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“Some of us have devoted our lives to the university,” said Maricruz Manzanares, a custodian at the University of California at Berkeley. “I’ve worked here for nineteen years, providing a healthy environment for students to come and live away from home.” She gestured to the large crowd of campus service workers represented by AFSCME 3299 — cafeteria workers, custodians, groundskeepers, security guards, delivery truck drivers — who were gathered on a picket line at the UC Berkeley campus on Monday. “We’re the ones students see in the morning before they go to school, we’re the ones they see when they come back from class. We’re the backbone of the university. And we’re asking to be able to provide for our families.” Manzanares had cut decorative shapes into her bright green union t-shirt, the same one worn by thousands of other striking workers across California this week. The forty-eight-year-old lives in the inland suburb of Dublin, and said that when traffic’s bad she sometimes commutes up to three and a half hours to and from work on the UC Berkeley campus. “The university creates a bubble of gentrification and flushes us out. In order for me to even come to work, I need to pay for gas and my car payments,” she said, balking at the 2 percent raise recently announced by the UC administration in an attempt to put a lid on contract negotiations. The modest wage increase fails to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living in California. But that’s hardly workers’ only concern: the university is also attempting to raise health care premiums, undermine pensions, and contract out workers’ jobs. The union is therefore demanding not just a 6 percent raise but also a freeze on rising health care premiums, the cessation of the university’s attempt to transition workers from defined benefit pension plans to 401(k)s, and a prohibition on the practice of subcontracting unionized public-sector jobs out to third-party private employees. The University of California is the largest employer in the state, which is itself is the fifth largest economy in the world. If it were a truly public institution dedicated to collective social prosperity, it would see part of its role as providing stable, safe, and desirable jobs that offer a high standard of living to Californians. Instead, UC runs more like a massive private firm dedicated to managing lucrative contracts with third-party companies — and as with any business, one of its primary objectives is to keep labor costs to a minimum. This week, more than 53,000 employees of the University of California have gone on strike not just for a better contract, but to resist becoming casualties in the neoliberal war against the public nature of the university.

The Anti-Social Contract “The more divided we are, the better for them,” said Manzanares. “But in this case, it’s not working. Not only are we going on strike, but we have two other big unions joining us in solidarity.” Campus service workers represented by AFSCME aren’t striking alone. For one thing, the University of California’s operations aren’t confined to higher education: they also include a network of highly lucrative medical centers throughout the state. The union represents not just 9,000 college service workers but also 15,000 medical workers, including vocational nurses, technologists, and radiologists. This week they joined together in common cause, with 24,000 AFSCME workers going on strike on both college and hospital campuses. That number would’ve been impressive on its own, but it more than doubled when the California Nurses’ Association (CNA) and the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) opted to join the strike. Those two unions also represent employees of the University of California — CNA represents nurses in the medical centers, while UPTE represents a range of occupations on and off campus, from pharmacists and lab techs to researchers and IT workers. The two other unions are striking with AFSCME as a show of solidarity, and because they’re also in contract negotiations with the university. They know that the outcome of this contract fight deeply affects their own prospects; if wages, benefits, working conditions, and overall quality of life are allowed to deteriorate for AFSCME workers, the others are next in line. One of the main battles AFSCME workers face is the constant threat of seeing their jobs outsourced to nonunion workers employed by for-profit companies. As the university increasingly privatizes aspects of its operations, workers employed by the institution are always looking over their shoulder, fearful that their jobs will evaporate overnight and they’ll be replaced by workers who answer to a different boss. “Every day we’re paying attention to when we see new faces on board,” said Manzanares. “Suddenly we see a new group of workers and we don’t even know who they are, until we talk to each other and the union and we find out they belong to a company. Lately the university has developed shady techniques. They used to do it openly, but now they’re finding ways to do it in the dark.” Either way, she said, “the university does not behave as a public institution.” Contracting out is just one of many manifestations of the decades-long process of public-sector corporatization. For forty years, the dominant trend in developed capitalist countries (and especially the United States) has been the relinquishment of state responsibility to fund and maintain accessible public institutions for the collective good. Instead, governments have increasingly bought into the idea that capitalist markets can be trusted to efficiently provide everything society needs. As a result, they have been steadily shifting their obligation to educate, employ, and otherwise care for their citizens to for-profit corporations. The result is massive accumulation of wealth by corporate bosses, and worse working conditions and living standards for those who might benefit from dedicated public institutions, i.e., everyone else. In the 1970s, California was at the leading edge of this transition worldwide. As governor in the early 1970s, Ronald Reagan began to cut public funding to the University of California, shifting to a tuition-based model. This led to an avalanche of tuition hikes, which have made the university increasingly inaccessible to working-class Californians. Even so, tuition itself is not enough to float an institution of UC’s size — so it began to look elsewhere for funds, and therefore to prioritize its relationships with the private sector. Over the last forty years, the University of California has gone from being almost entirely tax-funded to almost entirely reliant on a combination of private donations, corporate partnerships, student tuition, and revenue generated by external operations like its medical centers. In 2011, one chancellor called UC a “state-augmented” institution, which sums up the degree of state disinvestment and privatization to date. As the university enters at breakneck speed into partnerships with corporate firms (campus dining, dorm management), fewer and fewer jobs in the UC system are filled by public-sector employees. Contracting out public university jobs plays a dual role: it cuts costs in the short run, and it downplays the social role of the state in the long run. It is first and foremost a way for the university to get out of paying for the hard-won benefits of unionized public-sector workers. But it’s also a means of shifting the responsibility for provision of higher education from the public to the private sphere. Plus, contracting out has the added bonus of breaking the power of the union by decreasing its membership and fracturing the workforce, making it harder to organize against similar attacks down the line. Manzanares added that the university’s top administrators face no such threats to their job security, even though many of them collect exorbitant salaries for their role in managing the business aspects of the university. “They’re not talking about outsourcing administrators, outsourcing management, but they’re always talking about outsourcing our jobs,” she said. “We want a guaranteed safety net that allows us to be able to go to bed knowing that tomorrow we’ll go back to work instead of being laid off. We want to stop the madness.”