“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.