Approximately 10,000 University Professional Technical Employees and Communications Workers of America union members will walk off the job on May 26 to protest what the union has called the University of California’s unfair labor practices.

Over 85 percent of union members voted to authorize the one-day strike to express their dissatisfaction over attempts to negotiate a new contract with the university, according to San Diego UPTE-CWA Chapter President Carolan Buckmaster, who has also worked as a campus research associate for 15 years.

UPTE has said that the university has refused to increase compensation for research associates despite having the money to do so.

“[The strike] is a statement,” Buckmaster said. “The university should not refuse us the money.”

UC Office of the President spokesman Noel Van Nyhuis said that the union’s allegations are “incorrect.”

“State funding is [the university’s] single largest source of funding, and as such, is what governs the university’s abilty to give wage increases,” he said. “Because of the state financial crisis … the university has not been able to offer systemwide wage increases the past two years.”

The union has charged that the university has taken part in bad-faith bargaining by withholding university financial information from the negotiation process as well as retaliating against union activists, according to a UPTE strike notice.

“The university’s persistent bad faith has provoked direct action and strike activity as the only avenue available to UPTE-represented employees to … obtain meaningful bargaining in genuine pursuit of a negotiated agreement,” the notice stated.

Van Nyhuis said the university has been doing its part to avert the strike.

“The university has been bargaining on good faith,” he said. “We felt we made substantial progress over the past few weeks. We are doing everything on our side of the bargain agreement. All offers are not being reciprocated by the union.”

In particular, the union has criticized the ability of the university to retain research staff.

The turnover rate — the frequency with which staff leave the university — has reached “crisis” proportions, with an annual rate of 33 percent, according to Buckmaster. She said that the rate severely limits research at UCSD because it takes several months to train new research assistants.

“The university is becoming a revolving door for researchers, and it is not a beneficial long-term approach,” Buckmaster said. “They are running a business rather than an educational institution, and it is detrimental to students.”

A UPTE press release has stated that the union has filed several complaints with the California Public Employees Relations Board. On April 19, CPERB found that the university “illegally refused to provide information to UPTE about turnover savings.”

Van Nyhuis said that the charges are “without foundation” and that the union is using them as an excuse to strike.

“[The union] is using it as pressure for higher wages,” he said. “It is just a smokescreen to put pressure on the university.”

Because negotiations are still going on and no neutral state mediator has been included in the process, the university has deemed the planned strike unlawful and is now considering filing legal actions with CPERB, according to Van Nyhuis.

“The university believes the strike will be illegal because the university and UPTE are engaged in ongoing negotiations and have not completed the statutorily mandated impasse process,” UCSD Assistant Vice Chancellor of Human Resources Rogers Davis stated in a campuswide e-mail.

A spokesman for CPERB was unavailable for comment.

Each of the UC campuses and the university’s medical centers will take the necessary steps to ensure normal operations during the strike, Van Nyhuis said.

In a meeting with representatives in mid-May, the university has proposed incremental across-the-board wage increases, ranging between 1.5 and 4 percent, each year for two years.

Yet the proposed changes fall short of UPTE’s demands, which call for a 2.83 percent increase effective 2004-05, and 7.76 and 4.8 percent increases for the following two years, respectively.

University and UPTE representatives plan to meet in early June to continue bargaining.