SAN FRANCISCO– More than 30,000 professors, librarians, plumbers, electricians and other workers at California State University, the largest public university system in the U.S., walked off their jobs Monday in a weeklong strike to demand higher wages.
The strike at Cal State’s 23 campuses comes two weeks after CSU officials ended contract negotiations with a unilateral offer of a 5% pay increase effective Jan. 31, far below the 12% the union is seeking.
With the new semester starting Monday, classes could be canceled for many of the system’s 450,000 students unless faculty individually decide to cross the picket lines.
The California Faculty Association represents approximately 29,000 employees. They will be joined on the picket lines by 1,100 professionals from CSU, represented by the Teamsters Local 2010, which also has not yet signed a new contract with the university.
Cal State Chancellor Mildred Garcia said in a video call with reporters Friday that the university system has tried to avoid a strike, but the union’s salary demands are simply not feasible.
“We have to work within our financial reality,” she said.
In December, CFA members organized one-day walkouts on four campuses in Los Angeles, Pomona, Sacramento and San Francisco to push for higher wages, more manageable workloads and more parental leave.
The union says the university has money in its flush reserve accounts and could pay for the salary increases with money from operating cash surpluses and the $766 million CSU has in contingency reserves.
Leora Freedman, CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, said Friday that these reserve funds cannot be used for pay increases because they are intended for times of economic uncertainty or emergencies, including wildfires or earthquakes.
“We have made several relocation offers, most recently a 15% increase that would be paid over three years, which would give faculty a 5% increase each year. But the faculty union never dropped its 12% demand for just one year,” she said.
The increase the union is seeking would cost the system $380 million in new recurring expenses, which the university cannot afford, Freedman said.
The past year has seen a surge of labor activity in the country, as health care professionals, Hollywood actors and writers, and auto workers stood up for better wages and working conditions.
In California, new laws have given workers more paid sick leave, as well as higher wages for health care workers and fast food chains.
In 2022, teaching assistants and graduate student workers at the University of California System went on a month-long strike, disrupting classes as the fall semester came to a close.