CSU Management Bargaining Team Sticks to 4% Raise, Rejects CFA Efforts to Raise the Floor

Our bargaining proposals offer transformation. CSU management’s proposals seek to maintain the status quo.

“We need that 12-percent salary increase and the transformative changes in our contract. We need workload relief; our faculty cannot continue this way,” said Charles Toombs, CFA President and San Diego State professor. “I don’t want us to lose the journey of transformation we are on.”

Management doesn’t get it.

They don’t understand the work CFA members perform to educate, support, and inspire the state’s next generation of leaders. They don’t get the daily struggles and lived realities of faculty or students. They don’t get the need for systemic change if the CSU is to remain a sustainable home for higher learning.

At this week’s bargaining session – attended by 80 members in-person and virtually – the CSU bargaining team rejected our 12-percent salary proposal for the 2023-24 academic year and countered with 4 percent.

When asked what the offer was based on, management said “available resources.”  The number is not based on inflation or cost of living data.

Management also rejected our efforts to raise the floor for the lowest-paid faculty. We will not leave our most precarious faculty behind. Read both sides’ proposals.

“We’re trying to fix a broken salary structure. We have large groups of people clumped at the bottom of Range A and Range B because of hiring decisions made by administrators. They’ve stagnated there. They are paid less than K-12 teachers and with the recent victory at the UC, they’re getting paid less than post-docs even though all have advanced degrees,” CFA Bargaining Chair and Sacramento State Professor Kevin Wehr told the CSU bargaining team.

CSU management won’t budge.

At our most recent bargaining sessions, CSU management rejected our proposals for pay equity for lowest-paid faculty, a full semester of paid parental leave, safe and accessible lactation spaces, safe and accessible gender-inclusive restrooms and changing rooms, and the limiting of police power on campuses.

“They’re going to give us the minimum and then hope our dedication to our students takes them over the line,” said Loren Cannon, CFA Humboldt Faculty Rights Chair and Cal Poly Humboldt lecturer.

During her introductory interviews, Chancellor-Select Mildred Garcia has focused on transforming the CSU. As CSU trustees and management review damning reports of their mishandling of sexual assault complaints, they promise accountability and renewed commitment to health and safety.

The transformation CSU management proposes in bargaining is a deepening pay gap between them and their overworked and precarious workers.

CSU trustees recently doled out excessive pay raises for campus presidents and other executives – some as high as 29 percent – and awarded Chancellor-Select Garcia nearly $1 million in compensation.

Members vowed not to sell out our most precarious faculty or our social justice proposals for a minor pay raise that in reality is a pay cut.

“CSU management is betting on our long-term faculty being as selfish and short-sighted as management is – and they’re wrong.  It’s not going to happen,” said Molly Talcott, CFA Faculty Rights Chair and CSU Los Angeles professor.

Instead, CFA members are joining other unions across the country and California fighting greed, uplifting ourselves, and asserting our rights to dignity and respect.

Join us!

Sign up to attend our next bargaining sessions, and stay up to date on negotiations. Know any new hires or colleagues who aren’t dues-paying members? Ask them to join CFA!