Sonoma State faculty voting on whether to strike
Press-Democrat 3/6/07
Voting is to continue through Thursday at all 23 California State University campuses.
At SSU, faculty members, who are working on a temporarily extended contract, said the vote is a test of resolve.
"We may or may not have to hold a rolling strike," said Birch Moonwomon, an anthropological linguistics lecturer. "This vote is to find out whether faculty are prepared to, and it looks like we are."
A "yes" vote by a majority of the 10,100 members of the California Faculty Association would authorize union leaders to mount protests that could include a two-day strike or sporadic walkouts in April.
Moonwomon said that prior to this week's vote, more than 80 percent of the 266 SSU faculty members who belong to the association pledged to support a strike.
The association represents all 530 SSU faculty members, including librarians, counselors and coaches; those who don't belong to the association could participate if they chose but wouldn't be obligated.
The faculty association wants a contract guaranteeing salary increases of 25.25 percent over four years. The university system, in an announcement released Monday, said it has made a "fair offer" of wage hikes of more than 24 percent over three years.
The faculty association said the offer is written in a way that actually amounts to about 14 percent over four years and would barely cover cost of living increases.
"If it was 24 percent, we would have accepted it a long time ago," said Sue Park, a faculty association regional representative at SSU, on Monday.
Contract negotiations between the association - which represents 22,500 faculty statewide - and the CSU system broke down in September after 18 months when the university declared an impasse and withdrew from the talks.
That triggered the appointment of an independent fact-finding committee, whose report on the negotiations and the issues raised by both sides is due within a week, said Susan Kashack, SSU associate vice president for communications.
"I think it's awfully soon to do this, because we're still in the process of fact-finding," she said of the faculty vote, being held at a polling place table outside her office.