If you feel you are not getting what you deserve, what do you do? Should you sit around and wait for it to come to you or do you just let it go and hope some day people realize that you deserve it? For the California Faculty Association (CFA), it did neither. The CFA did what it had to do and followed legal actions to authorize a strike.
After two years of negotiating, the CFA and CSU still could not make amends and work things out. At the press conference last Wednesday, CFA executives said they wanted the chancellor to see that 94 percent voted in favor of a strike and that he should realize the CFA means business.
Ninety-four percent, with an 81 percent voter turnout, we believe speaks for itself. The demand is there. The battle is on.
Our teachers are no longer going to accept the meager wages they receive as compensation for the amount of work they do and are united in their fight for better pay. Eighty-one percent of the members from a union more than 11,000 members strong is quite a bit of people. According to the CFA Web site, 1,300 new professors were inspired to join the union based on the “bargaining crisis.”
However, before the press conference at Cal State Dominguez Hills last week, the chancellor released a responsive statement that said, “When the fact-finding report is made public, it will be clear that the university administration has gone to great lengths to come to a settlement with the faculty union and avoid the alternative, which would be imposition.”
If this were true, why has the ordeal gone on for this long? Have CSU administrators just realized that the CFA demands better pay to teach students?
After the conference, Lydia Sondhi, CFA president of the Long Beach chapter, said that it is disappointing to see people turn down faculty positions because of insufficient salaries. This, too, speaks for itself regarding this monumental problem.
Students may not want to care, but if we don’t have a dedicated faculty who can provide a good education, we will not be getting the quality education that we pay for and deserve. Knowing that otherwise qualified candidates are turning down positions at The Beach and other CSUs because of money is disheartening.
Educate yourself, stay informed, talk to your professors and, most certainly, keep up with the new developments. These strikes, no matter how much the union tries to minimize student impact, will affect all of us.
We urge students to follow the development of the CFA and CSU negotiations. The strikes, if implemented, will mark the largest mass strike in the history of higher education in the United States, and that’s a big deal.
