{"id":347566,"date":"2026-03-25T19:39:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/347566\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T19:39:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:39:18","slug":"healthcare-union-wants-uci-health-to-reinstate-150-critical-care-workers-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/347566\/","title":{"rendered":"Healthcare union wants UCI Health to reinstate 150 \u2018critical care\u2019 workers \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

The union representing more than 1,230 employees at UCI Health<\/a> wants 150 recently laid off workers reinstated after what it contends was an illegal termination as part of a system restructuring.<\/p>\n

The University and Professional and Technical Employees-Communications Workers of America, Local 9119, which represents workers at 18 UC campuses statewide, disputed UCI Health officials who said Monday that staff layoffs included a mix of operational, administrative and support functions across the organization, affecting 1% of the system\u2019s 14,200 employees.<\/p>\n

The union contends UCI Health isn\u2019t laying off noncritical employees \u2014 as it stated\u00a0 \u2014 but rather those who play critical roles in patient care. Those roles include physical and occupational therapists who assist in walking ventilated patients, pharmacists, speech pathologists, medical interpreters, child life specialists and \u201cquality improvement health care specialists who are tasked with investigating the root causes behind instances of medical injury and other forms of healthcare negligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMore than 70 percent of the layoffs were non-patient-facing roles, distributed evenly across the academic health system,\u201d said UCI Health spokesman Dominic Parero in a Tuesday, March 24, statement issued to the Southern California News Group.<\/p>\n

Ansel Herz, a spokesman with\u00a0Local 9119, said the union is preparing to file an unfair labor practice complaint with the state\u2019s Public Employment Relations Board, an independent agency that oversees relations between public employers and their employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are examining our options,\u201d said Herz.\u00a0\u201cWe believe UC violated state law and contract negotiations with UPTE and should reverse these layoffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said 16 of the union\u2019s workers stand to lose their jobs if the layoffs move forward, with another 81 union employees facing a reduction in hours.<\/p>\n

Last November, UPTE and its 20,000 UC workers agreed to a four-year labor contract that provided a 28% pay bump,<\/a> pension contributions, caps on healthcare premium increases and improvements to a career advancement steps and work-life balance.<\/p>\n

Herz did not offer an explanation for the remaining 134 workers caught up in the layoff dispute.<\/p>\n

Some of them are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, with 38,800 service and patient care technical workers at UC hospitals statewide.<\/p>\n

AFSCME spokesman Todd Stenhouse said that 44 of his union\u2019s employees were laid off at UCI Health this week \u2014 including respiratory therapists and patient care technical workers. On March 20, the union authorized an open-ended strike at UC over charges that the UC system has refused to bargain over housing aid<\/a> for its lowest paid workers, and passing along higher healthcare rates<\/a> without bargaining for them.<\/p>\n

A strike date hasn\u2019t yet been disclosed, Stenhouse said. Talks between the two sides are next scheduled April 7-8.<\/p>\n

A sticking point for Local 9119 is a concern that UCI Health has targeted layoffs at four community hospitals it acquired for $975 million in early 2024 from Tenet Healthcare Corp. The transaction included Fountain Valley Regional Hospital, Lakewood Regional Medical Center, Los Alamitos Medical Center and Placentia-Linda Hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe patients served by these community hospitals are disproportionately lower income, and UCI Health has a responsibility to ensure quality care for these communities,\u201d the union said. \u201cHowever, these layoffs were announced without abiding by standard legal requirements to negotiate with impacted unions to minimize patient impacts and also seem to target roles that support lower billability services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billability is the percentage of an employee\u2019s total working time spent on tasks that can be charged to a client.<\/p>\n

UCI Health is part of a wave of hospitals across the state<\/a> that have laid off thousands of employees over the past year after being\u00a0stripped of billions of dollars in federal and state funding. The catalyst for the cuts is coming from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or HR 1, signed into law last summer by President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

UCI Health serves 5.6 million people in Orange County, western Riverside County and southeast Los Angeles County.<\/p>\n

On Monday, UCI Health said the layoffs span multiple areas of the organization and are part of a realignment to better support patient and community needs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear if any layoffs occurred at UCI Health\u2019s newly opened, 144-bed acute-care specialty hospital on the UCI Health-Irvine medical campus. That facility, which opened in December, hired 970 employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The union representing more than 1,230 employees at UCI Health wants 150 recently laid off workers reinstated after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[138,179,219,184758,134,527,42076,184759,65205,111,139,69,51035,184760,38,3305],"class_list":["post-347566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-business","tag-california","tag-economy","tag-fountain-valley","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-labor-unions","tag-los-alamitos","tag-los-angeles-county","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-orange-county","tag-placentia","tag-top-stories","tag-uc-irvine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}