Cal State Faculty Hold a Series of 1-Day Strikes

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the bay. Local news to keep you rooted. California State University faculty held a series of one day strikes this past week across four campuses, including here in the bay at San Francisco State. The California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians and counselors, says that without better pay and smaller classes, the quality of students education suffers. And at San Francisco State, workers are particularly upset as the university also plans to cut hundreds of jobs and classes next year.

Ali Kashani: We are the engine of this, you know, university. University consists of faculty and students.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, the Cal State faculty strikes.

Juan Carlos Lara: On Tuesday, I went to San Francisco State University’s campus.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Juan Carlos Lara is a reporter for KQED.

Juan Carlos Lara: SF State is one of four CSU campuses that was participating in this series of single day strikes this week provided by the union. So it started with Cal Poly Pomona on Monday, SF State was Tuesday. Then that was followed by CSU, L.A. and Sacramento State was the last day. I’d say the mood was very energized.

Juan Carlos Lara: There were a few hundred people there for the strike. There was a lot of anger and frustration around the stalling in negotiations. But people also seemed pretty hopeful that something productive would come of their collective action, that they could pressure the university to make more movement at the bargaining table.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, tell me a little bit more about who exactly is on strike across these four campuses.

Juan Carlos Lara: So this strike was held by the California Faculty Association, which represents some 29,000 faculty across the CSU’s 23 campuses. So that would be professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches. Mm hmm. And joining the CFA on strike for these four days was actually the Teamsters Union, which represents about 1100 skilled trades workers on those campuses. So they have their separate negotiations, but they joined in solidarity for these four days.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And why are CSU faculty striking right now?

Juan Carlos Lara: Yeah, I mean, the big thing is, as usual, you know, salary the lowest paid lecturers in the CSU make about 50 4k. So they’re trying to raise that floor to 64. And they’re trying to get a 12% general salary increase for this year for 2023, 2024 school year. They argue that class sizes have been slowly increasing and that decreases the amount of time they’re able to give one on one attention to students.

Juan Carlos Lara: They are also hoping for a full semester of paid parental leave. There are also a few other things, like lactation centers on campuses that are accessible and gender neutral restrooms and other things. Negotiations between the CSU and the faculty union have kind of stalled. So they held these four days of strikes to kind of show the university that they were willing to hold work stoppages to get what they wanted.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know you had a chance to talk with some folks out there at the strike. What do faculty that you spoke with say about what it’s like to work for CSU right now and why they don’t feel like they’re getting what they deserve?

Ali Kashani: Across the board they’re cutting. So all the humanities courses have been cut.

Juan Carlos Lara: Ali Kashani is a senior lecturer of political philosophy at SF State.

Ali Kashani: So if you’re lecturer faculty here, you’re you’re teaching more than two courses. You have a health care. So once you lose that job, you lose your health care automatically. So I think that’s a major impact.

Juan Carlos Lara: He was pretty upset.

Ali Kashani: You know, we’re just barely going to be, you know, dealing with the inflation. It’s not like we’re not asking anything more. You know, we live in a very expensive area. So 12% is nothing.

Juan Carlos Lara: He feels like more money is going towards administrators, campus presidents and chancellors who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the people are actually teaching these courses and supporting students are kind of struggling to make ends meet.

Ali Kashani: The chancellor, who’s the new chancellor, is making $1 million and all the other, you know, the president’s day. There is no problem giving those people raises. And when it comes to us, we are the engine of this, you know, university. University consists of faculty and students.

Juan Carlos Lara: And I talked to Blanca Misse, who’s an associate professor of French at SF State. They kind of talked about why faculty are so angry and riled up and we’re so ready for this strike.

Blanca Misse: But the reason why it was not very hard to organize a strike at San Francisco State. I mean, it was a lot of organizing work, but it’s because the faculty were ready to go. Because when you’re losing 300 lecturer line faculty for next semester, people who’ve been working here for 20 years, when you see programs are being devastated, decimated students struggling to graduate. I mean, faculty get angry.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I want to talk about how CSU is responding so far. How has the university’s system administrators responded to these demands by faculty?

Juan Carlos Lara: University administrators have made some small movement, so they went from their initial proposal of a 4% salary increase for the year to 5%. They were initially suggesting that the salary increases take effect after the contract is signed. The unions pushing for that to be retroactive to the beginning of the year. But in general, the university administration hasn’t really made much movement on these demands. They kind of argue that they’re too expensive and that they can’t afford them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, I mean, I was going to say 5% offer compared to a 12% demand. I mean, that is a pretty big gap there between the CSU and its faculty. But why do administrators say that CSU doesn’t have enough money to pay these raises? What is their rationale there?

Juan Carlos Lara: Yeah, well, CSU administrators say that if they did agree to a 12% annual pay increase would result in like $380 million a year for them. That’s more than the annual budgets for some of their campuses. They also say that emergency funding that they were getting from the state during the first few years of the pandemic have gone away. The enrollment is kind of on the decline and that they don’t think that agreeing to these pay increases will be sustainable in the long term for them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, why university administrators at San Francisco State say declining enrollment is going to make it hard for them to give faculty what they want.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: At that point about declining enrollment is really interesting to me. I’m curious what we know about how CSU’s have been doing in terms of enrollment and what role is that really playing in all of this?

