UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab strikes impact Cal health services, BAMPFA

About 300 members of two unions — UPTE Local 9119 and AFSCME Local 3299 — who have gone on strike, marched on the UC Berkeley campus on Wednesday, Feb. 26. 2025. Credit: Iris Kwok

Thousands of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory workers stopped working as part of a statewide strike Wednesday morning amid fraught contract negotiations with the University of California.  

The strikes are expected to impact some UC Berkeley campus operations, including the university’s health center, campus shuttles and programming at BAMPFA. 

The striking employees are represented by two unions — University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) Local 9119, and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299. UPTE members are planning to strike for three days, Wednesday through Friday. AFSCME members will strike on Wednesday and Thursday. 

The unions and the UC have each accused the other of dragging out contract negotiations.  UPTE members have been working without a labor contract since the last one expired in October 2024. Most AFSCME members’ contracts expired either in June or October 2024. 

While happening at the same time, the two strikes are separately organized.

The two unions say the UC has restricted its members from union leafleting and picketing — moves they consider to be unfair labor practices. They have also demanded the UC address persistent staffing shortages.

The UC wrote in a press release that both unions are “amplifying misinformation.”

“We have offered each union meaningful wage increases, health care premium reductions, and other offers to directly address the issues they’ve indicated are important to their members,” the UC statement read.

AFSCME estimates more than 13,000 UC service and patient care workers have left their jobs over the last four years, due, the union wrote in a statement, to “real wages declining and the cost of living skyrocketing.”

Last year, the UC’s chief financial officer Nathan Brostrom told the UC Board of Regents that the university’s staff vacancy rate had tripled since before the pandemic.

UC Berkeley’s campus health center has paused lab operations and drop-in COVID-19 and flu shot services Wednesday through Thursday. Its testing tent, which offers COVID-19 and strep tests for students, staff and faculty, is closed through Friday, according to its website. Its counseling department is operating on reduced hours (from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) for students with urgent needs through Friday. 

Conflict over staffing levels, UC rules restricting handing out flyers

On the UC Berkeley campus, roughly 300 picketers — a mixture of blue-shirted UPTE members and green-shirted AFSCME members — gathered on Sproul Plaza for a midday rally, marching to a pitchy rendition of the 1980s song “Take on Me” before crossing Bancroft Ave. into the Southside neighborhood. 

Many held signs that read “For our patients / For our research / For our students” and rang cowbells. Some delivery drivers honked their horns as they drove by. 

Jamie Gardener, a staff researcher at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute who specializes in wheat and rice disease resistance, said that after his lab manager left their job for a higher-paying private sector role, the position remained unfilled, forcing other staff to take on essential tasks like maintaining plants. This has left the lab understaffed and slowed the pace of research, he said. 

Gardener, a bargaining team member for UPTE, said the UC hasn’t fulfilled the union’s requests for information on staff vacancies — data that he says is necessary for the union to make “reasonable proposals.” 

Heather Hanson, a spokesperson for UC’s Office of the President, denied there is a staffing crisis and said they have shared data with UPTE showing increasing head counts, declining separations and flattening turnover.

Gardener also said that last fall, the UC system, including Berkeley, began enforcing rules requiring members to stand 50 feet from building exits when handing out leaflets and prohibiting sidewalk chalking. Some buildings, he said, aren’t even 50 feet apart from each other. 

“A lot of it was backlash to the student Gaza protests and trying to restrict students’ freedom of speech that way, but because it applies to the university community as a whole, it also does things like limit our ability to picket and to talk to our members and to hold informational rallies instead of having to go on strike,” Gardener said. “How unintended a consequence that is, I don’t know, but it certainly is a problem for us.”

The UC denied that its work to “clarify UC rules” were meant to silence or target unions, adding that its goal was to ensure “everyone in the UC community can use our locations for learning, research, and essential conversations.”

“We fully respect any organization’s right to engage in expressive activities on issues of importance to its membership,” Hanson wrote in an email.

Shuttles to UC Botanical Garden, BAMPFA programming affected

UC Berkeley plant researchers and UPTE members Julie (left) and Naio (right) take a break from picketing for lunch on Sproul Plaza on Feb. 26, 2025. Credit: Iris Kwok

Visitors to the UC Botanical Garden won’t be able to rely on campus shuttles to get to the garden on Wednesday and Thursday as a result of the strike, according to the garden’s website.  

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which has some employees represented by AFSCME and UPTE, plans to close early at 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday. All film screenings scheduled for Wednesday through Friday have been cancelled; patrons who have bought tickets will be able to get a refund, the museum wrote in a press release. 

More impacts will likely be felt across the Bay, as health care workers at UC San Francisco’s medical centers from the two unions are also on strike. 

UPTE leadership estimates it has around roughly 1,200 total members in Berkeley, spread across UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. Berkeley members include scientists, IT analysts, stagehands and health clinicians. As of Monday, about 1,000 UPTE members in Berkeley had indicated they planned to strike, according to UPTE spokesperson Andrew Baker. 

A spokesperson for AFSCME, which represents service workers, patient care technical workers and skilled craft workers, did not immediately respond to Berkeleyside’s question about how many members it has in Berkeley. The union wrote in a press release that it has 40,000 workers across the entire UC system.