Update: City College faculty officially ratified the new contract on Dec. 14, 2023, according to AFT 2121.
Two years after the expiration of its last contract, the faculty union at City College of San Francisco has reached a tentative agreement with the university Friday, winning 14-percent wage increases over the next three years.
“I’m happy and relieved,” said Robin Pugh, an instructor in CCSF’s business department, and the secretary of the American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, which represents more than 1,000 teachers, librarians and counselors at CCSF. “It really marks a new turn for the college that it was faculty organizing, community advocacy and the leadership of our board that managed to get us to this point.”
Specifically, the agreement guarantees CCSF teachers a nine percent raise in the first year and three percent and two percent in the next two years. “This is about income and salaries and faculty’s ability to survive in San Francisco,” said Pugh. “But it’s also about respect for us as key partners in the educational mission at City College and how we get treated by the administration.”
City College Chancellor David Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The agreement came after a series of actions by AFT 2121, whose members’ wages at CCSF have been stagnant for three years. This included a rally in late October that brought together more than 200 City College faculty and staff, and a threatened strike vote that was originally scheduled for Dec. 8.
According to Pugh, the main sticking point was over the economic proposals. “For nine months, the chancellor’s team was stuck at 9 percent, and not changing from that,” said Pugh; the union wanted a cost-of-living adjustment of about 18 percent, according to union vice president Alan D’Souza.
On Thursday, the San Francisco Community College District offered 14 percent, which the union’s bargaining team accepted. Pugh said she would rather her colleagues be “near the top of the Bay 10,” the name for the 10 Bay Area community colleges, “but this gets us around the middle.”
In addition, according to the tentative agreement, the “faculty recessions made in the 2021-2022 fiscal year shall be returned in full.” During the pandemic, CCSF faculty voluntarily took a pay cut that could be as high as 10 to 11 percent of their salary when City College was in the midst of severe budgetary uncertainty. The recessions were made on the condition that City College would restore salaries at a later date, according to Pugh.
“It was a hard and exhausting process for everybody involved,” said Alan Wong, president of the school’s board of trustees. “I am looking forward to ratifying this contract, and working strategically together with AFT 2121 for the long-term sustainability of the college.”
“I really have to give thanks and credit to the board,” said Pugh, thanking Wong for playing “an instrumental role in guiding the process,” and thanking board members Aliya Chisti and Susan Solomon for participating in last Thursday’s mediation session, during which the tentative agreement was reached.
The contract must still be ratified by the union’s members in a vote that will kick off on Friday; the results will be known by the end of next week. Once ratified, the new contract will be effective retroactively from July 1, 2023.
