the outsourced work is now done in India, although some contract employees can be brought to the UCSF campus from overseas on H-1B visas. UCSF has also contracted with cybersecurity firm FireEye and Dell for other IT functions. Some years ago UCSF contracted out its medical transcription. In 2003, a Pakastani transcriber threatened to post confidential patient records unless she received more money. The threat was eventually withdrawn.
In May 2017 the laid off UCSF IT workers filed suit against the UC Regents. All of the workers in the suit are over forty years old and have decades of experience in information technology. One man worked at UCSF for thirty-one years, and several others worked at the university for more than a decade.
In March of this year the executive boards of the California conference of the AAUP and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations issued a joint Statement in Support of UC Workers, expressing “unconditional support for the just demands of our colleagues and friends of the Union of Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE-CWA) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).”
“For too long, the Board of Regents and the upper levels of the UC administration have pitted professors, staff, and students against one another,” the statement continued. “Despite this, UC faculty, students and staff are learning to come together and support one another in tackling the serious problems they face with our system of higher education in California. We stand with the fundamental unity that binds us together in all sectors of California Higher Education, and we tell UC Administrators this simple truth about their staff: They Do The Work! Without them, there is no University of California.”
In an important recently published book on changes in labor throughout higher education, The Gig Academy, authors Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott report that across the map “staff positions are increasingly being outsourced to external labor providers to save costs.” One study, they report, found that “bookstore workers are being outsourced 50 percent of the time, food services 75 percent of the time, vending 63 percent of the time, and groundskeeping 20 percent of the time.” In addition, “core functions are now also being targeted for outsourcing, including admissions, financial aid, housing, budget management, human resources management, and information technology” (40-41).
The authors warn: “We have already seen the expansion of outsourcing among staff, beginning with more select groups of workers less connected to the central educational mission and then gradually expanding to those operating in closer proximity to the core functions of the institution. Without mass intervention from the workers themselves, outsourcing of instruction is likely to continue its precipitous rise, particularly in areas of developmental and introductory mathematics as well as language and composition. Certain types of professional and credential programs viewed as easy revenue will increasingly be offered through outsourced mediums, utilizing low-cost online coursework in pedagogically questionable ways. And as these professional and credential programs begin to be perceived as a mainstream way of delivering education, outsourcing of more traditional types of programs will likely occur” (146).
