The University of California recently reached an agreement on changes to the contracts it holds with about 2,200 health care professional employees, nearly nine months after their old one expired.
And though the contract included wage increases, not all members of the University Professional and Technical Employees union believe all their requests were completely satisfied.
UPTE is a union that represents the UC’s 2,000 health care professionals as well as its 4,000 technical employees and 4,000 researchers.
The two parties reached a tentative agreement on February 15 and then the university announced Monday that UPTE members had voted to approve the new contract.
Some of the more significant changes UC spokesman Paul Schwartz noted were wage increases and an amendment to a previous provision that prohibits strikes, a standard part of many contracts.
The amendment states that not only are employees prohibited from striking with their own union, they also cannot participate in sympathy strikes with any of the other UC employee unions.
“The thing that was accomplished in this case … was clarifying the fact that the no-strikes provision includes a prohibition against joining other unions’ strikes,” Schwartz said.
According to Schwartz, this negotiation was a typical periodic update to contracts, and another round of negotiations is set for 2009.
“(The parties) are able to renegotiate over a limited number of subjects that usually include wages and benefits,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz also said periodically reevaluating wages is important because of changes in the market and cost of living.
“Obviously wage increases to keep the salaries of these employees competitive was important for both the university and the employees,” he said.
Cindy Yuge, a clinical laboratory scientist at UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine who was the health care bargainer for UCLA, said she was happy with the voting turnout and believes the bargaining was successful.
She said she was particularly pleased with the wage increases, which ranged from 4 percent to 15 percent depending upon the classification of the employees and location of their job.
“I think this contract was very outstanding as far as wages; we got good increases for the pharmacists and social workers,” she said.
“UCLA is now the only campus that takes into consideration total years of experience when determining wages.”
Mike Goldberg, a staff pharmacist at UCLA Medical Center who was not involved in negotiations, said for him the most important change was allowing UC health care professionals to negotiate pension plan changes as part of a coalition with other branches of UPTE.
“One of the concessions we got from the university was that our small bargaining unit … could bargain these pension plan changes along with other university unions,” Goldberg said.
Because the previous version of these contracts expired the summer of 2006 but the changes were not approved until last month, the new version is retroactive and will cover the time period July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2011.
But Goldberg said one of the issues he sees with the new contracts is that, while the contract is dated retroactively from July 1, 2006, the wage increase was not in effect until March 30, 2007.
Instead, the university is giving the employees a $1,000 lump sum payment.
Goldberg said this amount, for some employees, is less than they would have received if the wage increase were retroactive.
He also said he believes this practice might encourage the university to stall negotiations in the future in order to postpone enacting wage increases.
“We didn’t achieve everything we wanted,” he said.
Nevertheless, some involved in the negotiations stressed that the work of these health care professionals was the most important thing.
“Our health care professional employees play a critical role in helping UC hospitals and student health centers deliver quality patient care,” said Howard Pripas, executive director for university labor relations, in a statement.
“The main focus should be … in this case taking care of patients,” Schwartz added.