Union leaders authorize strike vote
Channel Islands faculty say walkout is last resort
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

California State University faculty members will vote this month whether to take to the picket lines to protest salary negotiations that have languished at the bargaining table for nearly two years.

John Travis, president of the California Faculty Association, which represents 24,000 faculty members at 23 campuses, made the announcement during a media conference call last week.

Travis, a professor at Humboldt State University, said the union's board of directors voted unanimously to authorize members at all of the campuses to vote on whether to begin rolling walkouts.

For a strike to be called, the union needs a 50-percent-plus-one vote. Some union chapters will vote March 5 through 8; the remaining campuses March 12 through 15.

John Yudelson, a lecturer at California State University at Channel Islands and the local union chapter's vice president for lecturers, said faculty at the Camarillo campus will probably vote between March 5 and 8. Lecturers make up more than half of the union's membership.

If the walkout occurs, Travis said, it would be the largest strike of college faculty members in U.S. history and a first for the CSU system.

A neutral arbitrator is working with union representatives and CSU administrators in an attempt to reach a compromise. A decision is expected later this month.

Clara Potes-Fellow, a CSU spokeswoman, called the union's decision to move forward with a potential strike "premature." She said the union should wait to see the arbitrator's decision. Travis said that if the union doesn't accept the outcome, members have 10 days before they can strike.

"We have said all along that we do not want to strike, but we will if that is what is necessary, and more than ever it is beginning to look like it is," Travis said.

Travis said rolling walkouts would affect the university's administration but would probably lessen the impact that a full strike would have on students.

Union officials said that if rolling walkouts fail to push CSU administrators to accept the faculty's terms, it's possible the officials would agree to a full strike. Travis said the university system, the largest in the nation, would be unable to replace the faculty members.

"We are a faculty of 24,000," Travis said. "That's a lot of faculty, and even though more than half of us are lecturers, it would be incredibly difficult to staff an institution our size."

Yudelson said faculty members were frustrated that CSU's top administrators continue to accept pay raises while professors' salaries - in the low $70,000s - remain below the national average. CSU administrators argue that their own pay also falls below the national level.

"If there's money to grant executives increases, there should be consideration for the various issues that faculty go through, and we just don't feel that CSU's compensation proposal has addressed those issues," Yudelson said.

He added that tuition costs continue to rise and class sizes are also climbing.

"You cannot keep increasing class sizes and expect quality to increase," he said. "After all, student learning conditions are the faculty's working conditions."

CSU officials released a written statement saying they had offered an "excellent compensation" package but the union had rejected the offer.

According to CSU officials, the offer "includes a 24.5 percent salary increase to be paid over the next three years," and that "the actual value of the CSU offer will be a 27 percent increase in salary during the next three years once the annual increases in the CSU offer are compounded."

Of the 230 faculty members at CSUCI, about 100 are paying members of the faculty union. Yudelson said that number is growing.