After a year and a half of stalled negotiations, the University of California and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 have finally reached a tentative contract agreement.
Though an agreement for university patient-care technical workers was reached in October, service workers under the union had been without a contract for an additional six months.
Under the new contract, the minimum wage for university service workers will be raised from $10.28 to $14 a five-year contract period, according to a UC press release.
The contract also promises a 3 percent across-the-board increase, a $64 million settlement.
For Diamond Robertson, a UC Davis service worker, this means she will finally be able to pay her bills.
Not only that, but she’ll get to send her teenage sister to her prom, go back to school and finish a degree in social work she started years ago.
“I had been working for UC Davis for nine years and was getting $14.01 an hour,” Robertson said.
But now, she said, the new contract would promise to raise her wages at least $3 an hour sometime over the next year, as well as taking her nine years of service into account.
Robertson said that this was good news for one of her colleague who had been working for the University for 40 years with barely any wage increases at all.
“She was only getting paid $3 more than me. She had been working there 40 years, and I had been working there nine,” Robertson said.
But Nicole Savickas, a representative for the University of California Office of the President, said that though the university was ecstatic about reaching an agreement, the contract has not yet been approved by the union.
“It’s a tentative agreement, so the service workers still need to vote to ratify the contract,” Savickas said.
She added that the contract had taken a long time, involving hard work and compromises on both sides.
During the year-and-a-half period that the negotiations continued, Savickas said, the union came down from their original $15-an-hour minimum wage requirement.
“We also came up on both of our minimum wage and across-the-board wage increases. … One of our earlier proposals was an approximate $24 million across-the-board increase,” Savickas said.
Savickas also said that though the university planned to implement the university minimum wage increases, the last three years of the contract would still be contingent on state funding.
“We have compromised on both sides … and we will continue to work with them,” Savickas said.
Lakesha Harrison, the president of AFSCME Local 3299, said that she felt the contract was a hard-fought victory for the union.
“We had a lot of help along the way … The contract is a really good contract now. It’s a great first step for moving our workers out of poverty,” Harrison said.
She added that she felt one of the most significant aspects of the contract was the step program, which workers had been fighting for a year and a half to implement.
“This part of the wage package is really a history-making part of the contract,” Harrison said.
She said that for the first time workers would be given seniority and paid according to the length of time they had worked for the university.
She added that in addition to the $64 million and 3 percent across-the-board increase, the University of California also promised to freeze the increasing rates service workers were paying on their health premiums.
“UC consented to give us a 3 percent across-the-board wage increase in addition to a step program that would increase worker compensation 2 percent for every additional year worked at the University,” Harrison said.
Savickas said that if the union is still not satisfied, the university will continue to work with them to find a solution.