Thousands of faculty members from California State University, including professors and lecturers, joined the strike by walking out for a planned five-day protest demanding higher compensation.
The latest demonstration is considered to be the largest university faculty strike in the history of the United States. The protest started on Monday and is expected to cancel most classes early in the academic period.
The strike was led by the California Faculty Association, which represents roughly 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches. It started the five-day strike that is expected to affect nearly 460,000 students who attend the country's largest four-year public university system. The walkouts began simultaneously at all 23 CSU campuses.
The co-chair of the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, Ken Jacobs, said that the strike reflects two national trends in labor. These are an increase in large-scale strikes and a rise in education walkouts in particular.
The former includes Hollywood actors and writers as well as members of the United Automobile Workers who staged protests last year. In March last year, Los Angeles school employees staged a massive walkout and Oakland educators protested for nearly two weeks last May, as per the New York Times.
Graduate student workers and researchers at the University of California system also stopped working for nearly six weeks starting in December 2022 in protest of low wages. It has become much more rare for university faculty to go on strike in recent years.
However, roughly 9,000 full-time faculty members, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates, and counselors at Rutgers University walked out on the job last April. Jacobs argued that the unrest among faculty reflected universities' growing reliance on part-time instructors and others who have very low starting pay.
Many workers across industries are having difficulty with low wages that have not kept pace with high inflation as well as the rising cost of housing and other living expenses. This is particularly true in California, where a busy period of walkouts last year was called a "hot labor summer."
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Demanding Higher Compensation
The latest strike also comes two weeks after CSU officials ended contract negotiations with a unilateral offer starting with a 5% pay raise this year, effective Jan. 31. This was far below the 12% hike that the union representing the faculty members was seeking, according to Yahoo News.
A part-time political science lecturer, Victoria Wilson, picketed in the rain at Cal State Northridge in Los Angeles. She said that she joined the strike to demand for higher pay, noting that her salary fluctuates from semester to semester, which impedes her long-term financial goals.
The CFA vice president of racial & social justice, Chris Cox, said that CSU management wants to maintain the status quo. He argued that this is something that is not working for the vast majority of faculty members, students, and staff.
He added that in order for a properly functioning system to exist in the years to come, they need to improve the working conditions for faculty and learning conditions for students. The faculty members who went on strike were joined by roughly 1,100 CSU skilled trades workers represented by the Teamsters Local 2010, said The Guardian.
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