A few months ago I wrote about my union, the California Faculty Association, and it’s fight to secure the faculty of the California State University system an across the board 5% general increase. The CSU system had stuck by their guns, offering us only a 2% increase.
We won.
We won by a lot.
Reality and facts saved the day.
The CFA represents about 26,000 faculty members across 23 campuses. The average pay, right now, for instructors is about $45,000 a year, but that is offset by long term, tenured professors, and a lot of part-timers who earn roughly a $24,000 to $33,000 a year, depending on course load. Add to that the fact that most salaries are based on less than 1.0 FTE, or full-time-equivalent, and you have a system rife with inequity.
Finally, some of those inequities are being addressed. Some history:
in 2006, when I was still a grad student, the CFA bargained for and got a 10% general increase. 2006 was a flush year for California, and Governor Schwarzenegger was pretty profligate with the state spending. Then 2008 happened, and California was hit really, really hard by the recession. The CSU took back the 10% increase, froze hiring, froze all raises for faculty and staff (but not administrators), and furloughed everyone to the tune of a 10% decrease in pay. By the time I arrived in 2010, the worst of these austerity measures had been lifted, but we were still fighting for the old contract.
In 2014, we received our first increase: an across the board 1.6% raise. This amounted to about $25 a month after taxes. But we also bargained for a revisiting of pay sooner rather than later. That day came, and we ended up in the 5% vs 2% fight.
A couple of things have changed the outcome.
An independent fact finder was hired to investigate the matter. That fact finder discovered that not only could the CSU afford to pay the 5% increase, but that in the last ten years faculty pay, when adjusted for inflation, had gone down by a whopping 7%, meaning a 5% increase would not even begin to put us on par with our earnings ten years ago. Also discovered was that 60% of faculty could not afford to live in the communities in which they taught.
We spent last week gearing up for the strike: informing students about possible canceled classes, holding meetings to discuss picket locations, reassuring each other that we were in the right, that sor of thing. Then on Wednesday we got word that all organization for the strike was on hold, a media blackout was in effect, and that talks had intensified. The talks had intensified to the point that Chancellor Timothy White, who had famously told faculty that they should “live within your means” took his first active role in the negotiations.
We waited with bated breath as the strike was held in limbo, uncertain if this current week would contain classes or clashes. Apparently this was to be the largest faculty strike in the history of our nation. On Friday morning we got word that a tentative agreement had been reached. We got well beyond our 5%.
This summer we will get our 5% raise on June 30th, followed by an immediate 2% raise on July 1st, bringing us back on par with our 2006 payscale. I attribute the weird split as a vagary of fiscal year calculations and budget considerations. 5% is tacked on to this current fiscal year, and the 2% comes out of next year’s budget. In July of 2017, we will get an additional 3.5%, bringing us to a 10.5% increase over the next two years. Also, for those of us on the bottom of our current pay-range, and additional 2.65% is in the offing. So some of us are looking at a 13.15% increase by the end of the 2017/2018 fiscal year.
Other considerations will include a change in contract negotiations so that they occur before the budget is set. That way, it is no longer a question of trying to squeeze money out of the budget for faculty remuneration, but becomes an integral part of the budget creation. That, above all else, feels like a solid victory. No longer will be be an afterthought. Our needs, which directly benefit the students, are now part of the equation, and not a remainder.
I had planned on documenting the strike with diaries, pictures, and videos. Instead I’m going to celebrate by going to class and teaching.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled primary fight.