Juan Carlos Lara: This year’s fall undergraduate enrollment for the CSU as a whole is about 6.5% lower than it was in 2019. Obviously, they took a hit at the start of the pandemic, but there hasn’t really seen a full recovery. And it seems like the anticipation is that it won’t be with California’s overall population being in slight decline and and people having kids at slightly slower rates.

Lynn Mahoney: So I have a budget that I build based on two sources.

Juan Carlos Lara: I got to speak to the university’s president, Lynn Mahoney.

Lynn Mahoney: The state allocation, the tax dollars I get and then the tuition I collect from students. And that’s the money I can count on year after year. And that’s what I use to pay my employees.

Juan Carlos Lara: For San Francisco State. Those declines are even worse this year compared to 2019 for undergraduate enrollment has seen a 20% decline and the university says that it needs to adapt to that by making these substantive cuts. So they were looking at about 125 full time equivalent lecture positions and more than 600 classes to be cut.

Lynn Mahoney: We’re down about 5 or 6000 students.

Juan Carlos Lara: Most lecturers aren’t full time. So the union estimates that that would be about more than 300 lecturers that would be laid off. Mahoney said that she understands, but she says tough decisions have to be made and that if enrollment continues to decline, the university has to adjust for that in its staffing levels.

Lynn Mahoney: My role as a university president is to keep the university financially solvent. In the best interests of the graduation rates of our students. But I’ve got to keep it financially solvent.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Okay. So CSU says they can’t afford these pay raises that the faculty are demanding. And on top of that, at San Francisco State, there’s also these looming job cuts because of enrollment decline. How is the union responding to those claims by the CSU and the university?

Juan Carlos Lara: The union hired its own financial analyst to look at the university’s finances. That analyst found that the university regularly has surpluses at the end of each year and that its reserves have been growing and are now in the range of $8 billion. So they don’t think that the university even needs to use its reserves to pay for these raises. They think that with the surpluses it sees every year, this is something they can accommodate. Of course, the university denies that.

Brad Erickson: They have been giving us a kind of gloom and doom financial narrative.

Juan Carlos Lara: I spoke with Brad Erickson, who’s the president of the San Francisco State chapter of the faculty Union. He said the university is sort of has a history of not being transparent with its finances and that there look at future financial situations is usually more pessimistic and that it’s in their best interest to kind of keep costs down.

Brad Erickson: Last year was actually the best, the strongest financial year in the CSU and at San Francisco State. So I trust the independent accountant. And and at any rate, it puts a reasonable skepticism. For anyone watching this situation to be skeptical about management’s claims, about both the impact of enrollment decline and their real financial situation.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, you know, we’ve been talking about a series of one day strikes, but it doesn’t really sound like these issues are going to be resolved any time soon. So are we going to see more of these strikes? Juan Carlos?

Juan Carlos Lara: I think that’s entirely possible, if not likely. These four day strikes were planned as sort of a testing ground so that union officials could start gathering up their support. It’s notable that these strikes weren’t only attended by faculty of those respective campuses. Some faculty kind of went from around the area to the strike nearest them to participate.

Juan Carlos Lara: The union was also sort of motivated by trying to avoid disruptions to students because, of course, we’re in December right now. Students are nearing their finals and the end of the term. So they were hoping that this would kind of push the union to come back to the table with more meaningful proposals. If it doesn’t, which it’s very likely it won’t, They’ll probably plan bigger strikes.

Blanca Misse: And it will not be for one day any more.

Juan Carlos Lara: So for Blanca said that they totally anticipate larger strikes going on for longer and covering more campuses and that in the spring, if there’s no movement at the bargaining.

Blanca Misse: Table so they have a chance to do what they have to do, the CSU, but if they don’t do it, will give them another nudge with more strikes next semester.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What do you think this is all going to mean for students at the end of the day? Not just the strikes, but whatever comes out of these negotiations between faculty and the CSU.

Juan Carlos Lara: One of the lines that the faculty union has pushed a lot in these rallies and in these strikes is that faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. I think it’s fair to say that lower class sizes and better compensated faculty, which would translate to lower turnover, would be beneficial to students. So some of these gains could potentially mean. Students have more one on one time with their professors and they see less turnover in the professors that they have. But in the meantime, it might mean disruptions. The beginning of the spring semester might be marked by prolonged strikes, and obviously they won’t be having classes if that becomes the case.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Juan Carlos, thank you so much for taking the time to break this down. I really appreciate it.

Juan Carlos Lara :Thank you so much for having me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Juan Carlos Lara, a reporter for KQED. This 25 minute conversation with Juan Carlos was cut down and edited by me. Maria Esquinca is our producer. She scored this episode and added all the tape. Our senior editor is Alan Montecillo. Shout out as well to the rest of our podcast team here at KQED.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That’s Jen Chien, our director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger, our podcast operations manager, Cesar Saldana, our podcast engagement producer, and Maha Sanad, our podcast engagement intern, and Holly Kernan, our Chief Content Officer. If you aren’t already, make sure you are subscribed to the Bay so that you never miss a beat. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next week.