Hundreds of SF State Faculty Ditch Class in 1-Day Strike for Better Wages, Working Conditions

San Francisco State University faculty held a single-day strike on Tuesday, demanding significant pay increases, amid the looming threat of widespread layoffs and hundreds of class cuts across campus.

Hundreds of faculty members, including professors, librarians, counselors and coaches, gathered on the campus alongside some of their students, holding signs and shouting chants as passing cars honked in support.

“When education is under attack, what do we do?” one strike leader called out. “Stand up, fight back!” the crowd responded.

The action is the second in a series of one-day strikes at four California State University campuses this week, with Cal Poly Pomona faculty kicking things off on Monday. CSU Los Angeles faculty plan to strike on Wednesday, followed by Sacramento State faculty on Thursday.

The California Faculty Association, which represents some 29,000 CSU employees, is demanding a retroactive 12% salary hike for the current academic year, more manageable workloads and an increase in parental leave — from six weeks to a full semester.

The work stoppages come after months of fruitless negotiations between the union and university system administrators, who have held fast to their offer of a 5% increase.

And neither side accepted some of the key terms that an independent fact finder recommended last week — including a 7% pay hike — in a final effort to avert a strike.

Blanca Missé, an associate professor of French at SF State, blamed administrators for failing to seriously consider the union’s demands, noting that a 5% pay increase would not even cover inflation.

“We need to look at the facts of the cost of living, the cost of keeping faculty working in this institution because a lot of faculty are leaving because they cannot afford to live in the Bay Area anymore,” said Missé, who joined the campus picket line on Tuesday. “We have a high turnover of faculty, which in turn affects the quality of education for students.”

But Leora Freedman, CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, said that while the university system aims to pay its workers fairly and provide competitive benefits, it simply lacked the financial resources to accommodate the union’s demands.

“We recognize the need to increase compensation and are committed to doing so, but our financial commitments must be fiscally sustainable,” she said in a statement.

SF State, more so than any other CSU campus, is also facing the prospect of sweeping cuts, with over 300 lecturers expected to be laid off in the spring and more than 650 classes on the chopping block following years of declining enrollment and a projected budget shortfall.

Missé said that although the strike was not about the planned layoffs, that grim context helped mobilize faculty and students to show up on Tuesday.

“When you’re losing 300 lecture-line faculty, people who have been working here for 20 years, when you see programs being decimated, students struggling to graduate, people get angry,” Missé said.

Ali Noorzad, a fourth-year history student who participated in Tuesday’s strike, said his education is directly dependent on the working conditions of his professors.

“Looking at my class schedule, there’s classes I needed to take that I could not take because so many classes are cut because so many faculty have been cut,” Noorzad said. “Faculty are obviously the ones being most directly affected by [cuts], but you can see how this is affecting us as well.”

Members of Teamsters Local 2010, which represents some 1,100 plumbers, electricians and other skilled trade workers in the CSU system, joined Tuesday’s strike in a show of solidarity.

“We’ve always had crappy negotiating and bad contracts, and that’s why we’re here,” said David Hagstrom, the Teamsters Local 2010 chief steward, whose own union held a one-day strike last month after also failing to agree on a new contract with university administrators. “The CSU has pushed us to this point where we have to stand up and we have to do something or they’re just going to walk all over us.”

For CSU faculty, the current three-year contract now under negotiation expires in the spring, at the end of this academic year. So even if the two sides do reach a compromise, they will have to return to the negotiating table in a matter of months to face off over the next contract.

But Ali Kashani, a senior lecturer of political philosophy at SF State, said the prospect of that ongoing struggle doesn’t daunt him.

“People are fed up. They want to have better living conditions, so we’re not afraid of that,” he said. “This is actually a good testing ground for us. We’re going to get ready, solidarity is going to be there, we’re going to actually get more militant for our next contract.”