CSU Faculty and Staff Reach Tentative Agreement. Here's What it Includes

Updated 4:30 p.m. Tuesday

California State University faculty reached a tentative contract agreement with the university system late Monday, after just one day of a planned five-day strike for higher wages.

The roughly 29,000 professors, librarians, coaches and other workers across the nation’s largest university system who walked off the job Monday returned to work Tuesday morning.

The deal, which still needs to be ratified by the union members, “reflects the solidarity displayed by faculty, staff, and students across all 23 campuses,” the association statement said. “To all the hard-working faculty who have been organizing on the street and on campus, your efforts have earned this victory.”

“It caught everyone by surprise that a deal was made so soon,” said Kevin Pina, a lecturer for the Department of Communication at CSU East Bay and the California Faculty Association East Bay Lecturer Council Representative.

Pina said the deal includes the following:

• A 5% general salary increase for all faculty, retroactive to July 1st, 2023.
• A 5% general salary increase for all faculty on July 1st of this year, contingent on the state not reducing the base funding to the CSU.
• A salary step increase of 2.65% (from 2024 through 2025).
• Increase in paid parental leave from 6 to 10 weeks.

It also increases the minimum wage for the lowest-paid faculty, according to the union statement. CSU Chancellor Mildred García praised the agreement.

“I am extremely pleased and deeply appreciative that we have reached common ground with CFA that will end the strike immediately,” García said in a statement. “The agreement enables the CSU to fairly compensate its valued, world-class faculty while protecting the university system’s long-term financial sustainability.”

Kevin Wehr, a professor of sociology at CSU Sacramento and chair of the bargaining team for the CFA called it “an extraordinary and historic contract, settlement after a historic, system-wide 23-campus strike.”

He also emphasized the importance of raising the salary floor for some of the lowest-paid colleagues. If someone is working full time in the lowest range, they’re paid $55,000 a year, he said. But, most people working in this category are part-time employees. For those people, average pay is around $35,000 a year. “It’s a matter of economic justice. It’s a matter of equity. And it’s also a matter of getting the best faculty for the students of California,” Wehr said. “I’m incredibly proud that we were able to win this victory for our most precarious colleagues.”

Not everyone is content. “I would say that our campus is trending against,” said Brad Erickson, chapter president of the CFA at San Francisco State. Of the 254 people at today’s Zoom meeting, he said more than three-quarters were against it, about 20% were undecided, and just a couple of people were planning to vote yes.

“A raise of less than 10% is effectively a pay cut because of how much we’ve lost relative to rising cost of living,” Erickson said. “It feels like we hadn’t reached our power yet.” He heard from several members that they gave in too easily.

Many CSU faculty also took quickly to X (formerly Twitter) to lambast the deal, arguing it fell woefully short of what the union had been pushing for, and urging members to vote it down.

“5% is a paycut. This is a terrible ‘deal,’” Josh Davis, an SF State journalism professor, said in response to the union’s post announcing the agreement. “CSU faculty deserves stronger leadership.”

For Pina, the CFA East Bay Lecturer Council Representative, it was “more a question of the recognition of the strength that we had, the numbers that we had, and the large number of faculty who respected the strike and did not teach.” After the pandemic “derailed a lot of what we considered normal,” he sees this as “a glimmer of hope.”

“Do I feel as if my union betrayed me? No. Could we have gotten a better deal? Who knows? We didn’t go there,” Pina said.

Pina also added that there are larger structural problems the union can’t solve, “The biggest problem is that the board of trustees that oversee the policymaking for the 23 campus system are political appointees,” he said. “You’ve got people who are business managers running a public institution.”

Monday’s massive walkout came two weeks after CSU officials ended contract negotiations with a unilateral offer starting with a 5% pay raise this year, effective Jan. 31, far below the 12% hike that the union was seeking.

Victoria Wilson, a part-time political science lecturer who picketed in the rain at Cal State Northridge in Los Angeles, said her salary fluctuates from semester to semester, which impedes her long-term financial goals.

“We’re just hoping for a better contract to ensure better pay and also the working conditions here on campus,” Wilson said.

Another 1,100 CSU plumbers, electricians and other skilled trades workers represented by the Teamsters Local 2010 had planned to join the striking faculty but reached their own agreement with the university late Friday.

Some students joined the picket lines on Monday to show their support.

Cal State Long Beach student Gabriela Alvarez said she joined the demonstration outside the university to support her professors and to reject tuition hikes that will start this fall.

“It’s important for our professors to be treated right, we need more student resources here, we’re trying to lower tuition prices,” Alvarez said.

“I’m not going to be able to afford next semester if they go through with the tuition spikes,” she added.

Senior Roxanne Washington is a little worried about catching up with her in-person classes, but like Eng and Alvarez, she supports the teachers’ demand for a 12% wage increase.

“Honestly, I think that it’s good for the professors and themselves,” Washington said. “But for the students, I think that if they were planning on doing the strike, they could have prepared a little bit better, like assigning homework or classwork ahead of time.”

Cal State Chancellor Mildred Garcia said Friday in a video call with journalists that the university system had sought to avoid a strike, but the union’s salary demands were simply not viable.

“We must work within our financial reality,” she said.

In December, CFA members staged one-day walkouts on four campuses in Los Angeles, Pomona, Sacramento and San Francisco to press for higher pay, more manageable workloads and increased parental leave.

The union insisted the university has money in its “flush reserve accounts” and could afford the salary increases with funds from operating cash surpluses.

Whether the university system can go higher has also been a topic of debate. A financial analyst hired by the union to independently assess the university’s finances found that CSU had regular annual surpluses, high levels of reserves and a commitment from the state government to increase annual funding through 2025.

University administrators, however, argue that the analysis was flawed. They say the majority of funds identified by the analyst have to be allocated to specific purposes and cannot be rerouted to salaries.

“We have about $766 million in emergency reserves,” said Leora Freedman, the CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, during a press conference last week. “These emergency reserves could keep our campuses in operation for about 30 days. That is far below the university’s board policy and national best practices on reserves, which is that a university should have enough funds to cover at least three to six months of operations.”

The increase the union is seeking would cost the system $380 million in new recurring spending, which the university can’t afford, Freedman said.

Meanwhile, Cal State Los Angeles student Katerina Navarro said she supports the strike. Monday was the first day of classes in her nursing program, and she was surprised her classes were not canceled.

“Some more money needs to be invested in salaries and educational resources because people in education are severely underpaid for the work they do,” said Navarro, who noted she was underpaid when she worked as a teacher abroad. Both her mother and sister are teachers.

The past year has seen lots of labor activity in the country as health care professionals, Hollywood actors and writers, and auto workers picketed for better pay and working conditions.

In California, new laws have granted workers more paid sick leave as well as increased wages for health care and fast food workers.

In 2022, teaching assistants and graduate student workers in the University of California System went on strike for a month, disrupting classes as the fall semester ended.

KQED’s Sara Hossaini and Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.