By BLANCA LEON
The author is a union activist with the CFA-SFSU
On Jan. 22, the California Faculty Association (CFA), representing 28,000 faculty employees in the California State University system (tenure-track and lecturer faculty, counselors, librarians, and coaches), will begin a full statewide strike for a contract for the entire week. The CSU administration walked out of bargaining on Jan. 9, imposing a very harsh contract on the union, and threatening to start docking workers’ pay if the Faculty Association goes forward with its larger strike action.
This is the first time that the CSU system has seen a statewide faculty strike since the faculty established their union in 1983. Last month, the four campuses that went on strike also marked a milestone; it was the second strike in the union’s history, a limited and partial one, but extremely successful. Now, emboldened rank-and-file members have managed to convince their leadership that the only way to win their demands is to shut down the entire system, as the CFA leadership is being pressured by the ranks to finally put up a fight against CSU management and break a trend of lukewarm and concessionary contracts. Therefore, it is fundamental to ensure the success of this strike week, and to empower the rank-and-file wave of organizing across the CSUs to show that “when we strike, we win.”
Open bargaining is a success; we need more!
The union is asking for a 12% general wage increase for all members, and to raise the floor for the lowest paid lecturer faculty members ($7000 and $5000 for the lowest salary ranges). This is the first time the union has negotiated its salaries in a way that reduces the structural inequities between tenure track and lecturer faculty. This is because many chapters have fully embraced the goal of abolishing the two-tier system of teaching that deeply divides the workforce. Today in the CSUs, only 55% of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty are tenure-track, but given that the vast majority of the 45% of lecturer faculty are employed part-time, they constitute around two thirds of the membership.
The CFA is also fighting for workload protections such as setting class size caps, and enforcing the federal counselor/student ratio of 1/1500. These will drastically improve the quality of education and mental health services offered at one of the largest public university systems in the United States, which serves 450,000 students. Finally, the union has included “common good” or social justice demands—including some that target the social reproduction needs of the faculty, such as the demand to have a full semester of parental leave or accessible and fully equipped lactation rooms—or demands that will benefit oppressed communities on campus, such as gender-inclusive bathrooms in all buildings, and the right of faculty members not to be interviewed by armed police on campus.
The last salary offer from the CSU administration was 5%, which definitely means a significant pay cut, given that last year alone inflation was 8%. The union argues that to really catch up with inflation for the past four years (since the raises of the last contract, which some members opposed, did not match the rate of inflation), a 12% increase is what is needed. The independent factfinder ruled that less than a 10% increase would be a pay cut. What the union is asking is basically to keep up with inflation and to give its members a cost-of-living adjustment.
The fact that the union has embraced an ambitious bargaining agenda reflecting members’ needs is the result of open bargaining and growing rank-and-file organizing pushed by several campuses. The CFA chapter of San Francisco State University and many other allies in the union have been arguing for years for a bottom-up and more democratic fighting union, and for the need to get “strike ready” as soon as bargaining begins. Open bargaining led to the strikes in December and now in January, as it left the union leadership without options of compromise when facing an untreatable CSU administration. Now, strike actions need to continue and grow stronger until they deliver the goods, otherwise the membership might get demoralized. What is needed though, is a real plan to win.
The neoliberal CSU administration must be defeated
The CSU administration claims that there is no money to meet the faculty’s needs and the union demands. Yet their claims are repeated by glaring facts that CSU translator Garcia and the board of trustees refuse to admit. The university system has, per its own accounting, more than $3 billion in reserves, and close to $8bn invested in the stock market. The union hired an auditor who found that there is in fact much more money stashed away: $8bn in unrestricted reserves and $11bn in investment. Just for reference, the total cost of the union demands for this year is less than $400 million.
In the last few years, the CSU has seen rapid corporatization. Since 2019, the cost of management has increased by $215 million while the investment in instruction, academic support, and maintenance has sharply decreased. Today, the Chancellor’s office spends $200 million per year alone (it’s a 24th ghost campus with no students!), and the most outrageous thing, is of course, the lavish pay of top administrators. The new Chancellor Mildred Garcia makes close to $1 million in total compensation, and CSU campus presidents got a 29% increase to their pay last year. This is public money that should be reinvested in the classroom, giving living wages to faculty and staff, and helping roll back the tuition hikes so the CSU becomes a free public university again.
The current budget needs to be turned around, but this cannot be accomplished without defeating this neoliberal administration through a mass and united strike action. This is why the support of students, staff, and community members is crucial to transform the California State University into a real public education system where students and faculty are empowered to make the core decisions about budget and instruction.
The CSU board of trustees and Chancellor are behaving more and more like the union-busting bosses of private and for-profit universities. They not serve any more working people in California, and are using public institutions for their own benefit, but they’re out to bust unions—in particular, fighting unions as the CFA is becoming. This is why the CSU walked out of bargaining and unilaterally imposed a contract with a 5% non-retroactive wage increase, and also an increase in parking fees. The terms of this imposition are worse than the last offer the CSU gave to the union in mid-December, and worse also than the offer given to the two other unions on campus, the staff union (CSUEU) and maintenance workers (Teamsters). It is clear that Chancellor Garcia and the trustees want to punish the CFA for successfully striking in December, and for daring to strike again, now at a statewide level.
