The Brief

Thousands of University of California healthcare, research and technical employees have voted to authorize their union to call a strike, potentially disrupting hospitals and research facilities statewide as the federal government threatens cuts to the university’s funding.

The vote, which concluded Thursday, passed with 98% support, according to a Friday press release from the University Professional and Technical Employees Local 9119, which represents more than 20,000 UC employees. The union said the strike has been scheduled for Feb. 26 to 28 and will involve members across all UC campuses.

It represents the latest escalation in a conflict over staffing levels and compensation that sparked a two-day work stoppage at UC San Francisco in November. Also on Friday, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, which represents more than 37,000 UC patient care and service workers, announced a strike at all UC campuses and five medical centers from Feb. 26–27.

Contract negotiations between UPTE and UC, the state’s third-largest employer, began eight months ago. However, both parties remain far apart on the union’s goal of fixing a recruitment and retention crisis that is harming patients, research and students, according to Dan Russell, UPTE’s president and lead negotiator.

“We don’t want to have to strike. But we’re also not going to let this crisis continue to drag out,” said Russell, a business technology support analyst at UC Berkeley. “We hear these stories from almost every group of workers, whether it’s pay is too low, people are leaving to go to Kaiser or people just feeling disaffected.”

Physician assistants, mental health clinicians, laboratory scientists, IT workers and other UC employees are fed up with the lack of progress, he added. The union declared an impasse on Jan. 3, and the two parties met with mediators later in the month.

UC has proposed wage increases for UPTE-represented employees of 5% starting in July, 3% in 2026 and 3% in 2027. The university also offered to streamline some of its career growth mechanisms and expand access to vacation time.

A spokesperson for the university called the union’s talk of preparing for a work stoppage “disheartening.”

“The university has been and remains ready to settle these contracts: we have offered UPTE what it has asked for,” Heather Hansen, a spokesperson with the UC Office of the President, said in a statement. “In the event of a strike, the University is prepared to make every effort to ensure the critical operations of the University system, which includes patient care, continue at a level of excellence UC patients, students, faculty and staff expect.”

UPTE and UC have accused each other of engaging in bad-faith bargaining on key issues. The union charged the university with unfair labor practices before the California Public Employment Relations Board, including for allegedly failing to provide job vacancy and financial data to assess the extent of staffing issues, increasing employee health care costs without negotiating over the changes and limiting worker and union speech.

Hansen told KQED last October that the university was working to produce information on vacancy rates and other data. But Russell said the union has yet to receive that information.

The labor standoff comes as a federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked this week the National Institutes of Health from reducing funding that supports biomedical and public health research at universities, after California and 21 other states sued. The NIH is the largest funder of UC research, and the university said it could lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year, leading to layoffs and disruptions to life-saving research. A hearing in the case is set for Feb. 21.

The union was relieved the proposed NIH funding cuts were paused, Russell said, though he noted that reductions would represent a relatively small fraction of the $51.4 billion budget for UC in 2023–24.

John Logan, who chairs the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University, said UC is bracing for challenges with the Trump administration over various issues that could impact federal funding, including policies affecting transgender, LGBTQ and undocumented students, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

Financial uncertainty under the Trump administration could make UC administrators reluctant to give out generous multi-year labor deals. However, the timing of a large, disruptive walkout could also be disastrous, he added.

“A strike which would cause major disruptions — would be the absolute last thing that university administrators would want at this time when it is trying to protect its funding and talk about the value of medical research at places like UCSF and UC San Diego,” Logan said. “The university, while being very concerned about the potential financial implications of what the Trump administration is trying to do, should also be concerned about its public image.”

The Supreme Court on Monday gave itself more time to consider a national ban on telemedicine access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Justice Samuel Alito extended an earlier order he issued by three more days, so rules for prescribing mifepristone online or through the mail remain in effect through Thursday at a minimum.

The case at issue

The tumult over the future of telemedicine access to mifipristone started on May 1 with a ruling from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling re-instituted prescribing rules from before the pandemic that required patients to receive mifepristone in person in a doctor's office or clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration determined that the rule was medically unnecessary in 2021. The state of Louisiana sued last fall, arguing that telemedicine access undermines the state's abortion ban.

What is telemedicine abortion?

The telemedicine abortion process starts with a patient connecting with a healthcare provider on the phone or online. If the patient is eligible, that provider can prescribe two medications — mifepristone and another pill called misoprostol. Patients can pick up the medicine at a local pharmacy, or providers can mail the drugs to a patient's home.

That access is a big part of the reason why the number of abortions nationally has actually increased since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Now, most abortions in the U.S. use this combination of medications, and one quarter happen via telemedicine.

After the 5th Circuit ruling, some providers said they would continue offering telemedicine access to abortion medication using a different protocol that involves higher doses of misoprostol and no mifepristone.

Researchers say that method is just as safe and effective, but tends to cause more pain for patients and more side effects, like nausea and diarrhea. Misoprostol has other medical uses, such as treating gastric ulcers and hemorrhage, and has been on the market longer than mifepristone. It is likely to remain fully accessible, even if mifepristone is restricted.

Since the FDA's prescribing rules for medications apply to the whole country, a change to the rules about how mifepristone can be accessed has national impact. That means it affects states with constitutionally-protected access to abortion, states with criminal bans, like Louisiana, and all states in between.

States' rights

Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states submitted an amicus brief in this case, writing that the appeals court decision put the policy choices of states with bans above the choices of states "that have made the different but equally sovereign determinations to promote access to abortion care."

There are also stakes related to the power of FDA and other expert agencies to set rules. While the Trump administration's FDA did not respond to the Supreme Court's request for briefs, a group of former leaders of the agency, who served under mainly Democratic and some Republican presidents, wrote about this in an amicus brief.

They defended the FDA's process in approving the medication and modifying the rules for prescribing it, and say the appeals court decision "would upend FDA's gold-standard, science-based drug approval system."

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