Yesterday the California Faculty Association revealed its decision to strike should the next step of its contract negotiations with the Cal State University fail.
“Now is the time for the voice of the faculty to be heard,” CFA President Lilian Taiz said. “The faculty of the California State University have had enough.”
At a press conference in the Barrett Athletic Administration Center, Taiz announced the voting results by checking off “yes” on an enlarged voting ballot for authorizing the strike.
CFA held a two-week voting period for its members online and at all CSU campuses. Taiz said out of CFA’s 12,501 members, 70 percent participated in the vote, and 95 percent of that voted for a strike.
“We were really quite excited and quite astonished,” Taiz said.
CFA has been in contract negotiations with CSU for the past 22 months, which resulted in faculty strikes in November that shut down campuses at Cal State Dominguez Hills and Cal State East Bay.
Taiz said a strike this fall would look much the same.
“It really does give you a clear picture of what every campus will look like,” Taiz said. “They looked like ghost towns.”
Chair of CFA’s bargaining committee Andy Merrifield said some issues CFA and CSU have yet to agree on include workload, academic freedom, intellectual property, compensation and the appointment process of faculty.
Merrifield also said that CFA and CSU will return to the bargaining table today, because the CSU contacted CFA the day the strike vote began.
For this reason, the CSU disagrees with CFA’s decision to authorize a strike.
“Frankly, it’s a little irrelevant,” CSU spokesman Erik Fallis said. “It’s kind of a sideshow to what’s really going on.”
Fallis said that if CFA and CSU come to an agreement at the bargaining table today, negotiations would not need to move on to fact-finding, the final step of the negotiating process.
However, if fact-finding fails, the CSU would have the right to implement whatever terms and conditions it chooses to, and only then would CFA have the right to strike.
Fallis said the meeting today and fact-finding provide a lot of opportunity for the two sides to come together, so authorizing a strike is “irrelevant to where the process is.”
“It’s just really out there to even talk about the strike,” Fallis said.
Despite the past 22 months of negotiations, both groups still hope to reach an agreement before this happens.
“Our hope has always been that we will solve it at the table…and the talk of the strike goes away,” Merrifield said.
Should contract negotiations continue to fail, CFA’s strike would “roll” through all 23 CSU campuses, moving from campus to campus on different days according to Merrifield.
The strike could affect the beginning of school this fall.
“We are very mindful of the effect on students,” Taiz said, “but … we do believe that this is something that students will understand that sometimes folks have to stand up for things they believe in.”