Almost 26,000 professors, lecturers and librarians represented by the California Faculty Assn. would stop teaching and doing academic work on April 13-15 as well as on April 18 and 19, officials said.
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That is far higher than the 2 percent raise that the university offered all employees this year.
“If a strike occurs, campuses intend to remain open”, the CSU said in a statement.
Negotiations between the union and the university have been ongoing since May 2014 and union members voted to authorize a strike in October.
“We don’t want to strike, but we will”, said Jennifer Eagan, president of the California Faculty Association and a professor at CSU East Bay. If a resolution still can’t be reached, the faculty would be authorized to strike.
“This is a historic strike if it happens”, said Eagan, during a news conference at the union’s Sacramento headquarters.
“Sadly, too many CSU faculty members are falling out of the middle class or unable to rise into it”, Wehr said in the press release. We don’t want to strike. “The strike should not interfere with students being able to complete their semester and quarter courses and graduate on time”.
Also, the university has set aside more than $3 million for faculty raises over a four-year period; this year, 316 faculty and 300 staff received raises as part of a $1.5 million increase.
System administrators say they could not increase enrollment or address other priorities if they gave faculty a 5% increase.
Under that contract, salaries for subsequent years have to be renegotiated and the two sides have been unable to reach an agreement since talks resumed in May. An outside mediator is compiling a fact-finding report; the union can not go on strike until 10 days after the document is issued.
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Kaitlyn Gorbet, a Cal State Long Beach art history transfer student, said that she would stand with her professors in the strike and understood the significance of using class time to articulate why the strike would occur. Professors have held up signs demanding the 5 percent raise, and disrupted open meetings where White was scheduled to hold question-and-answer sessions.
