3rd day of Cal State University faculty strikes underway at Los Angeles campus
Hundreds of Cal State Los Angeles faculty staged a one-day strike at their campus on Wednesday, Dec. 5 — the third iteration of similar actions planned by their fellow union members across the state this week.
The California Faculty Association, a labor union representing around 29,000 instructional faculty, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches across the California State University system’s 23 campuses, planned the week of one-day walkouts as part of efforts to a negotiate a new labor contract.
The union’s chief concern, according to its website, is securing 12% pay raises for all its members in order to keep up with inflation, raising the pay floor for the CSU’s lowest-paid faculty and expanding parental leave.
The CFA also wants more manageable workloads, the website says, additional mental health counselors for students, and better access to both gender-inclusive restrooms and breastfeeding stations.
Wednesday’s strike at CSULA was the third such action planned by the CFA. Faculty members were expected to be on the picket line at State University Drive and Paseo Rancho Castilla until 7 p.m.
Other one-day walkouts took place at Cal Poly Pomona and San Francisco State University earlier this week, with a final walkout planned at Sacramento State on Thursday, Dec. 7.
Pat Alford, a Cal State Northridge counselor who joined CSULA faculty during the Wednesday strike, said she’s hoping the walkouts will make a difference in bargaining — and help avoid longer strikes in the future.
“It’s time to increase wages to keep up with inflation,” Alford said. “I know, in my department, many people work two jobs to make ends meet. We also need to hire people but we can’t attract anyone with such low wages.”
Despite the walkout, CSULA — which is not directly involved in the labor negotiations — did not cancel classes on Wednesday, the university said in a statement, and most student service centers remained open.
“Cal State LA values our faculty colleagues — before, during and after the strike,” CSULA’s interim provost, Amy Bippus, said in the statement. “We want our faculty to be fairly compensated. Our Golden Eagle community maintains hope that the CSU and the CFA will reach an agreement soon.”
The CSU, meanwhile, said in a recent news release that it is prepared to agree with a majority of the union’s demands.
Those would include increasing paid parental leave from six to eight weeks and decreasing workloads for faculty with new children from 40% to 60% through the CSU’s alternative paid workload reduction program.
“Recommendations also address issues such as minimum pay ranges for lecturers,” the CSU said, “additional pay for department chairs, workload, personal leave, counselor ratios, gender-inclusive bathrooms and lactations spaces, parking and other issues.”
But salary, it seems, is the sticking point on both sides — with the CSU’s news release arguing that the union’s one-year 12% pay raise request is unsustainable for the system over the long-term.
That request, the CSU said, would cost about $380 million per year in new spending.
That’s an issue for the system, whose Board of Trustees recently OK’d 6% annual CSU tuition hikes over the next five years — the first tuition increase in more than a decade — in an effort to cover its $1.5 billion funding gap. The tuition increases will begin in fall 2024.
Instead, the CSU has proposed 15% general salary increases over the next three years, or 5% a year. Those raises, though, would depend on the fulfilment of a state funding compact, which promised to provide the CSU with a 5% annual boost to its annual budget — amounting to a $227.3 million increase for this fiscal year.
Post-promotion increases would be raised by 2.65% in fiscal year 2024-25 under the CSU’s proposal, along with a service salary increase of 2.65% in the 2025-26 fiscal year.
“CSU strives to provide fair, competitive pay and benefits for all of our employees,” Leora Freedman, the CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, said in last week’s release. “We recognize the need to increase compensation and are committed to doing so, but our financial commitments must be fiscally sustainable.”
The CFA and its members, though, have argued that the university system should prioritize its 12% across-the-board salary increase proposal, as it would also benefit CSU students.
“We are overworked and underpaid,” Anthony Ratcliff, CSULA professor and CFA LA chapter president, said in a Friday, Dec. 1, news release, “and our students are not getting the education they deserve.”
Bargaining, meanwhile, is ongoing. A fourth one-day strike is planned for Thursday at Sacramento State — and the CFA has said it will consider additional strikes in the spring if an agreement isn’t reached before then.