With labor threatening to throw up a picket line this week around former President Bill Clinton’s big student gathering at the University of California, Berkeley, the cash-tight university agreed to spend millions of dollars to hire dozens of contract and part-time workers as full-time campus employees.
“I think it’s clear that UC Berkeley didn’t want to have the Clinton event picketed,” said Todd Stenhouse, spokesman for Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 22,000 workers at UC campuses.
It’s not just the university that wanted to head off the dispute. The optics wouldn’t have been much better for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is trying to head off a challenge on her left from Sen. Bernie Sanders.
