What's at stake?
Some of the union’s demands include a 12% salary increase for the 2023-24 school year, bumping up parental leave for new parents from six weeks to a full semester, and building more gender-inclusive campus restrooms.
More than 100 Fresno State faculty members and dozens of students joined picket lines on a rainy Monday morning as the first day of a planned week-long strike kicked off at California State University campuses across the state.
The parties are bargaining over reopeners on year three of a contract that expires in June. They’re supposed to start negotiations on their next contract this summer.
“Never has the largest university system in the country,” said Fresno State Professor Loretta Kensinger, referring to the 23-campus CSU system, “had all its faculty go out on strike on the same day. You just made it happen.
“I am sorry that we are making history,” she added, “because it ought to tell us how pissed off we are.”
Some of the union’s demands include a 12% salary increase for the 2023-24 school year, hiring more counselors, bumping up parental leave for new parents from six weeks to a full semester, and building more gender-inclusive campus restrooms.
While school-related strikes are frequently criticized for hampering student progress and learning, the Fresno State CFA chapter President John Beynon told Fresnoland on Monday the CSU strike is “just the opposite.”
“Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.”
CSU leadership has pushed back against several of CFA’s demands, saying they can’t afford the proposed salary increases over a single year.
“We would have to make severe cuts to programs,” said CSU Vice Chancellor for Human Resources Leora Freedman during a Jan. 19 virtual news conference. “We would have to lay off employees. This would jeopardize our educational mission and cause hardship to many employees.”
The results of this bargaining cycle could affect the livelihoods of thousands of educators across California for the next several years of bargaining with the CSU system.
Students who joined faculty on the picket line said the strike has implications for them as well.
“The CFA has constantly been fighting alongside the students for the CSU to remain affordable,” said Ingie Kisbye, a junior at Fresno State.
“It’s our turn to fight for them.”
The scene at Fresno State
Chapter leaders said Fresno State had “one of the better turnouts” among the CSU campuses where faculty walked out.
Fresno State’s CFA members rallied around a number of contract priorities Monday – including anything from a salary boost to keep up with inflation to making gender-inclusive restrooms more accessible on campus.
The latter is of special importance to Michael Lee Gardin, a CFA member and member of Fresno State’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department.
“In terms of gender-neutral space,” she said, “I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community. My spouse is. Many of my students are.
“That’s not just a faculty request. That’s for the entire campus community.”
Approximately 40 students also joined faculty on Fresno State’s picket lines Monday, according to Kisbye, who helped coordinate student involvement with the strike.
Some of these current and former students performed music during the rally, including May 2023 graduate Aaléyah Wilson. After singing a live rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” she told Fresnoland she thinks the strike will benefit “future generations” of CSU teachers and students alike.
“It only makes sense to do this now,” she said, “and get this figured out now.”
The CSU’s Teamsters Local 2010 union didn’t end up striking alongside the CFA as originally planned. The bargaining unit, which covers roughly 1,100 skilled trades employees across the entire CSU system, reached a tentative agreement with the CSU over the weekend.
“We’re happy for them,” Beynon said. “We’re not competing.”
What’s happened in bargaining so far?
The CSU is the largest university system in the country, with over 430,000 students and 44,000 employees, including faculty and staff.
The CFA represents 29,000 tenure-track faculty, lecturers, counselors, librarians, and coaching staff in the CSU’s 23-campus system. CFA leadership declined to share membership numbers for the Fresno State campus specifically.
Fresno State estimates there are over 1,700 CFA-represented faculty on their campus, Fresno State spokesperson Lisa Bell said in an email to Fresnoland on Jan. 22.
The union started contract reopeners last summer.
In addition to salary, the union and CSU management revisited other articles of CFA’s three-year contract covering issues like reducing workload and class size, increasing parental leave, adding gender-neutral restrooms, and creating employee protections in interactions with campus police.
The CFA declared an impasse in negotiations with the CSU in August.
After mediation proved unsuccessful, CFA and the CSU participated in fact-finding with a neutral third party. The fact-finder’s report, published in late November, recommended a 7% salary increase for faculty and extending the parental leave period from six to eight weeks, among other suggestions.
The CSU system shared in a December statement that it agreed with most of the fact-finder’s recommendations with some exceptions, including salary. It maintained its proposed 5% salary increase for the 2023-24 school year.
As for the union, following a successful strike authorization vote among CFA members collected in late October and the release of the fact-finder’s report, it conducted a series of single-day strikes at four different CSU campuses – Cal Poly Pomona, San Francisco State, CSU Los Angeles, and Sacramento State – between Dec. 4 and 8.
Later in December, CFA announced plans for another week-long strike across all 23 campuses for Jan. 22 through 26, saying CSU “refused to make any significant movement” on the union’s proposals, even after the previous strike.
After failing to reach an agreement during two January sessions, Fresno State’s CFA chapter vice president Andrew Jones – who attended the sessions via Zoom – said CSU management “announced that there will be no further bargaining.”
“They were looking to shut this down,” he said, “and go ahead and impose an offer on us.”
Later that week, the CSU system notified employees it would be imposing an agreement including a 5% salary increase on employees.
CSU leadership has since stated that they’re waiting for the CFA to make the next move.
How the Fresno State administration has responded to the strike
Like the rest of the CSU, Fresno State refused to close campus during the CFA strike.
Neither classes nor events were canceled across the board.
“They’re gonna try to act like everything’s normal,” Jones of CFA said in an interview Jan. 18, “which is part of the problem.”
Students were encouraged to contact their professors about whether they would cancel class.
“The campus is not hiring substitute teachers, and administrators will not fill in for instructors during the next week,” Bell of Fresno State said.
The university also distributed a survey to students where they could report a canceled class or student service.
In the virtual news conference on Jan. 19, CSU Associate Vice Chancellor of Labor and Employee Relations Christina Checel said the survey responses would be used “to try to gauge the impacts and how our students have been impacted by the strike.”
CSU leaders added that the university system “respects the rights of the faculty union, Teamsters, and their members to engage in strike activity.”
In a statement Monday morning, the CSU affirmed that campuses would remain open though adding that visitors to campus “should expect to see picket lines and may experience traffic delays.”
CSU leaders also said that they were “in communication” with CFA over the weekend but declined to share details.
Beynon of CFA told Fresnoland he wasn’t aware of any additional bargaining sessions being scheduled with the CSU administration as of the start of the strike.
