The four-day rolling walkout of professors and other workers this week at multiple California State University campuses is significant in its own right. But it also has the distinct aura of prelude.
“I have a feeling that we’re going to head to a statewide strike,” said Leda Ramos, a lecturer and faculty organizer at CSU Los Angeles. “The corporatization, the outsourcing, paring down, looking at labor as dispensable — it’s a hydra-headed thing. This is a monster that just keeps growing.”
Ramos’ campus, where California Faculty Association members walked out Wednesday to protest stagnant negotiations with CSU leadership, is one of four involved in the current action. One-day strikes also occurred at Cal Poly Pomona and San Francisco State, with Sacramento State scheduled for Thursday.
The CFA, which represents about 29,000 members across the Cal State system’s 23 campuses, has made it clear that this week represents a taste of what may come. As union bargaining chair and Sacramento State professor Kevin Wehr said recently, “The decision was made to start on the smaller side … to allow us some space to escalate.”
In a statement by CSU last week, Vice Chancellor Leora Freedman said, “CSU strives to provide fair, competitive pay and benefits for all of our employees. We recognize the need to increase compensation and are committed to doing so, but our financial commitments must be fiscally sustainable.”
The breakdown in talks, which were initiated by the union as a “reopener” to an existing contract that expires next June, appears to be grounded in numbers that might confuse those looking in for the first time.
The CFA, which counts professors, lecturers, counselors, coaches and librarians among its members, is seeking a 12% raise for the 2023-24 academic year. The CSU team is offering 5% increases in each of the next three years, or 15% overall. That sounds rather close.
But as often happens in cases like this, the numbers are in dire need of context. The union’s ask isn’t as dramatic as 12% in one year might sound, as it is attempting to account for years of raises that haven’t kept pace with the rising cost of living, not to mention workloads for professors and lecturers that have grown significantly.
And the university system’s offer of 15% over three years is conditional in that any increase in those final two years is subject to the state’s final budget for the CSU system. In other words, the administration is offering 5% now and the hope of future raises based upon legislative appropriations.
“We’ve been through this before, where they promised a future raise and then said they couldn’t afford it,” said Ramos, who has been at CSULA since 2016 and teaches Chicana(o) and Latina(o) studies. “In the meantime, we’ve got some people with food insecurity and some people living in their cars. This is subsistence living.”
Ramos teaches a full load of five classes totaling roughly 200 students, for which she is paid $65,000. At Cal State Northridge, meanwhile, the average lecturer is paid roughly $55,000, according to CSUN adjunct professor and union official Antonio Gallo, and the class sizes often hit 45. (Lecturers work on a contingent basis.)
“That’s a huge number of students to be teaching, and these people are not being paid enough to keep up with the cost of living in Southern California,” said Gallo, who has worked at CSUN for 22 years. “We haven’t had a strike since 2011, but this time around CSU just has not communicated with us.”
The lack of trust is palpable. The CFA flatly disbelieves Cal State’s claim that it cannot afford the raises, and it hired a forensic economist to study CSU’s numbers. The economist concluded that the system is “in very strong financial condition,” including sitting on more than $8 billion in cash reserves. Campus presidents have also enjoyed dramatic salary increases over the last 15 years.
While CSU officials don’t deny the runup in reserves, they argue that they can’t simply tap them for the blanket 12% raises that the union is seeking. That increase would cost $380 million in new recurring spending, the university system said in its statement, adding that the amount is well more than CSU received from the state in total funding for its operations in 2023-24.
Left unsaid is that raises for lecturers and other workers over the previous several years haven’t kept up with inflation, including a 3% raise in 2022 when the Consumer Price Index rose 6.5%. Together with increased class sizes and workloads and issues in other areas, such as parental leave, the screws have tightened on CSU workers, union members say.
An independent factfinder called in to work on the negotiations recommended an immediate 7% raise for all CFA workers and an additional bump for the lowest paid, but CSU officials have said that even a 5% raise will create strain on campus budgets. It is a claim met with rising skepticism from those doing the teaching and the working on those campuses.
“They have no problem giving bloated salaries to their administration but squeezing the workers further down the line. They have billions in reserves,” CSULA’s Ramos said. With the parties at stalemate, the specter of more walkouts — or a full strike — now looms large.
