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.

(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.)