With Bill Clinton event coming to Cal, UC caves to union demand

With labor threatening to throw up a picket line this week around former President Bill Clinton’s big student gathering at UC Berkeley, the cash-tight university agreed to spend millions of dollars to hire dozens of contract and part-time workers as full-time campus employees.

“I think it’s clear that the UC Berkeley didn’t want to have the Clinton event picketed,” said Todd Stenhouse, spokesman for Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 22,000 workers at UC campuses.

It’s not just the university that wanted to head off the dispute. The optics wouldn’t have been much better for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is busy trying to head off a challenge on her left from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“I can’t imagine that President Clinton wanted to put himself in the position of having to cross the picket line with his wife running for president,” said one labor-friendly source following the talks that led to the labor change. The source asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the agreement.

AFSCME, the biggest of UC’s unions, was threatening to picket the three-day Clinton Global Initiative University, which starts Friday. The event will bring together 1,000 student leaders to discuss world problems, with Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea moderating.

The event is getting a big assist from the Blum Center for Developing Economies, an antipoverty institute founded by UC Regent Dick Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The Blum center has been promoting the gathering and, according to its website, “will serve as the hub for all UC Berkeley student participation in the event.”

Troubles erupted last month when AFSCME, representing 900 maintenance workers and other employees at UC Berkeley, called for prominent public figures to cancel speaking appearances at the campus. The union’s “speakers boycott” was in protest of UC Berkeley’s refusal to hire 93 night-shift custodians, parking attendants and other mostly contract workers as full-time university employees.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic state Sens. Loni Hancock of Berkeley and Carol Liu of La Cañada Flintridge (Los Angeles County), Democratic Assemblyman Tony Thurmond of Richmond and activist Angela Davis promptly canceled appearances at campus events.

AFSCME representatives said they had appealed directly to Bill and Chelsea Clinton to honor the speakers boycott and the threatened picket line. There was no immediate comment from representatives at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

Hillary Clinton had already landed the union’s endorsement in the presidential race, and Local 3299 officials set up a meeting last spring between her and a couple of the workers hoping to become full-time UC Berkeley employees.

But with the university facing a projected $150 million budget shortfall and warning of layoffs, negotiations with AFSCME went nowhere.

That is, until the union threatened to station pickets outside the Clinton event at Haas Pavilion.

UC blinked, saying it would offer jobs to all its contract custodians and parking attendants “within 30 days” and “hire all temporary custodians into full-time positions.”

Campus officials say that they had intended all along to hire many of the 55 custodians full time and that they were already factored into the university’s budgeting. The campus’ new agreement will add 38 part-time and contract workers to its full-time payroll at a cost of anywhere from $3.5 million to $8 million a year.

“We completely caved,” said one frustrated UC insider, who blamed the very legislators who have been beating up on the cash-strapped university over runaway costs.

Noting the Democratic officeholders who honored the speakers boycott, the UC official said, “On one hand they don’t want administrative growth, but then they say, ‘Bring in our (labor) pals,’ when it’s much more efficient and effective to contract the work out.”

Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for UC President Janet Napolitano, said only that “our office of labor relations was consulted” and that “Berkeley felt it was in the best interest of the campus to do this.”

UC Berkeley officials declined to comment. They recently issued a statement saying the settlement with AFSCME had brought an end to the speakers boycott and that the union “plans to write to all of the speakers they previously contacted to inform them” they are free to make campus appearances.

The union also issued a statement, saying it had canceled its planned picketing at the Clinton event.

AFSCME’s Stenhouse told us, “We have been reaching out to folks” — including the Clintons — “telling them the boycott is off.”