Thousands of workers at the California State University system’s 23 campuses are ready to kick off a five-day strike next Monday, Jan. 22 — as tensions between the California Faculty Association and the CSU continue to broil around ongoing labor contract negotiations.

The California Faculty Association announced its intentions to launch the strike, planned for Monday, Jan. 22 to Friday, Jan. 26, after deeming a 5% salary increase proposal from the CSU “not viable,” earlier this month.

Negotiations and the upcoming strike also involve Teamsters Local 2010, a labor union based in Bellflower, that represents more than 17,000 administrative and skilled trades workers in both the CSU and University of California systems, according to its website.

The parties have been in the bargaining process for eight months, according to the CSU, but have run into several impasses throughout the process.

In December, for example, the CFA — representing around 29,000  instructional faculty, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches across the CSU — staged a series of one-day walkouts at campuses throughout the state in an effort to sway bargaining in their favor.

The union’s chief concern, according to its website, is securing 12% pay raises for members across the board to keep up with inflation — along with raising the pay floor for CFA’s lowest-paid members.

But the CFA is also working on nailing down a series of other provisions in their new contract, including securing additional mental health counselors for students, expanding parental leave, and giving faculty more manageable work loads.

The CSU’s offer to increase pay for instructional faculty, librarians, counselors and coaches by 5% effective Jan. 31 is consistent with other contracts the system has already finalized with other unions, the CSU said.

The average annual salary for a senior assistant librarian, for example, is currently $83,120, and the 5% would have bump that to $87,276. And associate professors, who now average $105,226, would see their yearly pay rise to $110,487.

CFA almost immediately rejected that proposal, though, and announced their intention to launch the five-day, campuswide strike the same day it was offered.

“CSU management wants to maintain the status quo, which is not working for the vast majority of our faculty, students, and staff,” CFA vice president and San Jose State lecturer Chris Cox said in the Thursday news release. “In order for us to have a properly functioning system in years to come, we need to improve the working conditions for faculty and learning conditions for students.”

The CFA also argues that the CSU hasn’t been bargaining in good faith — a claim the university system rejects — citing lack of movement on the union’s concerns aside from salary raises.

“CSU management has only addressed our conflict over salary; they have completely ignored the issues of workload, health and safety concerns, and parental leave,” Cox said. “Management wouldn’t even consider our proposals for appropriate class sizes, proper lactation spaces for nursing parents, gender inclusive bathroom spaces, and a clear delineation of our rights when interacting with campus authorities.”

Leaders from the CSU, in a Friday, Jan. 19 press conference, took issue with the union’s claims that they’ve ignored CFA’s requests.

Leora Freedman, the CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, said the system is in agreement with the union’s concerns about parental leave and other issues outlined in an a third-party fact finding report last year.

Those included increasing parental paid leave from six to eight weeks, improving the CSU’s alternative workload reduction program, increasing mental health counselors, creating gender-neutral bathrooms, and more.

“It’s not that we are rejecting or refusing. We want to address them,” Freedman said. “We just can’t address them without resources — we can’t do everything right away, and what we are offering is very reasonable and consistent with the shared values with the union.”

Freedman added the the CSU has already increased its offer for parental leave.

But the main gap between the parties, as expected, is the money.

The CSU, for its part, has repeatedly said that CFA’s 12% salary raise proposal isn’t financially feasible — and isn’t sustainable long-term.

It would cost the CSU about $380 million per year in new spending to fund those raises, they said previously.

That’s an issue for the system, whose Board of Trustees recently OK’d 6% annual CSU tuition hikes over the next five years — the first tuition increase in more than a decade — in an effort to cover its $1.5 billion funding gap. The tuition increases will begin in fall 2024.

Freedman and other CSU leaders, during the Friday press conference, also took issues with claims that the system could afford the CFA’s 12% increase request if they were to dip into their $2.5 billion reserves.

That money, according Freedman said, is essentially untouchable — as all but $766 million of it is set aside for specific and critical campus obligations.

The remaining $766 million, Freedman added, is set aside as emergency reserves intended to keep all 23 CSU campuses operational in the event of an emergency or natural disaster situation.

That money, she added, is one-time funding — once its gone, it’s gone — and it can’t be used to pay for an ongoing cost like salary.

“It sounds like a lot of money, $766 million, but when you look at that amount, it equates to roughly 30 days of our operating budget,” Steve Relyea, the CSU’s CFO said Friday. “And by board policy, our target is three to six months of reserve for that purpose.”

Relyea also added that it would be “reckless, and would put the institution and our students at risk,” to considering funding salary raises with the CSU’s reserves.

“In the end, we’ve got to protect this university for our students,” Relyea said. “We have to ensure that our students are going to be able to come to an institution where they get a quality education at a reasonable cost.”

Instead, the CSU’s most recent proposal included 15% general salary increases, or 5% annually, over the next three years across the board.

Those raises, though, would depend on the fulfilment of a state funding compact, which promised to provide the CSU with a 5% annual boost to its annual budget — amounting to a $227.3 million increase for this fiscal year.

But bargaining is stopped for now — at least through the next week as the CFA embarks on its five-day strike. It will have to resume in the coming months before the contract expires this summer.

“We’ve successfully reached agreements with five unions in the past few months and we look forward to doing the same with the faculty union and Teamsters,” Freedman said. “We are ready to return to the table and remain hopeful that the union’s share our goal of reaching labor peace.”

CFA is set to begin strikes at all 23 campuses on Monday, Jan. 22, in the early morning.

The CSU said that all campuses will be open and operational throughout the duration of the strike, and that students will be notified if their classes are cancelled.

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