AFSCME Local 3299 announced an open-ended strike set to begin May 14, pulling more than 42,000 University of California service and hospital workers off the job across every UC campus in the state.
The workers represented by Local 3299 aren’t researchers or professors. They’re custodians, food service staff, patient care assistants, and hospital technicians. The union says they’ve been squeezed for two-plus years while contract talks with UC management have gone nowhere that matters. Wages haven’t tracked inflation. Housing near UC campuses has become untouchable on their pay.
Todd Stenhouse, the union’s spokesperson, didn’t soften any of it. Some members commute three hours each way just to reach their shifts. Others “are sleeping in their cars or living in homeless shelters,” he said. “To say that these workers feel undervalued and insulted would be an understatement,” Stenhouse told reporters.
The decision to strike wasn’t impulsive. Stenhouse made that clear. The union’s membership is overwhelmingly women and people of color, and strikes carry a real cost for the people who participate in them. “At a certain point in time, you have to just say: ‘Enough.’”
Stenhouse also said that the union’s frustration with the UC system employs some of the highest-paid researchers and physicians in the country, and that the workers who clean their labs and serve their food don’t share in that prosperity.
AFSCME has now taken the dispute to the Public Employment Relations Board, filing unfair labor practice charges that accuse UC management of violating California labor law. Two specific allegations are central: that the university refused to bargain over housing assistance for workers, and that it imposed higher health care costs on employees “despite being legally required to bargain over such changes.” That second charge isn’t just a contract grievance. It’s a legal one.
Housing is the pressure point running underneath all of it. From Irvine to Berkeley to San Francisco, rents near UC campuses have climbed well past what low-wage workers can reasonably pay. Long-tenured employees, people who’ve worked for the UC system for years, can’t find anything close enough to make the commute survivable. AFSCME member José Pérez, who’s worked at UC Irvine’s medical center for nearly a decade and walked out during a two-day strike last November, is the kind of worker the union says the system is failing to hold onto.
UC management’s position is that it’s been moving in good faith. Heather Hansen, the university’s spokesperson, said the two sides have settled 26 contract articles and that the university’s wage offer runs to 32% or more through 2029. “We’re disappointed that AFSCME is moving toward this open-ended strike, despite the real progress that we’ve made at the bargaining table,” Hansen said. “We recognize that many employees are facing real pressures related to housing, commuting, and the high cost of living. That’s why we’ve made the generous offers that we have.”
On the unfair labor practice filings, Hansen didn’t concede ground. “Just because AFSCME has filed these charges doesn’t mean that they have merit,” she said.
Stenhouse called the university’s wage framing “fuzzy math,” telling LAist that the headline number obscures what workers in the lower pay grades are actually taking home. When you’re already earning near the bottom of a wage scale in one of the most expensive states in the country, a percentage increase doesn’t change your housing situation.
The May 14 date makes this concrete. It’s not a warning. It’s not a planned walkout for a single day. An open-ended strike means UC campuses, hospitals included, start feeling the absence of 42,000 workers with no fixed endpoint in sight. Hospital operations don’t pause. Food service doesn’t pause. The people who make those systems run do.
What 2026 has made obvious, after more than two years at the bargaining table, is that the gap between what the UC considers a generous offer and what these workers consider a livable wage hasn’t closed. On May 14, that gap becomes visible to everyone on campus.