The prospect of a Cal State Long Beach faculty strike is looking more and more likely after the release of the fact finder’s report on Thursday, which sided with the California Faculty Association’s demand for a 5 percent salary increase.
Both the California State University and the CFA seemed to declare victory in separate statements released after a mandatory 10-day period of silence that ended with the release of the report.
The CSU’s statement focused on whether or not the schools could afford more than the 2 percent raise that the CSU budgeted at the beginning of the school year. The CSU statement said that the salary demands of the CFA could only be met by diverting funds from other projects, something the CFA said the fact finder agreed with.
“Freshmen and transfer students have enrolled. New faculty, advisors and academic support staff have been hired. Desperately needed renovation and maintenance projects are already in process,” CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White said in the statement. “Any attempt to pull back from these commitments would cause significant harm to students, faculty, staff and California. And as a fiscally responsible public entity, the CSU cannot commit to spend money it does not have.”
The CFA countered the assertion that the fact finder agreed with the CSU’s logic, arguing that the fact finder “found no legitimate evidence that the CSU could not afford the raises.”
“This is not just about faculty pay; it’s more than that,” said Antonio Gallo, the chair of the CFA bargaining committee. “We teach in ‘The People’s University’— with the largest number of students of color in the country. We confer more than half of all undergraduate degrees to the state’s Latino, African-American and Native-American students. It’s about an investment in the classroom.”
Fact finding was the last official step in the CFA-CSU negotiation process. Both parties submitted documents and witnesses to the independent fact finder, Bonnie Castrey, who looked over the information provided and made a recommendation to both.
Castrey, a 1972 CSULB alumna, sided with the CFA in her final report, recommending that the CSU provide a 5 percent general salary increase as well as service salary increases to roughly 43 percent of the faculty.
“ … The faculty are still suffering from structural salary issues as well as the lack of substantial general salary increases in percentages in order to address the lack of progress in salary adjustments for all faculty,” Castrey said in the report.
Among trends discovered in the report, Castrey found that longer serving employees are more likely to be behind the market in salary than newer employees; additionally, employees at larger campuses are further behind than those at smaller campuses.
Castrey also recommended that money should be reallocated from other projects to cover the cost of a faculty raise, and that both sides should develop a joint strategy to lobby the governor for an increase in the CSU budget.
Both sides will have until April 13 to come to an agreement to avoid the planned strike by CFA members. The CFA has scheduled a strike from April 13-15 and 18-19.
