No Progress Made on Ground Rules During Last Bargaining Session

CFA members met again in Sacramento to continue trying to bargain with CSU management. However, they yet again refused to actually meet with us.

Because of our members’ presence over Zoom, management refused to enter the room with the bargaining team. This is no different from the tactics used when we bargained just a little more than a year ago, with CFA members being present and observing bargaining. Management instead chose to share their counter proposal by email even though we were in the same building.

We would like to get to bargaining over issues impacting faculty and so the bargaining team worked to provide a counter proposal that maintains our commitment to racial and social justice, transparency, and inclusion.

Michelle Ramos Pellicia, CFA San Marcos President and CFA Associate Vice President, South, reflected the sentiments of the bargaining team. “For management to come to us without anything but intransigence on ground rules, preferring to discuss over email, not even coming to meet with us in the same room is disrespectful and dismissive of the work each one of our bargaining team members have committed to do.”

CSU management is both embracing and exploiting the anti-union national agenda, as well as capitulating to it. We know that management’s bargaining team is taking direction from Chancellor Mildred García. She is using this moment to do one thing: continue to wage a war on workers—one started on campuses across the state under the guise of austerity and consolidation. She is not being subtle about this either. Management does not want to bargain over improved working conditions for faculty. They do not want us to bargain on salary, or workload, or academic freedom, or artificial intelligence, or the many issues impacting us on our campuses. Instead, they are digging their heels in over CFA members simply being able to watch bargaining over Zoom and have access to the process.

Management has suggested that CFA’s interest in open bargaining is a unilateral change and that we are bound by past practice. We do not have an established past practice. Our most recent bargaining was open to CFA members who wanted to attend. At our maximum, we had 150 people attending bargaining. Going further back in our bargaining history modalities have been wide ranging, with Zoom bargaining during the COVID pandemic and past occasions of in-person bargaining on campuses with invitations extended to faculty of the “hosting” campuses.

CSU management’s refusal to meet in person to discuss ground rules and other proposals is meant to break the spirit of faculty who are already dispirited with austerity claims, layoffs in the CSU, and national policies that are intended to destroy public education. With everything going on right now, it’s sad to see this lack of leadership from the CSU administration.

Our time was not wasted though. We will continue to work on articles that we plan to propose when management wants to begin bargaining in good faith. We plan to seek a mediator to facilitate resolution on ground rules so we can actually get to this work.