The faculty union representing professors and lecturers at San Francisco State University and other California State schools has voted to authorize a strike if it cannot reach a deal with management.
The vote — called by the California Faculty Association, which represents some 29,000 professors, lecturers, coaches and other faculty across the state — authorizes the union to call for a state-wide strike in the future, but does not guarantee it.
The vote showed 95 percent of voting members across all 23 campuses were in favor of the measure. The union did not disclose how many members actually voted.
“Cal State voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, if necessary,” said Charles Toombs, a professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University and the union’s president, during a virtual press conference Monday. “Members are emphatic that low pay, growing workloads, and systematic inequalities are not sustainable.”
The issue is, chiefly, pay. During the summer, the union pushed for 12 percent across-the-board increases this fiscal year, but California State University management countered with 5 percent raises. The system’s interim chancellor, Jolene Koester, wrote that the salary demand from the union was “unreasonable because it would grossly undermine the CSU’s fiscal stability.”
Koester will be paid $983,000 this year, including housing and other stipends, in line with the six-figure salaries of university presidents and other executives across the system.
CSU faculty, by contrast, are paid an average of $99,386 if they work-full time and $67,136 if they work part-time — which most faculty at CSUs do.
San Francisco State Staff Cuts
Lecturers, the lowest-paid CSU faculty members, who make up around 60 percent of the teaching staff across the state, have a starting pay of $54,360 if working full-time, a salary that increases slowly, and is insufficient for living in costly cities like San Francisco, according to Brad Erickson, the president of the California Faculty Association’s chapter at San Francisco State.
“The lecturer faculty in the CSU are some of the worst-paid educators in the state — the starting pay is very low, and it’s a very long process to move up the salary schedule,” he said.
Negotiations reached an “impasse” in August, meaning the two parties stopped holding formal talks because progress was limited. An independent arbiter has been appointed to review both the union’s and management’s offers to determine their feasibility, and will issue a report outlining their findings in the coming weeks, the faculty union said.
San Francisco State has 1,084 lecturers, staff who usually work part-time, cobbling together classes to fill out their schedules. They are facing the prospect of mass staffing cuts come the spring, when some 300 lecturers will lose all their classes and another 600 will lose some, according to the faculty union.
The California State University management, for its part, said the results were “not unexpected,” and that such strike votes have “become a routine part of [the union’s] post-impasse negotiation strategy.”
“The CSU remains committed to the collective bargaining process and reaching a negotiated agreement with the CFA, as we have done with five of our other employee unions in recent weeks,” said Hazel Kelly, a spokesperson for the CSU system.
California State faculty members have never engaged in a system-wide strike, the faculty union said during the press conference. It did threaten a strike in 2016, until negotiations led to a satisfactory contract.
Is it just me or can you hear the disdain in the CSU mgmt quotes?