UPTE, your union, is again asking you to support a possible strike in the near future.

For more than a year, UC has been working hard for a new contract that reflects your many contributions and the important role you play at UC. Throughout negotiations, UC has offered:

  • Fair, market-competitive wages: Guaranteed annual across-the-board increases, plus additional equity increases for some employees based on local markets, to help ensure your pay remains competitive. By contrast, UPTE leaders continue to ask for unrealistic pay increases that are nearly three times what most other UC employees receive.
  • Quality health benefits: Excellent health benefits for you and your family at the same rates as other UC employees with similar salaries.
  • Excellent retirement benefits: Current employees will see no change in their pension benefits. Future employees hired after a new contract is ratified would be given a choice between a traditional pension plan and a 401(k)-style plan. UC’s retirement benefits under its choice program are among the most generous in the market — few employers offer this kind of choice or a pension plan. Offering future employees this choice will not affect or harm the pension benefits of current employees.

    UPTE continues to oppose UC’s retirement choice program, even though it:

    • Has no impact on existing employees;
    • The vast majority of RX and TX employees don’t work at UC long enough to vest in UC’s pension program and would gain from having a portable retirement benefit that they can take with them when they leave the University.
  • Long-term stability: A four-year contract that provides both employees and the university with stability through 2021.

Strikes hurt patients, students and co-workers

Strikes impact patients, students and other UC employees. We think it is wrong for UPTE leaders to threaten services to patients, students and your co-workers with another strike as a negotiating tactic — patients and students are not bargaining chips.

You deserve a contract that reflects your value and contributions — not more conflict.