After two years of tense negotiations and talks of a 23-campus rolling strike, the Cal State University and the California Faculty Association finally came to a tentative agreement on a successor contract Friday.
CFA and CSU officials announced the settlement Tuesday, along with the parameters of the new tentative contract.
Under the new agreement, CSU faculty will not receive salary increases for 2010-11 and 2011-12. However, the agreement includes opportunities to reopen salary and benefit talks for 2012-13 and 2013-14, meaning either CFA or the CSU may later choose to negotiate these increases again.
The two groups also made changes to the evaluation and appointment process for three-year temporary faculty, according to CSU Spokesman Erik Fallis.
“We believe that this contract reflects the tough budget times that we’re in and the things the CSU was concerned about when it came to providing a quality education for our students,” Fallis said.
Under the new agreement, lecturers who have taught for six consecutive years and received positive or satisfactory evaluations may now receive three-year instead of one-year appointments, which better secures faculty positions, according to CFA Communications Director Alice Sunshine.
Before the agreement, eligible lecturers were issued three-year appointments even with unsatisfactory ratings, Fallis said.
Highlights of the agreement include a new systemwide online evaluation process – which students will be able to use for evaluating professors – and a joint union-administration committee that will track and study the impacts of changes in workload on all faculty, according to the CFA website.
The tentative contract also provides the return of the Equity Pay Program, which can raise the lower pay of long-time faculty to the same level of that of newly hired faculty.
“This agreement allows the campus-based program [Equity Pay Program] to deal with that,” Fallis said. “It’s a discretionary item that would have to be authorized by the campus president.”
According to the CFA website, the faculty union “scored an important victory for quality education” by fighting against changes to Extended Education during negotiations.
At the bargaining table, there were proposals to reduce the pay of faculty members who teach in Extended Education, Sunshine said. However, CFA fought those plans, so they were abandoned.
“We think this is a fair agreement,” Cal State Long Beach CFA President Teri Yamada said. “Although the gains were modest, they are still gains nonetheless.”
However, Sunshine said this tentative successor contract is very similar to the union’s previous contract with the CSU.
Throughout negotiations, pay raises, faculty evaluation and Extended Education were all points of impasse for the CSU and CFA.
In November, CFA members held a strike at Cal State Dominguez Hills and Cal State East Bay for lost pay raises from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years, attempting to shut down both campuses.
In May, CFA members authorized a rolling faculty strike on the 23 CSU campuses, which would have shut down classrooms for two days on each campus, had CSU and CFA’s negotiations failed.
When mediation efforts between the two groups broke down in April, CFA and CSU moved into the final step of contract negotiations, fact-finding.
As part of this step, CFA and CSU each presented their proposals for the contract to a three-part panel, including one person representing the CSU, one representing CFA and one playing a neutral role. The two groups came to an agreement during this step.
“If you can narrow down your issue, you can narrow down your disagreement,” Fallis said.
The tentative agreement requires ratification by CFA members and the CSU Board of Trustees. CFA members will vote on the contract Aug. 13 through 30, while the Board will discuss the tentative agreement at its September meeting.
Should the agreement be ratified, CFA’s 23-campus rolling strike will not happen.
“I’m extremely pleased at the agreement we reached, compared to the original negotiations [we made] two years ago,” Yamada said.
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The article “CSU and CFA reach agreement, negotiations end” from August 2, 2012, claims, in a statement attributed to CSU spokesman Erik Fallis, that prior to the new tentative agreement “lecturers were issued three-year appointments even with unsatisfactory ratings. ” This is the opposite of what is required in the current contract, which states that three-year appointments are issued EXCEPT in cases of documented unsatisfactory performance. You can see the current contract, which is in effect until the new agreement is ratified, at http://www.calfac.org Please correct this serious error.