California Education Code 92625 – The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) In …
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) In the course of fulfilling its educational mission, the University of California is required to participate in the marketplace, both as a purchaser of goods and services and as a provider of services to its customers, such as students who contract with the university for room and board and medical consumers who utilize the university’s hospitals and clinics. In that role, the university also functions as a proprietor of real property and other physical assets located at its campuses and medical facilities.
Terms Used In California Education Code 92625
- Assets: (1) The property comprising the estate of a deceased person, or (2) the property in a trust account.
- Contract: A legal written agreement that becomes binding when signed.
- Facility: means any campus, school, cafeteria, store, hospital, clinic, institute, laboratory, or office owned or operated by the university, or at which the normal educational or administrative functions of the university are conducted. See California Education Code 92625.1
- Lease: A contract transferring the use of property or occupancy of land, space, structures, or equipment in consideration of a payment (e.g., rent). Source: OCC
- Proprietary interest: means any nonregulatory arrangement or circumstances in which the financial or other nonregulatory interests of the university in a service contract could be adversely affected by labor-management conflict or consumer boycotts potentially resulting from a union organizing campaign. See California Education Code 92625.1
- Real property: Land, and all immovable fixtures erected on, growing on, or affixed to the land.
- Service contract: means a lease, management agreement, service agreement, loan bond, guarantee, or other similar agreement to which the university is a party and in which the university has a proprietary interest. See California Education Code 92625.1
- University: means the University of California and its governing body, the Regents of the University of California. See California Education Code 92625.1
(b) In the marketplace, the university must make prudent business decisions, as does any private business entity, to ensure efficient and cost-effective management of its business concerns, and to maximize benefit and minimize risk. One of those risks is the possibility of labor-management conflict arising out of labor union organizing campaigns. This conflict can adversely affect the university’s operation of facilities in which it has a proprietary business interest by causing an interruption in service.
(c) A major potential source of labor-management conflict that threatens the economic interests of the university as a participant in the marketplace is the possibility of economic action taken by labor unions against employers when labor unions seek to organize their workers over employer opposition to unionization. Experience has demonstrated that organizing drives pursuant to formal and adversarial union certification processes often deteriorate into protracted and acrimonious labor-management conflicts.
(d) One way to reduce risk where the university has a proprietary interest in the operation of its facilities is to require, as a condition of the university’s entering into a lease or service contract, that employers operating in the facility agree to a lawful, nonconfrontational alternative process for resolving a union organizing campaign. That alternative process is a so-called “cardcheck,” wherein employee preference regarding whether or not to be represented by a labor union to act as their exclusive collective bargaining representative is determined based on signed authorization cards. Private employers are authorized under existing federal law to agree voluntarily to use this procedure in lieu of election procedures under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board.
(e) The sole purpose of this article is to protect the university’s proprietary interest in the operation of its facilities and to assume the university’s ability to procure and provide uninterrupted services in the marketplace. This article is not enacted to favor any particular outcome in the determination of employee preference regarding union representation, nor to skew the procedures in that determination to favor or hinder any party to the determination. Likewise, this article is not intended to enact or express any generally applicable policy regarding labor-management relations, or to regulate those relations in any way, but is intended only to protect the university’s proprietary interest as a participant in the marketplace.
(Added by Stats. 2002, Ch. 1040, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2003.)