Amid public education cuts across the board in California, the University of California has found space in its budget to raise faculty wages by 3 percent this year.
But 22-month-long negotiations between the California State University and the California Faculty Association ended Sunday, when the association and the CSU could not agree upon faculty pay increases and benefits.
The California Faculty Association, the CSU faculty union which represents 23,000 CSU faculty across all CSU campuses, voted to strike next fall if contract negotiations did not go its way.
The proposal the union rejected included minor changes in the rights and privileges of the faculty, and kept salaries at their current level with possible increases depending on the CSU budget in 2013-2014.
While the CSU faculty union deserves to have a new contract, supporters of the union might feel differently if they understood that some of the numbers and statistics the union have been using to describe the CSU budget were misleading.
CSU Public Affairs spokesman Erik Fallis said that some of the fund increases in CSU operating accounts were not increases in the CSU budget, as the union had claimed.
Fallis added that an additional $40 million fund from state bond payments added to the CSU operating accounts was not actually an increase to the CSU budget, but rather a fund that was the result of a common practice where the state government temporarily places funds into CSU operating accounts.
Even though the CSU could not use these funds to support members of its faculty, the CSU union still reported the new cash as a budget increase to its members, Fallis added.
By misconstruing some budgetary facts, the CSU faculty union falsely suggested that the CSU was hiding money from the faculty, even though that was not the case.
Regardless of these inconsistencies, the CSU faculty union still deserves pay raises and increased benefits. Because of inflation, CSU faculty members are effectively making less money than when their contracts were originally negotiated in 2007.
The CSU faculty has been negotiating for 22 months, but it has not made significant progress in the proposals surrounding pay increases and benefits, said Charles Toombs, union president at San Diego State University.
The CSU faculty is asking for 1 percent salary increases per year, after salaries have remained constant for the last few years, Toombs added.
Fallis said that if the CSU faculty union was to meet the proposals by the CSU, the money for salary increases and benefits would come out of financial aid programs or possibly tuition increases.
Even though there may not be space in the current budget to increase faculty salaries, appeasing a modest 1 percent salary increase in part, if not fully, by the CSU would help relations between the CSU and the faculty union.
Although a greater emphasis will be placed on reducing the impacts of the $750 million CSU budget cut this year than on faculty requests for pay increases, a guaranteed pay increase in the future could be a provision that the faculty union agrees to.
Although a salary increase of 1 percent is estimated to cost $214.3 million, the CSU should attempt to reorganize funds, if possible, to raise the salaries by a small amount, instead of opting to leave them at the current levels.
Still, the union should realize that it is going to be very difficult to convince the CSU to provide salary increases and benefits at this moment, considering that the CSU is trying to avoid placing further tuition increases on students.
State funds to the UC have been cut as well, but the UC has created space in its budget to increase faculty salaries. Yet this is attributed not to negotiations with unions, but rather to competition with other schools for better faculty. If the CSU does not find a way to increase salaries, it is very likely that the CSU will lose some of its accomplished faculty to other schools.
Ultimately, losing a few days of classes is inconsequential to students, but the instability and media attention generated by 23,000 faculty members on strike across 23 CSU campuses where over 400,000 students are enrolled may cause a delay in the beginning of the next academic year.
If the situation is not resolved soon, severe damage to relations between the faculty and the CSU may occur in the long run.
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