The California Faculty Association’s Board of Directors have released the dates of the potential five-day strike, approved in a vote last semester. CFA members will strike if they cannot come to an agreement with the California State University management in regards to their request for a general salary increase for all faculty.
The strike will be April 13 to 15 and April 18 to 19, and will occur on all 23 CSU campuses.
“We’ve said all along that we don’t want to strike, but we will if we have to,” said CFA President Dr. Jennifer Eagan in a CFA press release.
The CFA represents 26,000 employees on all CSU campuses including instructional faculty, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches.
The possible impact of a strike remains uncertain. If a strike occurs, all CFA faculty members working for CSU will stop.
Additionally, multiple labor groups and councils have granted strike sanctions to the CFA. By granting these strike sanctions, labor union members will not cross the picket lines to lend any kind of support to the CSU.
“With all the labor unions supporting us, everything will stop,” Nate Thomas, president of the Northridge CFA chapter, said.
With labor unions not crossing picket lines, many services will be withheld from the campus. UPS and mail deliveries will stop, public buses will not enter campus, trash will not be collected and unionized tradespeople will not go onto campus to build or make repairs.
“Go back to Cal State East Bay and Dominquez Hills [strike] in 2011. Campus was closed. It was a ghost town in the middle of the week,” Thomas said.
In a statement released by the CSU Labor Relations, if a strike occurs, campuses will remain open and will not interfere with students classes or graduation dates.
Currently the CSU and CFA are in fact-finding, the final stage of the collective bargaining process.
During the fact-finding process, a neutral third party is selected to hear both sides and then write a report to propose how the settlement could be reached.
After the report is completed there will be a 10-day media blackout, allowing both sides to examine the content and possibly reach a settlement. Until the end of the 10-day media blackout, the CFA cannot take action.
No exact date for the release of the fact-finder’s report has been set, but the CFA believes it will be out by April 13, according to Thomas.
Negotiations between the CFA and CSU began in May 2014.
The CFA has been fighting for a 5 percent general salary increase for all faculty members, while the CSU management has been sticking to their offer of 2 percent.
“Too many CSU faculty members are falling out of the middle class or unable to rise into it,” Dr. Kevin Wehr, chair of the CFA bargaining team, said in a CFA press release. “That is painfully ironic given that the very purpose of a state university is to open the doors for our students to become middle class.”
