California State University faculty walked off the job Monday, effectively ending classes for more than 450,000 students. By the end of the day, their union had agreed to terms with the university’s management after months of fruitless bargaining.
By Tuesday morning, faculty had started doing a lot of math.
The California Faculty Association represents 29,000 professors, lecturers, coaches, librarians, and counselors. They've been negotiating with the university system for months, looking for better pay, working conditions, family leave, and safety provisions.
The California Faculty Association is a union that represents 29,000 coaches, counselors, lecturers, librarians, and professors. They've been negotiating with California State University since last spring, and have staged a series of strikes.
Monday night's agreement meant classes started to resume immediately.
"With the agreement in place, I look forward to advancing our student-centered work — together — as the nation's greatest driver of social mobility and the pipeline fueling California's diverse and educated workforce," said CSU Chancellor Mildred García in a statement.
Update: After this story was published, the California Faculty Association released full terms of the deal.
The fine print is still being worked out, but CFA issued a news release late Monday night noting the following terms:
Salary: CFA had sought a 12% raise for its members. The university's leaders had maintained that meeting CFA's demands would be financially unsustainable, and countered with a series of 5% raises, only one of them guaranteed, and the others contingent on future state funding.
The final deal offers a 5% general salary increase for all faculty retroactive to July 1, 2023. Faculty would get an additional 5% general salary increase on July 1, 2024, contingent on the state not reducing base funding to the CSU.
Lower-paid faculty will see a "service salary increase" of 2.65% for 2024-25. CFA expects that about 30-35% of members will benefit. They'll also receive an additional $3,000 raises retroactive to last July. The lowest-paid faculty will receive another such raise this July.
Working conditions: Faculty have said that they're often not compensated for "extra" work, like mentoring and counseling.
"We attend events with [students], organize events for them, write grants for those events, and teach them networking at those events," Griselda Suarez, a lecturer at Cal State Long Beach, told LAist.
The deal would provide "support for lecturer engagement in service work," but the announcement didn't offer further details.
Family leave: A four-week increase in paid parental leave, for a total of 10 weeks.
Safety: The deal will allow for a union rep in police interactions with faculty. It will also "(improve) access" to gender-inclusive restrooms and lactation spaces, and create a pathway to monitor issues around access.
“The collective action of so many lecturers, professors, counselors, librarians, and coaches over these last eight months forced CSU management to take our demands seriously," CFA President Charles Toombs said. "This Tentative Agreement makes major gains for all faculty at the CSU."
Julia Barajas contributed reporting to this story.
