Faculty Union To Vote On New Contract
Long Beach Gazette 4/26/07
“The bargaining team on both sides É they have been working very, very extensively,” said Lydia Sondhi, president of CFA’s Long Beach chapter.
For the last three weeks, CFA and CSU bargaining teams have been focusing on working out the contract language, rather than making any changes to the tentative deal, Sondhi explained. She added that the CFA expects to finish hammering that out this week.
“On all of the issues, there’s agreement,” she said. “The question is just writing it.”
Anticipating that the contract will be complete, CFA has scheduled its ratification vote for May 1-3. CFA members at all 23 CSU campuses statewide will participate in the vote (in similar fashion to the strike-authorization vote in March). Faculty members at CSU, Long Beach, will vote from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday in the plaza lobby of the Student Union. Results will be announced May 7.
Sondhi said the CFA is strongly encouraging its members to vote in favor of the new contract.
“We have come very, very far from where we started,” she said of the negotiating process.
For example, in past years CSU administrators have refused to discuss the issue of making the university’s maternity/paternity-leave policy more flexible, Sondhi said. However, both sides finally agreed on policy changes for the new contract. The maternity/paternity leave with pay would now be 75 days (up from 60) and can begin either before or after the birth of a child. Improved policies such as this help younger faculty start families, Sondhi added.
The tentative agreement reached on April 3 also outlined changes in salary increases — the most contentious issue between CSU and CFA. Under the new deal, all CSU faculty are guaranteed base salary increases of 20.7% over four years (retroactive to July 2006) and step salary increases of up to 2.65% each year.
In addition, the deal assigns $28 million to fund two new merit-based programs that will provide raises for senior and junior faculty. Faculty would get an extra 1% raise for each of the last three years of the contract (contingent on additional state budget allocations for the CSU system).
This would raise the average base salary of a tenured or probationary CSU faculty member from roughly $74,000 to $90,749, and of a full professor from roughly $86,000 to $105,465 by the end of the contract period, according to CSU officials.
Along with the announcement that a tentative agreement had been reached April 3, the CFA Board of Directors voted to postpone the two-day, rolling walkouts across all 23 campuses — which it had authorized in March and scheduled for April 9-13 — until contract language was finalized.
If the CFA ratifies it, the tentative agreement will head to the CSU Board of Trustees for approval at its May 15-16 meeting.