Workers across California are on strike today. They are researchers, technical employees, health care workers, custodians, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, security guards, and delivery-truck drivers employed by the University of California, the state’s largest employer. There are nearly forty thousand of them.

The one-day action is aimed at securing a fair contract for researchers and technical professionals represented by UPTE-CWA 9119. While the University of California continues to pay exorbitant salaries to executives and pad the ranks of upper management with well-heeled administrators, it greets workers with pension cuts, salary adjustments that are incommensurate with the cost of living, a proliferation of part-time positions, and the constant threat of outsourcing.

The union’s health care workers have committed to strike in solidarity with researchers and technical workers. And joining them is the membership of AFSCME 3299, a union that represents custodians, dining service workers, and others, which has decided to go out on a sympathy strike. This powerful act of cross-union solidarity has more than doubled the size of the strike.