Short and bitter? 

Did you notice the California Faculty Association (CFA) held a strike against the California State University (CSU) management on Jan. 22? Unless you had business at Cal Poly between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Monday while traffic in and out of campus was slowed by picketing, probably not.

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It was the shortest strike ever! After the planned five-day strike ended on its first day, faculty members received a 10 p.m. email from the CFA titled "Strike a Success!!! Pushed CSU Management to Settle." The email read, "Dear Colleagues, Congratulations! With your efforts, we have won a Tentative Agreement with CSU management."

Wow! Look at that! Collective action works! After only a day of withholding labor, the CFA got what it demanded. Amazing, right? Yeah, right. Too amazing to be true, in fact.

Among other things like reduced workload, the CFA had demanded a 12 percent raise to keep up with inflation and the cost of living, but during negotiations, the CSU said, "Nope, how about 5?" CSU added that, contingent on budget, they'll raise it 5 percent more the next year and 5 more the year after that. Fifteen percent over three years sounds OK, but considering California's $68 billion deficit projected for 2024 and 2025, that was a hollow promise ... contingent on budget? Get serious. Most faculty know they'll never see it.

After reaching an impasse in negotiations, CFA planned its five-day strike from Jan. 22 to 26, and in a final slap in faculty faces, the CSU "magnanimously" said that despite the lack of an agreement, "We have taken action to provide all bargaining unit employees represented by CFA (faculty, coaches, counselors, and librarians) with well-deserved raises in the form of a general salary increase of 5 percent, effective Jan. 31, 2024 ... allowing for modest increases to parking fees."

Oh wow, you're going to give faculty 5 percent starting in February after you'd offered it retroactive to last July, and you're going to raise the cost of their parking permits to park where they work? So. Damn. Generous. As the strike approached, the faculty were fired up and ready to march their little red-shirt-clad teachers' bods through the week even though they knew CSU would dock their pay. The injustice had to stop!

So, what exactly did CFA win after ending the five-day strike after one day? Drumroll, please! A 5 percent pay increase. No wonder so many faculty members are steaming mad. Why strike at all? Why disrupt student learning? As for the students, many planned for a five-day strike and left town.

Maybe faculty would be less angry if they knew what happened behind the scenes, but the process lacks transparency. Plus, the big elephant in the negotiating room was a stipulation CSU had reached with other unions promising 5 percent raises that in subsequent contracts reached with unions (such as CFA), if they included more than a 5 percent raise, past contracts would be reopened for further negotiation. In other words, giving CFA members 12 percent meant the Teamsters could come back and demand more for its members. Obviously, 5 percent was the hill the CSU was going to die on. If this had been made clear to faculty members, would they have been willing to strike and lose pay for an unwinnable battle?

To its credit, the CFA won some important concessions for members, for instance substantially raising the base salary for the lowest paid faculty, increasing paid family leave from six to 10 weeks, and improving access to gender-inclusive restrooms and lactation spaces. Yet it was a far cry from their complete list of demands, most importantly among them for struggling lecturers, pay. Many Cal Poly teachers live paycheck to paycheck and work second and even third jobs to make ends meet.

They say compromise is the art of making as many people unhappy as possible, and in that regard, this tentative agreement seems to be a rousing success regarding faculty, but perhaps not in regard to CSU management, which didn't have to stray far from its original offer.

The ugly truth is public higher education ain't what it used to be. Its mission seems to have gone from investing in young people to build an educated workforce that would improve California's economy to creating a business model designed to extract as much money from struggling students as possible through room and board. How's that pricey meal plan, kids?

While the number of administrators and their pay has soared over the years, the number of tenure-track faculty has fallen, and the CSU has increasingly relied on "part-time temporary lecturers," who earn far less than senior faculty. Meanwhile, nationwide, student debt is $1.77 trillion. Instead of sending graduates into the California workforce ready to join the economy and be good little consumers who buy homes and cars and pay taxes, they send them out as paupers struggling to make enough to pay their loans and the associated interest.

So, CFA has a tentative agreement? La-de-da. The next step is to vote to ratify it. What will CFA members do? Reject it and hope their union suddenly gets a lot better at negotiating, or resign themselves to being underpaid and overworked? Δ

The Shredder is seeing red. Tell it those are rose-colored glasses at [email protected].