Your commute time just tripled if you have a B Permit..

For many frontline workers, parking at this campus has become a daily obstacle course — one that starts long before the shift does and doesn’t end until well after it’s over. Finding a parking spot can take 30 minutes or more. Employees circle lots, double back, watch others grab spaces, and watch the clock tick closer to their start time. Being late isn’t about poor planning — it’s about scarcity.

For those assigned to remote lots, the commute doesn’t end when they park. It continues on foot or by shuttle. Shuttles are scheduled every 15 minutes, but real life doesn’t run on a schedule. Wheelchair boarding, bike loading, traffic, and delays routinely turn that into 20 minutes or more. Miss one shuttle, and you’re already behind.

To compensate, many workers are now leaving an hour earlier than they used to — sometimes more — just to have a chance of getting to work on time. Some are already waking up at 4 a.m. or earlier to make it in. Dietary staff and other early-start classifications are up even earlier. And that’s before the workday even begins.

Permit Type, Pay Type, and Who Pays the Price…

Parking policy doesn’t land evenly across the workforce. Higher-cost D permits are predominantly held by higher-income, salaried employees. These employees generally do not punch a clock. Their time is not tracked minute by minute, and parking delays don’t automatically follow them into attendance records. Lower-cost B permits are largely held by hourly workers — the employees who must punch in at an exact time and who are subject to attendance discipline if they are even a few minutes late.

As parking availability tightens, B-permit holders are pushed farther away. That distance carries consequences. Longer walks. Longer shuttle waits. More chances to be marked late — even when the delay is completely outside the worker’s control. Attendance Is Where This Becomes Punitive. For hourly workers, parking delays don’t just mean frustration. They turn into attendance issues. A few minutes late becomes a tardy. Tardies accumulate. Attendance records follow workers. Discipline follows attendance. None of that reflects effort or performance — it reflects structural barriers created by parking policies and designed by executives.

Salaried employees are not scrutinized this way. They are not docked or disciplined minute by minute. That difference matters. When hourly workers are pushed farther away while being held to rigid clock-in requirements, the burden is not shared equally. Off Shifts, Safety, and Exhaustion- this impact is especially heavy for off-shift workers. Early morning and night-shift staff are the ones parking farthest away, walking through largely empty lots, waiting for shuttles in the dark, and navigating long distances alone. Security patrols exist, but they are not private escorts. Workers are often on their own before dawn or late at night. After physically demanding shifts — hours spent on their feet, lifting, cleaning, transporting, moving nonstop — workers still have a long walk or shuttle ride ahead of them just to get back to their cars. This isn’t theoretical. It’s exhausting. And it compounds fatigue that already exists.

These issues were all made by design- and how the risk of many is outweighed by the convenience of a few

Life Outside of Work Still Exists. Extra unpaid time spent navigating parking doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Workers have daycare pickup times, second jobs, classes, households to run, and families to attend to. Already tight schedules are being stretched in places that were already too thin. Adding an extra hour on the front end — and uncertainty on the back end — creates real conflicts that hourly workers don’t have the flexibility to absorb.

Despite all of the other inconveniences and drawbacks, the cost of parking hasn’t gone down. Workers pushed farther away are paying the same, while absorbing the difference in time, energy, and risk.

Frontline departments don’t control parking permits, lot assignments, or shuttle systems. These are campus-wide decisions made at the executive level by UC Davis Health leadership.

When those decisions fail to account for how hourly work actually functions — rigid attendance rules, early start times, off shifts, and physically demanding labor — the result is predictable. More lateness. More discipline. More stress. More inequity.

Why Workers Are Speaking Up

This disconnect between official messaging and lived reality is why employees across classifications are speaking up and supporting a petition calling for these parking changes to be paused, reconsidered, or redesigned with worker safety, access, and equity at the center.

The petition can be found here:

Petition Demanding Fair Parking Practices For Medical Center Staff

The Actual Impact On EVS Staff

After the reallocation of B Permit parking to expand D permit spaces, hourly employees with B permits are now required to park significantly farther from the hospital than higher-paid staff. The walk from the relocated B-permit parking area near Broadway to the staff entrance across from the Sherman Building, followed by travel through the main hospital to the EVS Start-Up Office totals approximately 1.35 miles one way. This translates to 2.7 miles per day, or roughly 70 minutes of unpaid walking time per shift. Over a standard five-day work week, that equals 13.5 miles and nearly six unpaid hours spent simply getting to and from work areas.

Over the course of a year, this adds up to approximately 702 miles walked and 304 hours of uncompensated time — the equivalent of more than seven full workweeks.

This burden falls disproportionately on hourly, frontline employees who already perform physically demanding work and are subject to strict time-clock attendance policies, to benefit salaried, higher-income D permit holders. The result is not just inconvenience, but a measurable & ongoing labor inequity that thoughtlessly transfers time, energy, & physical strain onto the backs of frontline workers.

In the media, UC boasts of being a top employer who values “equity, inclusion, kindness, and excellence”. “Be Best” they say-.. Well, we say..

DO BETTER!!

#DontBelieveTheHype