California State U. Faculty Union Agrees to Continue Negotiations in Effort to Avoid Strike
Chronicle of Higher Education 3/26/07
Faculty members and administrators agreed to base their negotiations on a 37-page report released on Sunday by an independent fact finder. The report's author, Sylvia Skratek, a former Washington State senator, recommended that the university system raise faculty salaries by almost 25 percent by 2010, among other recommendations. That increase would close the double-digit gap between the salaries of California State's 23,000 faculty members and those of instructors at comparable universities, according to the report.
John Travis, president of the California Faculty Association and a political-science professor at Humboldt State University, said he was encouraged by Sunday's agreement. "It's an opportunity to work within the framework of the fact-finding report to find a settlement," he said.
Cal State officials said they would not discuss details of those negotiations until a deal was completed.
"I'm optimistic that a settlement can be reached," said Charles B. Reed, California State's chancellor. "We have a framework to work with ... and everybody has good intentions to seek a settlement."
The faculty's union agreed that it would not hold any strike activities on any of the system's 23 campuses while the negotiations continued.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Travis said during a teleconference with reporters that faculty members were prepared to go ahead with their plans for a strike if the trustees did not follow through with the recommendations of the fact-finder's report.
"We have the interests of our students at the very top of our lists," he said. "We do not want to hurt them, but if we can't get the Board of Trustees and chancellor to realize how important this is ... we're going to do what it takes."
The most-recent collective-bargaining agreement at California State expired in 2005, and subsequent talks between administrators and the faculty union stalled.
One California State official issued a five-page response to the fact-finder's report on Sunday. In the document, Jackie R. McClain, the system's vice chancellor for human resources, wrote that "while there are still some significant issues on which there is no agreement, including salary proposals on which we still remain well apart, ... we should be careful not to lose sight of the significant progress that we have been able to make in bargaining."