Teachers at California State Vote to Authorize a Walkout
New York Times 3/22/07
An arbitrator will continue working with administration officials and the California Faculty Association, the union representing some 24,000 Cal State instructors and professors, to end the deadlock, which centers on salaries. But if meetings over a 10-day “quiet period” now break down, a strike could begin as early as next month, said the union’s president, John Travis.
The faculty walkout would be the largest in the history of American higher education, although the union says it would be a rolling strike — that is, it would begin on one of the system’s 23 campuses and last there for two days, then move on to another campus for two days, and so on. In this way, union officials say, disruption to the schedules of students, particularly graduating seniors, would be kept to a minimum.
Without elaborating, Cal State administrators said they would have contingency plans to deal with any walkout.
“This is just what unions do,” said Clara Potes-Fellow, a university spokeswoman. “There will be interruptions, of course, but that doesn’t mean that the university will be shut down.”
The union said 94 percent of more than 8,000 members who had voted on a strike favored authorizing it.
At the university’s Dominguez Hills campus, in Carson, Mr. Travis was cheered by dozens of his members, who wore black T-shirts bearing the inscription “I don’t want to strike, but I will.”
“We are a faculty that’s fed up,” he told them, “and we are a faculty that’s ready to walk off the job.”
Many low- and middle-income students from around the state, about a third of them the first in their families to attend college, rely on the Cal State system for an education. But faculty salaries there lag far behind those at other universities, ranging from an average of $71,000 for full-time tenured professors to $43,000 for the very few instructors who work full time.
Moody’s Investors Service reported this week that Cal State had cash reserves of $1.2 billion, which union officials say gives the university the financial flexibility to resolve the dispute. Administrators say that this money has been allocated to other purposes and cannot be used for teacher pay.
Engaged in stalemate, each side points to an abundance of figures that differ from the other’s. The union says salaries are 18 percent below those at comparable institutions. The administration acknowledges a gap, but says that it is only 14 percent and that the university is committed to bringing salaries in line with those at other universities within five years.
Ms. Potes-Fellow, the Cal State spokeswoman, said that the university had offered a 25 percent raise over four years and that the union had rejected it; the union says the offer was only 14 percent.
Ms. Potes-Fellow also pointed to the administration’s offer to pay 100 percent of increases in health care premiums during the four-year length of the contract. Over time, administrators say, that could cost as much as $145 million a year.