More than 60 members of the Cal State Employees Association marched in front of the Social Sciences and Public Administration building Wednesday afternoon in protest of administrative powers.
Chapter 315, which represents the university’s grounds laborers, healthcare workers, clerical workers and technical employees, blew whistles and waved signs with messages that read, “CSU keep your hands off my job security,” “Don’t short change the staff” and “Can you hear us now?”
“There’s bargaining negotiations for our contract at the Foundation Building,” Chapter 315 union president Peggy O’Neil-Rosales said. “Our team is here negotiating with the CSU team.”
According to O’Neil-Rosales, the CSU wants to increase parking fees and, if the plan goes through, it will allow the university system to charge any amount it deems necessary.
These increases, O’Neil-Rosales said, will also be passed on to students.
The union president also said the CSU wants to tamper with job security rights.
“We don’t want them touching that at all,” she said. “The new employees coming in will be the ones that will be more affected, but we are very concerned about that.”
With state budget problems, it is anticipated that the CSU will face a $100 million trigger cut. If that happens, there will be an $8 million cut to the university and layoffs are expected, according to O’Neil-Rosales.
“They will want to be able to jump over long-term employees and pick and choose who they want and that’s wrong and we don’t want that to happen,” she said.
Chapter 315 is not only concerned about the issues from an employee perspective, but how it’s impacting the CSU student.
Students are no longer getting the quality education that they need because professors and supporting staff are spread so thinly, she said.
O’Neil-Rosales said that this is also because there are not enough staff members to be trained and serve to help operate and maintain the function of the university.
State-wide VP for Representation, Russel Kilday-Hicks, who also works for IT services at Cal State San Francisco, described the CSU system as a broken compensation and classification system.
“It’s a corporate model,” Kilday-Hicks said. “They gave up on their employees a long time ago.”
The union is trying to address some of the real problems that are built into the system, he said.
“I go up to the board of trustees meetings and I tell them, ‘You are the managers of the decline of a once great system,'” Kilday-Hicks said.
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