Connecting the struggles: Money for jobs & education, not for wars & occupation!
This second strike of CSU faculty is happening in the midst of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The CFA has a PAM (Palestine, Arab and Muslim) caucus, which has organized numerous teach-ins and educational events, contingents at the demonstrations, and put forward a solidarity resolution with Palestinian Arab and Muslim faculty and against the genocide in Gaza. The PAM resolution has already been endorsed by seven of the 23 local chapters, including the one at San Francisco State, which has supported the Palestinian struggle since 2018. In the Bay Area, CFA PAM members are active in the Bay Area Labor for Palestine coalition, organizing rallies and actions with other unions and community organizations to head the call of the Palestinian trade labor unions to stop all U.S. aid to Israel, to stop arming the genocide.
The connection between the struggles for economic and social justice for California faculty and students and for liberation for the Palestinian people is not just coincidental. Even though the stakes are drastically different, in the ultimate instance, we are fighting a common enemy: an arrogant imperialist state that puts profits ahead of people’s needs and lives, a genocidal state that tries to implicate us in its crimes. This is why we disagree with the position of the union leadership that we should not attempt to bring solidarity with other struggles into the preparation and lead-up to our strike action for a fair contract. Quite the opposite! We need to show how and where our public money is being spent.
It’s not a “divisive” endeavor to fully embrace the agenda of liberation in our unions, and to do political education among the ranks about the nature of the society we live in, and thus of the class alliances we ought to build to survive and thrive. What is divisive and oppressive is to silence those who want to speak for justice everywhere. Actually, limiting our struggles to “bread and butter” issues will always set us on the road to defeat, because the best social justice fighters are very often the best union organizers. They are able to connect the issues, develop relations of solidarity, and to overcome the divisions instilled in the movement that prevent a united action.
In the last 10 years, the CSU has begun investing billions of public money in investment funds tied to two major corporations linked to wars, the occupation of Palestine, the prison industrial complex, and the militarization of borders. This is why to fully embrace a social justice agenda, from an internationalist perspective of solidarity, the CFA and the rest of the public sector unions in California must begin a BDS campaign to divest all our of their private investments and pension funds from the major U.S. corporations that directly or indirectly make profit out of war and occupations, starting with those who maintain connections with the Israeli apartheid settler-colonial state.
Getting our statewide union strike-ready to win!
This week of the statewide strike at the CSU is a key step towards both getting a good contract, and transforming our union. Unfortunately, the CSU walked out of bargaining and refuses to further meet with the union. It wants to make a point to break the morale of this new layer of fighting rank-and-file activists and local union leaders. It is likely that even a successful week-long statewide strike will not display enough leverage to force management back to the table, and we need to seriously plan the next steps.
Many rank-and-file members have been arguing that what is needed is an open-ended statewide strike to win our demands. This is true, but as we keep saying, strikes are not “declared”—they need to be organized from the bottom up. The strikes that are apt to succeed are those led by rank-and-file union activists, organized in committees with representatives of all employment units and departments, and that become majority strikes. Rank-and-file activists and local union leaders need to be able to work together to make the best decisions in a transparent, democratic, and thoughtful way.
Therefore, to overcome the uneven level of organization across the 23 union chapters, the statewide union needs to unleash the organizing power, agency, and creativity of the ranks, and provide venues to grow union power and a roadmap to win. Concretely, the statewide union leadership needs to stop discussing and deciding the strategy in a closed room with very few people (most often not the campus organizers), and instead needs to call for broad regional conventions or meetings that bring together the best activities from all campuses to assess forces, uneven level of organization across the 23 union chapters. The statewide leadership needs to call broad regional strike-organizing conventions or meetings that bring together the best activists from all campuses to assess forces, share organizing strategies, and debate and deliberate democratically on the best strike tactics and strategy. This will build the kind of rank-and-file power needed to defeat the boss.
The second prerequisite for a successful stronger, open-ended strike action is to build a real strike fund. This means overcoming the wrong ideas still instilled in the membership—i.e., that the strike is mostly powerful as a “threat” or a “bluff” and not as a real action, that strikes do not require material preparation, and that workers should stop complaining if management docks their pay.
Building strike funds has been one of the key strategic discussions in the labor movement in the U.S. because it is a method to build and leverage the material means of victory, tapping the powers of the working class—our numbers and the practice of solidarity. Fighting unions, which understand that the real threat of a strike can win good contracts, have strike funds. This fact was corroborated again by the UAW strike against the Big Three (GM, Ford, Stellantis), which was able to be sustained for weeks because the union had a strike fund. In the CFA, a few chapters are already pushing in that direction. Strike Hardship Funds are being created in LA and San Francisco, and a campaign for a real strike fund at the statewide level is on. The union has enough reserves to seed a strike fund in 2024 that would really scare CSU management and make an open-ended statewide labor action not only a possibility but a tremendous success!
Photo: Picketing outside San Francisco State University on Jan. 22 (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)