Posts tagged California Public Employment Relations Board
Teachers in California’s Blochman District oust CTA
January 31, 2025 // Because the process involves a legal proceeding before a state agency and may involve opposition from the incumbent union, it can be a little tricky for non-lawyers to navigate. In Blochman, for instance, CTA initially attempted to get the teachers’ petition dismissed. But with help from Freedom Foundation attorneys, the Blochman teachers politely stood their ground, defeated the CTA’s frivolous objection and democracy eventually won the day.
AFSCME union organizes state-wide rally over UC patient care contract
October 15, 2024 // Employees at the UCI Health Lakewood and Placentia Linda hospitals picketed similarly in front of their workplaces. Rallies were held simultaneously at all 10 UC campuses, including UC San Francisco and the UC San Diego, UC Davis and UCLA medical centers. Participants at UCI gathered at 8:30 a.m. to protest an ongoing impasse between the union and the UC system on negotiations for patient care technical and service employees, according to an Oct. 9 press release from AFSCME Local 3299.
How did Clovis Unified’s Faculty Senate violate labor rules? What’s next for teachers?
June 30, 2024 // At some point – the district said it’s not sure exactly when – Clovis Unified started financially supporting the Faculty Senate, and controlling it in other ways, which made it less of an employee representative body and more an employee relations arm of management, according to state labor officials. This included paying for supplies, a car and cell phone for leadership, stipends and other expenses. The state said that Clovis spent $610,000 on its Faculty Senate from 2020-2022. Meanwhile, none of these resources and access was granted to the Association of Clovis Educators (ACE), a teacher group attempting to unionize since 2020, or other groups attempting to unionize or form other representative groups.
OPINION: UAW loses at Mercedes, but are they done with Alabama?
June 18, 2024 // The question for the UAW is where to turn next in their campaign to organize Southern auto plants. Speculation has focused on Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina, or even another crack at other factories in Alabama. But it’s not at all clear that the union has much support in any of these locations. It’s also unlikely that any of the potential target companies will sign a neutrality agreement, but rather will make sure workers have both sides of the story. So, while the UAW puts on a brave face and claims that Southern autoworkers will “Stand Up!” ꟷ it appears that what workers are standing up against is the UAW.
OPINION Unionized academic workers go on strike, for what?
June 4, 2024 // The union, which states on its website that it “will not negotiate on behalf of encampment organizers,” has filed multiple complaints against the University of California with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) since the beginning of May, when the university called in law enforcement to break down the “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” at UCLA. By then the initial 30 tents had grown into a massive, self-barricaded site that attracted angry counter-protesters in a violent overnight clash. The union’s complaint listed “workplace demands” that included the “right to opt out of participation in military-funded research,” and the “disclosure and divestment of University funds from Israel’s war effort.” The UAW local also complained that a new discipline policy of an “applicable review process” for employees who are arrested or cited was imposed without “notice or opportunity to bargain.” Further, the union wants the university to “make whole” any employees who were reported for criminal activity by paying their civil fines, attorney fees, bail and damage expenses.
UC Academic Workers Strike Over Pro-Palestinian Protest Arrests
May 22, 2024 // UAW 4811 is carrying out what the UAW calls a “Stand Up Strike.” Instead of a simultaneous systemwide strike like the one these same workers carried out in 2022, UAW 4811 is calling on its members on individual UC campuses, starting with Santa Cruz, to walk out. The strategy echoes the successful one that UAW’s traditional autoworker members staged against the big three U.S. automakers in 2023.
Student workers at Cal Poly Humboldt, other Cal State schools, get the OK to hold a union vote
October 4, 2023 // California State University student workers are one step closer to unionizing after announcing Tuesday that the California Public Employment Relations Board has deemed there is enough student support to trigger a union vote. After vetting thousands of union cards submitted by student assistants, the board notified the CSU Employees Union on Sept. 27 they met the threshold following a wave of organizingthis past year. Over 19,300 student assistants will soon vote on forming one of the largest student worker unions in U.S. history. Their ranks would more than double the size of the employees union, which already represents 16,000 support staff across the 23 campuses.
State axes SF rules outlawing public employee strikes
July 28, 2023 // The California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) on July 24 returned a resounding decision against the city and in favor of the Service Employees International Union 1021 and International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21. This ruling affirms — and expands — a decision handed down last year by an administrative law judge, and appealed to the PERB panel. That state panel on Monday found that the charter provisions enacted following chaotic 1970s-era public employee walkouts, and subsequently modified by voters over the course of the ensuing decades, to be wholly incompatible with California law. While the state panel does not have the power to rescind portions of the San Francisco City Charter, it can — and, now has — declared significant swaths to be “void and unenforceable.”
San Diego Gompers Preparatory Academy Charter School Educators Vote Out SDEA Union
June 21, 2023 // Even worse, shortly after the PERB’s ruling halting the original decertification effort, Chiscano and another Gompers educator filed charges maintaining that SDEA agents targeted them on social media for opposing the union hierarchy. California law makes it illegal for union officials to intimidate or retaliate against employees who exercise their right to refrain from union membership. Union boss-aligned state legislators even chimed in to pressure Gompers management to give in to union demands. In a letter to Gompers management, then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (now an AFL-CIO president) attacked the National Right to Work Foundation for simply providing legal aid to Gompers educators as they sought to exercise their right to hold a decertification election. Gonzalez was best known during her tenure for authoring AB5, a California law that drastically reduced opportunities for freelance workers and independent contractors across the state.
San Diego Gompers Preparatory Academy Charter School Educators Vote Out SDEA Union
June 9, 2023 // Even worse, shortly after the PERB’s ruling halting the original decertification effort, Chiscano and another Gompers educator filed charges maintaining that SDEA agents targeted them on social media for opposing the union hierarchy. California law makes it illegal for union officials to intimidate or retaliate against employees who exercise their right to refrain from union membership. Union boss-aligned state legislators even chimed in to pressure Gompers management to give in to union demands. In a letter to Gompers management, then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (now an AFL-CIO president) attacked the National Right to Work Foundation for simply providing legal aid to Gompers educators as they sought to exercise their right to hold a decertification election. Gonzalez was best known during her tenure for authoring AB5, a California law that drastically reduced opportunities for freelance workers and independent contractors across the state.